If You Choose to Accept It.

“Your son can watch football. He can even play it. I’ll suffer through baseball and I could even find a way to survive basketball. But just know this. 

Your son will LOVE hockey.”

From the periphery I can see the folds of the long black coat moving across the ice, a slow, careful proceeding that only makes the almost quiet louder in its awkwardness.

In our hearts, we know that we are not destined to win this game and that a group of boys and one girl will go home without the prize they desire. But still we chant the cries, hoping against hope that their grit and determination and youthful optimism will float across the ice in their favor. They have played with more stamina than we should expect and we’ve watched the unbridled joy erupt when the puck met the back of the net.

Watching him lay on the ice, his deep sobs echoing across the frozen pond in a painful culmination of broken toe, deep exhaustion and disappointment, I refuse to let the tears spill over.

So much of who we were, who we still are and who we’ve become is forever carved in the ice.

Still trapped in our icy fog, I watched their tiny feet tread cautiously on the frozen surface for the first time with the same fear and loathing that my own tiny feet had stepped into the frozen abyss. Burning like ice across bare skin, our pain was raw and exposed. With each return we became more surefooted than the one before and I found a place where I could lose and rebuild myself in a place where he had left no traces behind.

In the years since, we’ve found a rhythm in this place where hockey bags pile with pride and little boys watch young men with awe and admiration. Where the rancid smell of chest pads is a right of passage, pucks are tossed errantly into purses and the first “time out” is a coveted statistic. Where parents become teammates and siblings claim the rink for their own. Where coaches are defined not by wins but by how loudly the love of the game beats within the heart of the bench.

In so many ways, the rink helped us find our way again and along with it we found friends in the hockey family that welcomed us in. And they did so without knowing us, granting us the space to be painful and raw and angry and weak.

He still whispers about the unfairness that it is only ever me in the locker room, a constant dose of maternal estrogen that will never deliver the locker room machismo of paternity. And yet he looks for me on the red line the moment his skates touch the ice, the slightest nod of his head our silent ritual. He hugs me and whispers I love you before each game, and I whisper to him that I love him, too.

Listening to the chorus of sticks on the ice, I watch him glide to the bench, his coach at his side and in my heart I know this.

We do not choose what befalls us. We choose whether it defines us.