Glennon Doyle - Untamed

Craig, Abby, and I sit Tish down and tell her together.

“You made it,” we say. “You made the team.”

It’s been a few years since those tryouts, and now we are parents who spend our weekends carting our child all over the state and spend our money on gas and hotels and tournaments and cleats.

Tish is strong and solid now, not because she wants to be a model, but because she wants to be the best athlete and teammate she can be. The stronger she is, the more her team can count on her. Tish does not consider her body an end in itself, but a means to an end. She uses her body as a tool to help her achieve a goal her mind and heart have set: Win games with my friends.

Tish is a leader now. She has learned that there are great athletes and there are great teammates, and they are not always the same people. She watches her teammates, and she decides exactly what each needs. She knows who is hurting and who needs encouragement. After every game, win or lose, she sits in the back seat on the drive home and sends her teammates messages: “It’s okay, Livvie. Nobody could have stopped that ball. We’ll get them next time. We love you.” The girls’ parents write me emails saying, “Please thank Tish for me. She was the only one who could console my girl.”

Tish is an athlete now. When drama hits at middle school, it doesn’t shake her badly because those hallways are not where she finds her identity. She doesn’t need to manufacture false drama in her social life because she has all the real drama—the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat—on the pitch. The other day I heard her say this to a friend of Chase’s: “Nah, I’m not popular. I’m a soccer player.”

Soccer saved my daughter.

The fact that I didn’t save my daughter from soccer saved my daughter.

Recently, Craig, Abby, and I sat on the sidelines in the cold, pouring rain and watched Tish’s team play. The girls were soaking and freezing and somehow showed zero signs of being either one. I watched Tish closely, as always. Her legs and face were both chiseled. Her hot-pink pre-wrap headband held back strays from her signature ponytail. The other team had just scored, and she was trying to catch her breath and get back into position. As she ran, she called back to her defenders, “Let’s go. We’ve got this!” Play resumed. The ball came to Tish. She trapped the ball and passed it to her forward, Anais. Anais scored.

The girls ran toward Anais, toward each other. They all met in the center of the field, a mass of tween girls leaping and hugging and celebrating each other, their team, their sweat. We parents cheered, too, but the girls didn’t hear us. In that moment, there was no one else on Earth but them. How we felt about them didn’t matter. How they felt was what mattered. For them, it was not a performance. It was real.

The game ended, and Abby, Craig, and I walked to our cars, parked side by side. We all climbed inside to get out of the rain. After a quick team huddle, Tish walked toward us with her friend Syd. They were not hurrying, because they didn’t even feel the cold. When they got to us, they hugged, and Syd walked off with her mom. Tish came over and stood outside Abby’s window to say good-bye because she was going home with Craig. It’s still tough, all this back-and-forth between houses. Divorce is hard to navigate—all families are hard to navigate—but Tish knows that she can do hard things.

The rain continued to fall around her, but Tish’s face was a floodlight framed by the window.

She said, “Coach Mel gave me a nickname today. She says she’s going to call me Elmer’s because the ball sticks to me like glue. When she called me off the bench today, she yelled, ‘Elmer’s—you’re in.’ ”

Craig’s window was open, and he heard her story. He smiled over at me and Abby. We smiled back. Tish just stood there between us—glowing and gluing.

When Abby and I first fell in love, we had hundreds of miles and a million obstacles keeping us apart. The facts laid out in front of us made a future together seem impossible. So we’d tell each other about the true and beautiful unseen order we felt pressing through our skin. Our imaginings always included each other and the water.

Abby wrote this to me from the other coast, one evening before she fell asleep:

“It’s early in the morning and I’m sitting on our dock watching the sunrise. I look and see you in your pajamas, still sleepy, walking toward me, holding two mugs of coffee. We just sit there on the dock together, my back against the piling, your back against my chest, watching the fish jump and the sun rise. We have nowhere to be but together.”

The harder things became, the more often we’d return to that morning Abby had imagined for us. That dock, her, me, two steaming mugs of coffee: That image became our unseen order, guiding us forward. We had faith.

A year later, Abby made dinner for the six of us: the kids, Craig, and me. We all sat down to eat on the back porch of the home off the Gulf of Mexico that Abby and I bought together. It was a gorgeous evening, the sky all purples and oranges and the breeze steady and warm. We ate and laughed and then cleared the table together. Craig left for his Sunday-evening soccer game, and the kids finished the dishes and then sat down on the couch to watch a show. Honey, our bulldog, snuggled up on Amma’s lap, and Abby walked outside to our dock: the Doyle Melton Wamdock. I watched from inside as she sat down with her back against a piling and looked out at the canal. I poured two hot teas and walked out to join her. She looked back toward me, and by her smile, I knew she was remembering. We sat on the dock together, my back against her chest, her back against the piling, and we watched the fish jump while the sun set and the sky celebrated in deeper and deeper purples.

Before we went back inside, I snapped a picture of us, smiling with the sun setting behind us, and later I posted it. Someone commented, “Gah. You’re so lucky to have each other and this life.”

I replied, “It’s true. We are terribly lucky. It is also true that we imagined this life before it existed and then we each gave up everything for the one-in-a-million chance that we might be able to build it together. We did not fall into this world we have now, we made it. I’ll tell you this: The braver I am, the luckier I get. ”

I used to hate romantic movies. When they came on the television, I’d feel achy, like I was looking at pictures of a party I hadn’t been invited to. I’d remind myself that romantic love is just Disney bullshit, but I’d always feel a yearning right before changing the channel.

Like the yearning that Abby, who is agnostic, feels when she watches a church choir with their robes and deep voices and shiny eyes.

I’ve always had shiny eyes about divine love; I’m a believer.

Abby has always had shiny eyes about romantic love; she’s a believer.

Abby’s favorite movies are Romeo + Juliet and The Notebook. The NOTEBOOK. When I say to her, “I cannot believe we found each other,” she says, “I can. I knew you were out there the whole time.”

I didn’t know. I didn’t know about romantic love because I didn’t fall in love until I was forty years old. There I was, just walking down the street of my life, when I fell into a rabbit hole. This is why they call it falling in love, because there is suddenly no solid ground beneath you anymore.

When I fell in love, I felt a lot like I did when I ate hallucinogenic mushrooms with my friends in college. When the mushrooms kicked in, we’d fall into the rabbit hole together. Suddenly I’d feel utterly connected to the people I was tripping with and equally disconnected from everyone sober. My friends and I were in a bubble of love, and no one else could reach us or understand us. I felt sorry for the sober people. They didn’t know what we knew or feel what we felt or love like we loved. We called them the normal people. “Be careful,” we’d whisper to each other when one of them would approach. “She’s normal.”