(I am a huge football fan. I think I have told you that I was a cheerleader and our football coach took us in the locker room and taught us the game. He didn’t want airhead cheerleaders yelling “Defense” when we had the ball! I learned the game well and love it. My son, twice being a championship winning high school football player and then college player, only made me love the game more. I think football has applications in everyday life and the lessons I have learned and I have watched my son learn are invaluable.)
About a week ago I was sitting outside of my voice teacher’s room waiting for my lesson when a girl who had also been waiting in the hall was summoned to a room several doors down by another teacher. As she gathered her belongings and stood up she totally lost it and began to cry. The teacher urged her to come in and talk or to leave. The teacher said if this girl was that upset she did not need to have a lesson. The student had a case in her hand that made me think she was flute player. The girl went into the room, I assume to talk.
It made me start thinking about crying. My BFA project has made me dig deep into my past and now I seem to think about things deeper than I really want to sometimes. I remembered that when I was a young girl I was crying one day and my dad saw me. I have no idea now what I was crying about then, but I am sure it seemed important to me at the time. Adults tend to forget how deep young emotions are. I remember my dad telling me to stop crying and that he never wanted to see me cry again. He said crying was a waste of time and didn’t fix or change anything. Being a parent -pleasing, obedient child I quit crying and did not cry again for any reason for over twenty years. When I did finally cry again it was such a relief and yet I felt like I was doing something dreadfully wrong. I have spent the rest of my life being very careful what I spend my tears on. But not so much the last few years, and especially not since I have been back in school.
School has been such a mixture of acceptance and rejection, triumph and failures, progress and regression. I wake up some days weepy for no particular reason. Maybe it is a symptom of getting older. I think it is just a way of life for college students. And seeing this poor girl in the hall made me really think we students are driven to that state on a regular basis, especially those of us in the performing arts. I have had many conversations with other students and it seems like we are all in the same boat on this subject. (Again, this is why I like math and science- no subjectivity, it is either right or wrong!) I have broken down several times in my poor voice teacher’s presence.
I told someone the other day, that I had really thought being back in school would help with my confidence. It has not. I take one step forward and two steps back. During the BFA process I have taken MANY steps backwards! But that is a story for another day.
Last night, near the end of a very emotional football game where my team almost lost, but pulled it out miraculously in the last minute, they showed the quarter back crying on the side lines. My husband said, “Why is he crying?” And I knew exactly why he was crying. He has worked hard all of his life to be able to be right where he was at that moment. If he is like my son, during high school he gave up most holidays for years to train and be in practices and games. He went to school on “teacher work days” when the other kids slept in and played video games. He ran from class to football practice and then to show choir practice so he could “do it all.” He kept a schedule that was unbelievable to me so he could keep up his college GPA and make every work out, every team meeting and every practice. Last night, here was this young man, who had been everyone’s hero until that night. He was seeing the wheels come off of this machine he had driven all year. And he was going to feel the blame if that happened. He had worked and done everything he knew to do. There were lots of incomplete passes. The offensive line had let defenders through to sack him which takes a huge toll on you physically and mentally. Things were not good. With less than two minutes to go, our quarterback rallied his team and began passing straight to his receivers and they began to catch them. Methodically 10 to 12 yards at a time they began moving down the field. We held our breath as they approached the goal line and then scored. We cheered and the quarterback once again became our hero. But there was still time on the clock- time that the other team could use to try to score. And our quarterback had no way of doing any more. He had left all he had on the field. That is something we told our son many times. Leave it all on the field. If you give everything you have and do your best, then you can’t have regrets and no one can fault you. If you do your best and you lose, you hold your head up because you gave it everything you had. Our quarterback knew it was out of his hands, there was no more he could do. But he also knew he had left all he had out there, he had done all he could do, more than he probably thought he could do as that game had gone wrong in the second half. The emotion, the exhaustion, the going from hero to zero and then maybe back up to hero again had drained him. He knew he had a team that was there with him when he needed them and he knew that whatever happened, this was a moment he would never have again, yet would never forget. And it poured out of him in the form of tears.
I think it is OK to cry when you win. When you have done all you can. It is more questionable when you cry after losing. You look like a poor sport, a cry baby. Tears of relief and joy are one thing, but I have certainly had my share of tears from disappointment. I try to hide those more. And whether it should be or not, our society certainly looks at the tears of a guy differently from those of a girl. Guys are supposed to be tough, while people expect girls to be weepy. I know as a teenager and young woman you could not break me enough to make me cry. People thought I was unfeeling and hard. After my father’s remarks I would stare down physical and emotional pain and never flinch. I was tougher than any guy I knew. But I have realized that really doesn’t get you anywhere.
So crying is a strange subject for me. I get teared up a lot now that I am under such pressure all of the time. But I really felt the emotion last night as I watched this young man sob. He had earned it. I want to be able to say in 5 weeks that I gave it all I had. I want to be able to say that no matter how I was treated or what people thought, I persevered. I want to know that when I walk off of that stage I have done the best I could do and that I inspired my team to take that journey with me. I have no one else to blame in this one- I have been put out on the field with no coaches and no pads. So when this is over I may weep because I will know that my team and I did this, we left it all on the field and did everything we had to do to win. We will know we got less than most but did more with it. That is worth shedding a few tears for! Oh, and Roll Tide!
