The Secret Language of Football

I am the only estrogen in my house. I have two sons, a husband, and two male rescue dogs. I’ve always prided myself that I am a good “boy mom.” This, in the stereotypical sense, means I can handle video games, sports, and dirt. This illusion came crashing down last summer when I showed my nine-year-old a picture of a professional football player and he asked if he played on a tennis team. He wasn’t joking. And I could no longer kid myself that I was doing a good job being a “boy mom.” I called my husband in a panic and said we needed to get the football package. He told me we had had it for three years. Could this possibly get any worse?

Let me just say that I’m the type of mom who would be thrilled if my boys hated football and loved designing clothes or studying ballet. I really couldn’t care less what floats their boat as long as they don’t do drugs, they stay out of jail, and they are happy. But I felt like maybe I had kept our home too gender neutral. I began to questions that maybe when I thought I was being a good “boy mom” I was really just insulating them from boy things that I found to be boring. What I really needed to do was to bend a little and fully embrace the testosterone coursing through my home.

And when I did something magical happened. My husband and my sons began to communicate in a language I could barely comprehend. For the first time in their lives they had endless topics to discuss that interested them deeply. My sons couldn’t wait to tell my husband when they got a top rated player on their IPad football game (I don’t even know what the heck the game is called). They played Madden on the Xbox together. They watched ESPN like the three amigos while my youngest son searched for weekly highlights online to show to his dad and brother. They talked about Aaron Rodgers, Jordy Nelson, and Tom Brady (for those like me who are sports ignorant they are all football players) as if they were our neighbors not just guys they watched play professional football every Sunday.

So now not only can my children differentiate between Roger Federer and Peyton Manning (tennis player and football player) but they now have this platform with which to engage with their father. And I didn’t have to force or nag them to do it. That alone is worth the price of the cable football package or an annual subscription to Sports Illustrated.