I'm No Morty Seinfeld

On expectations, and catching the right wave

This week’s book recommendation is Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments. This is her follow-up to The Handmaid’s Tale, and I am currently watching the TV adaptation on Hulu.

Maverick approved ✅ 🐾

I’m No Morty Seinfeld

On expectations, and catching the right wave

At a cheer competition not long ago, I was standing next to another dad as the team was warming up backstage. He’s around just enough to be familiar, but not enough to know what’s going on. He couldn’t tell a punch-front from a rewind. Neither can you probably, but that’s beside the point.

He leaned in like he was about to share something important with me:

“My only job,” he said, nodding toward the competition floor, “is to be there when my baby girl runs off the mat and jumps into my arms.”

He said it with a little smile, like he’d cracked the code. Ladies, I know you don’t like it when men ‘mansplain’ things to you. But imagine for a moment, just how much more infuriating it is when you are a man and are ‘mansplained’ to. It’d be like a perimenopausal woman listening to a 20-year-old complain about a hangnail.

Anyway, I gave the guy a nod, because that’s what you do. But I remember thinking two things at the exact same time. First, that this wasn’t even accurate. I’d been to enough of these competitions to know he wasn’t always there for that moment. And second, if I’m being honest, it made me feel a little bad.

You know, the normal amount of bad. The healthy kind.

I felt kinda bad because that’s not what my daughter does to me.

One of the reasons I stepped away from coaching was so I wouldn’t miss this stuff. The weekends, the performances, the travel…the moments that feel like they might matter later. And when she comes off the mat, she doesn’t come looking for me.

She finds my wife. There’s a hug. Sometimes tears, but always talking. A lot of it.

And me?

I’m an onlooker. If you were an outsider looking in, I probably look like the divorced dad who showed up but doesn’t really belong. Not the guy who used to sit on the top step and comb her hair, go on “adventure hikes,” or sit on the floor for hours playing school with her stuffed animals.

“It’s not about you. It’s not about you. It’s not about you,” I repeat to myself ad nauseam.

You’d think I’d just spent five days in Tibet, not five hours in an obnoxiously loud, ridiculously named venue where nine dollars buys you twelve cents worth of popcorn and a mild headache.

I think subconsciously, when I retired from coaching to ‘be dad,’ I probably did it for selfish reasons, at least partly. How great would it feel to be worshipped by your kid for being the world’s greatest dad?

But I’m no Morty Seinfeld, I’m a bit player at best. Because parenting is just like every other part of life. We don’t get to choose our role. Most of the time, our roles choose us.

I’m starting to think life is less like a plan… and more like trying to time waves to ride in the ocean.

🌊 🏄🏼‍♂️ 🌊 🏄🏼‍♂️ 🌊 🏄🏼‍♂️ 🌊 🏄🏼‍♂️ 🌊 🏄🏼‍♂️ 🌊 🏄🏼‍♂️

In the fall of 2003, my wife and I moved to Wisconsin when I got a job as the offensive coordinator at a small D3 school. It was an upgrade for my career, but also a gamble. The program had won three games total over the previous two seasons, and nearly the entire staff had been fired. This was a last-chance situation.

To no one’s surprise, we started 0–3. Luckily, Week 4 pitted us against the worst team in the league (yes, even worse than us).

“Well boys, if we lose this one, I’ll be gone by this time next week.” That’s what our head coach told us after the third loss. Basically implying that if we lost this next game, to arguably the worst team in America, he would be fired.

We lost.

At 0–4 we were set to host one of the top teams in the conference (and our biggest rival) for homecoming. It was supposed to be a bloodbath.

We won.

We went on to win three of our last six to finish 3–7. We were ecstatic. The players were pumped. And the administration believed we were headed in the right direction.

Three years later, the program had improved enough that our head coach left for a D1 job. I was promoted to head coach. We kept building. Not in a straight line, but in a clear upward trend. By 2010 we were 7–3, with two of those losses coming in overtime.

At the postseason awards meeting, there was a tie for Coach of the Year. I lost the re-vote.

Three weeks later I was fired.

Different administration. Different expectations.

🏈 🌊 🏈 🌊 🏈 🌊 🏈 🌊 🏈 🌊 🏈 🌊

When I was a kid, I used to ride a boogie board in the Atlantic for one week every summer. The older I get, the more I think life is like that. You wait for a wave, ride it as far as you can, then paddle back out and wait again.

Some days there are more waves than you know what to do with. Other days the water is flat and you’re just…out there. Either way, it’s not up to you.

All we can do is pick our spots, take our shot…

and when it’s time…

…be ready to paddle like a motherfu*ker.

🌊 🏄🏼‍♂️ 🌊 🏄🏼‍♂️ 🌊 🏄🏼‍♂️ 🌊 🏄🏼‍♂️ 🌊 🏄🏼‍♂️ 🌊 🏄🏼‍♂️

If you enjoyed this, you’d enjoy last week’s episode of the SilentPunt Podcast with author Lee Bacon. We discuss his 10-year quest for publication, fatherhood, and some other fun stuff:

Next week I’ll be joined by author Andrea Hoffmann as we discuss retirement and all the expectations that come with it. If you’ve found the SilentPunt podcast on other platforms (YouTube, Apple, Spotify), please make sure to follow or subscribe to us there as well.