Never did me any harm...

There is a prevailing, and to me misguided, view that often gets expressed that those things one has experienced oneself, and survived, can reasonably be inflicted upon the next generation.  I hear it about student debt relief - that cancelling student debt for this generation is unfair on those who did pay off their loans. As though one's own suffering justifies others' suffering. I've heard it about unpaid internships, or about appalling working hours for junior doctors. About corporal punishment in schools. About cold baths in boarding schools. Any number of unpleasant, or downright dangerous, experiences that could justifiably be left well and truly in the past.

It will come as no surprise to hear that the arena in which I'm currently hearing this is football coaching. And more specifically, the coaching of young children. How much is it OK to shout at children? How much yelling is too much? How much stick is "needed" compared to the carrot? Those who know me, know that my own style is not to berate children, or tell them they're not good enough, or yell and scream from the sidelines*. 

I've had several people lately tell me that being yelled at and intimidated by your coach, and told you're not good enough, is just how it is in football. That it's what their own experience of youth football was like. That it, "never did me any harm".

And, for me, there are two obvious responses...

Firstly, how do you know it didn't do you any harm?

Who would you have been without that experience? What might you have done differently? How might your interactions with the world, and the people you love have changed? None of us can know the path not taken.

Secondly, forget about yourself, some things aren't just about whether you were fine. What about all the other children? What about the boys and girls who were terrified by the shouting, intimidated, made to feel useless or worthless? What about the children who couldn't handle it and who left the sport? The ones who stopped playing football because they cried after every match where they were shouted at. Football, sport, life, none of those are only supposed to be for the thick-skinned, the robust, the supremely self-assured. We should be making space in life, and in sport, for those who are not sure, those who have self-doubt, and building their confidence, not breaking it. 

Maybe, once you reach the top-flight of international sport, a certain resilience is required. The ability to believe in yourself, despite what others may say, is almost certainly needed both to rise to the top, and to stay there. Even there, the honesty of people like Marcus Trescothick, Ben Stokes, Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles reveals that it's not that straightforward. That even at the top, doubts, fears, depression and anxiety may be an ever-present enemy. But when we're talking about children playing non-competitive, grassroots sport? Inclusive, open, sport played for fun, should be, well, fun.

And if we can nurture today's children, and show them that it's possible to participate in team sports, and give your all, even when you're not the best, without being demeaned and belittled, then maybe when today's children grow up, they will be part of a kinder world.

“It's not our job to toughen our children up to face a cruel and heartless world. It's our job to raise children who will make the world a little less cruel and heartless.”

L.R. Knost, Two Thousand Kisses a Day: Gentle Parenting Through the Ages and Stages

 

* Obviously, I do yell from the sidelines, but it's generally anodyne stuff like, "Well done!" or "Keep it up!"  or occasionally even such tactical gems as "Man on!" It's possible that at a recent training session the phrase, "you wouldn't like me when I'm angry" was also used...

Pleasing none of the people none of the time

The thing about random memes on Facebook is that most of them, aside from being poorly spelled, poorly punctuated, and frequently involving utterly invented quotes, are complete tripe. They sometimes make me wonder whether I really know my friends when I see the things they link to. On the other hand, there's the odd thing that pops up that stops me in my tracks and actually makes me think.

Here's one of them (with apologies for spelling, punctuation, grammar and colour-scheme):

And the problem is, I am absolutely not OK with not being liked. In fact I spend an inordinate amount of emotional and mental energy contorting myself attempting to be liked. I volunteer, I help, I smile, I cook, I step up, I try so damn hard all the time to be a person other people will like. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, it doesn't work. The people who like me, like me anyway. And the people who are either indifferent to me, or don't particularly like me, are not going to have their minds changed by me spending hours of my free time doing things for them. They'll just willingly soak up my kindness and carry on with their lives, not liking me any more or any less than they did before. I am an irrelevance to them.

It would now appear that I have engineered myself into a hole. I have spent so much time contorting myself in desperate and futile attempts to be liked, that now if I stop being the ever-biddable, ever-self-sacrificing, ever-helpful me, I am resented for not bending over backwards. I am now expected to be all things for all people, and I am burnt out, unable to keep offering more and more of myself. And yet I keep doing so, because to stop, and to risk not being likeable enough is still unthinkable to my needy little mind.

Every day I receive emails, WhatsApp messages, text messages, phone calls, taps on the shoulder, all asking me for something. Sometimes it's a simple question about a date or a time, sometimes it's a request for information, and sometimes it's a request for help. But it's always something. Always requiring an answer, or effort, or work, or commitment. Worst of all is that sometimes it requires a decision. A decision that I know is not going to please at least one other person. And then my need to please slams up against my need to do the right thing, or my need to be clear and honest, or my need to be organised. It's not possible to be honest, and honourable, and moral and also please everybody.

I have to find a way to tell people things that they won't like. I have to find ways of telling people what I think or believe without worrying about whether they will or won't like it. 

I have to find ways of saying "No", without being paralysed by the fear of being disliked. I have to find ways of doing what I know to be right without spending hours agonising over the wording of the email that needs to be sent, and then days agonising of what I have (or more likely haven't) heard in reply. 

I have to find ways of accepting that I cannot please all of the people all of the time. I will be lucky if I can please some of the people some of the time. 

At the moment it feels like I'm pleasing none of the people none of the time.

 

Perils of cycling

 For those who like a bit of levity in their day... picture the scene... I am cycling LittleBear to school early for triathlon club. We're in a hurry, as we're always a little late for the 7:55-at-school start. Suddenly, there's huge resistance to my pedal stroke, and my bike slams to a halt. My long skirt has caught in the chain and wound itself round the rear hub. I lurch onto the pavement dragging my bike, and clutching my skirt to prevent it being pulled off entirely by the weight of the falling bike.

I try to contort myself, my skirt and my bicycle into position to disentangle myself, and then hear the dulcet tones of an Angel of Mercy. The neighbour whose house I have stalled in front of happened to be looking out of the window and has rushed out to help. 

She turns out to be dextrous and of delicate touch. As she gently eases the wheel round, inching the oily fabric out, a van pulls up and the slightly-less-dulcet tones of the chairman of our football club ring out, offering help. I sternly wag my finger and forbid photographs. To my surprise, and relief, he complies. Though he also mocks me. Deservedly. 

My Angel of Mercy completes the extraction of my skirt, without once needing to reveal my bottom to the world AND she then gives me a hair tie with which to bundle up the ill-advised skirt and complete my journey. We even got to triathlon club before they closed the gates.

I will not be riding in that skirt again. 

Football management vignettes #3

It's now been a month and half since I wrote anything here. Some of this is just the inevitable impact of a school holiday, and being busy, or away, or playing Minecraft with LittleBear. But some of it is because football has eaten my life. I thought that football had already eaten my life before now, when I was simply running a team, but I see now that I was painfully naive.

In July, I asked the Chairman of the club for some help. He helped, but just before helping, he asked me for a favour. Obviously I agreed. Devious bastard. Unfortunately the "favour" was stepping up to assist as a Welfare Officer for the club. This was something I was asked to do when another volunteer stood down two years ago, but I didn't feel I had time to commit to it*. There was no escaping this time.

For the past two years, the Chairman has been doubling up as the Welfare Officer as well. What I had not fully appreciated, is (a) the degree of mind-numbing attention to detail required to maintain the database of volunteers at the club and (b) the absence of mind-numbing attention to detail possessed by the Chairman. He cares passionately about the club, and about it being run well, and for the benefit of the children. This doesn't necessarily equate to a mind-numbing attention to detail however.

And thus it arises that I have inherited a system that is, to be kind, not entirely in top-notch condition. I also have not really inherited it. Instead I was asked to only be partially responsible for the system. Because partial responsibility for a complex system is definitely a strategy with no drawbacks. So, for most of August I took a relatively laid-back approach to my responsibilities: I reminded people that their qualifications were expiring; I sent out links to training courses; I gently explored the periphery of another arcane section of the FA's website.

But then reality started biting. I tried asking the Committee why we had so many people listed on our own spreadsheets who were not registered with the FA. Or who all the people registered with the FA, but not on the spreadsheets were. Or why we had so many people registered as applicants to volunteer, whose applications had seemingly been stuck in limbo for months, or possibly years. I was told not to worry about it. I was told that was too many questions. I was told The Spreadsheet Is King**.

I poked around a bit more. I asked the County FA safeguarding officer some questions. To start with she answered them. Then she started getting tetchy. Then she became quite vexed. Because the more I tugged at the threads of the anomalies I found, the more the entire jumper unravelled. 

I will not bore you with the excruciating details of the issues I found as I delved deeper, but suffice to say that for the past two weeks I have spent a minimum of 2 hours a night working on ensuring the right people, with the right qualifications are registered with the right teams. The season is about to start, and if a team's registration is not squeaky clean, that team (and potentially the entire club) will be suspended by the FA. In the first three days of September alone, I sent and received over two hundred and seventy emails. I spent, at a conservative estimate, 18 hours over those three days fighting with four spreadsheets, two wings of the FA website, the online Disclosures and Barring Service website and two email accounts***. I have had to book annual leave to cover the time I've spent beating my head against this particular brick wall.

In the end, I bypassed the rest of the Committee and just tackled the FA and all our volunteers head on. I decided not to sit back and ask polite questions, but to just get it done. To mis-appropriate the intended use of a key phrase from my Welfare Officer training: 

If not you... who? If not now... when?

There was a job that needed doing, so I did it. I still have qualms that I have trampled on rather too many toes en route. The fact that neither the Chairman nor the other Welfare Officer has replied to any of my emails in the past few days of frenetic activity is now making me feel distinctly anxious. But I am 99.9% sure I have both done things right and done the right thing. At the cost of a huge amount of my own time, energy and emotion. But the right thing nonetheless. I just have to hope other people see it that way...

* This was a grave error. Had I taken over two years ago, I would have inherited a nice tidy system, and this blog post would have read, "I have become a Welfare Officer. The End." 

** The Spreadsheet is Not King. The FA database is King, and Queen, and Courtiers, and Joker. If the FA database says you're not qualified to work with children, then that is the final answer.

*** A story for another day. A very, very tedious story.

Football management vignettes #2

Now that I have introduced you to the concept of the FA website, I can delve deeper into the arcana of attempting to administer a team via one of the tentacular arms of the website. This is an arm that, unsurprisingly, bears almost no apparent similarity to any other arm of the FA, and is called the Whole Game System. Because nobody would want a Half Game System, or even a Two-Halves Game System.

I'm fairly certain that you have to have performed a ritual sacrifice under a full moon while chanting ancient Sanskrit incantations to be allowed to actual register players with the Whole Game System. Which is perhaps why it is that the Club Official who is allowed to do so for our club is, well, venerable. 

It also appears to be exactly the same system that is used for every level of English football. For instance, my own entry lists, in order of importance, my name, date of birth, and number of international caps.

Among the vagaries of the Whole Game System is the fact that once a player's name has been entered, it is cast in stone for all time. It is not possible for any changes to be made by our venerable Club Official. Instead, he must submit a request to the County Official, who may then have to escalate the issue to FA HQ at St Georges Park. Because I can't imagine them having anything better to do at the moment. And it's clearly unheard of for anyone to ever change their name. It's almost as the though the FA aren't aware of the concept of marriage, or the tradition many women still follow.

The immutable nature of names makes it all the more frustrating that venerable Club Official is not the most accurate typist. LittleBear, for example, has spent three years with a letter missing from his surname. Various other boys in my team have their names entered with no capital letters, or entirely in capitals, or in one notable case, changing from lower case to upper case half way through the forename, just after the letter "a". Anyone who's ever slipped onto the Caps Lock key knows what we're talking about here.

It took two days this week to have a letter added to LittleBear's name, but I have finally managed it.

And then I hit a more significant hurdle. One of my boys has changed his surname. He no longer wants to have his (estranged) father's name, he wants to use his mother's name. Utterly fair and reasonable, and relatively painless in other areas of his life. But with the FA?

The emails went something like this:

Me to Club Officer: My player has changed his name, what do I do?

Club Officer to County FA: Our player has changed his name. Shall we create a new player in the system?

County FA: NO! Never create a new player if it's someone who's played before! Send me the player details.

Club Officer: It's OK, I haven't created a new player, I was just asking. I don't know his details anyway.

Me: Here are his details.

Club Officer: Shall we create a new player now?

County FA: NO! NO! NO! How many times have I told you, never create a new player if it's someone who's played before!

Club Officer: Why are you panicking? I haven't done anything.

County FA: I've changed the name.

Club Officer: I can't find the new name in the system. Shall I create a new player?

At this point, I'm fairly certain I heard County FA's intestines climbing up his throat in an attempt to choke off the blood supply to his own brain. He certainly hasn't shown any signs of life via email. I don't really blame him.

I looked on the Whole Game System for my player. We now have two copies of him, both with the same, new, correct name. 

Football management vignettes #1

I have been very quiet here lately. Very, very quiet. And this is partly because I feel as though I have nothing interesting to say* and partly because the only interesting things have been both enormously stressful and involving other people who don't deserve to be written about, even on a pseudonymous blog. 

 Oh, and I'm busy.

 Busy? Even while a pandemic continues to rage?

Oh yes. Busy.

Because it is the end of the football season, and the start of preparing for the next football season. A season that only starts on 11th September, but one for which we must start organising now.

So I am going to attempt to get back into the swing of writing by giving you some vignettes into the life of volunteering at a grassroots club. 

And we'll start with the FA website.

The FA website. When you phrase it like that, it sounds as though there might only be one website. And there is. Sort of. I certainly only have one username and password. But an injudicious click of a link and I find myself somewhere that bears almost no resemblance to where I came from. I have (so far) identified at least five different websites that all pretend to be part of the FA. Each has clearly been written by different people. Each has different designs, colour schemes and menu layouts. Why should this bother me? Well... I have, for reasons that are probably good, volunteered to become a Welfare Officer for LittleBear's club. This has involved additional training. Online courses, webinars and questionnaires. All of which is accessed through MyLearning. Not, it is important to note, through MyAccount. Though MyAccount does have a subsection titled My Learning, this is categorically not the same as MyLearning. Spaces matter don't you know?

Having completed all required modules, and acquired nice green ticks next to each one, my training was marked as 83% complete. There was no means of determining what the remaining 17% was, or where to find it. I tried asking my County Safeguarding Officer. She asked me to send her my completion certificate. I explained I couldn't because of the aforementioned missing 17% and thus absence of certificate. She asked for the completion certificate. I explained (with screenshots) why I couldn't send it to her. She asked me for the completion certificate. There were brick walls that were more rewarding to bang my head against.

I asked the FA, via a bizarrely complex web form, in which in the "other comments" section I resorted to begging for help. "I just want to be a Welfare Officer! Please help me!" Then, magically, for reasons that have never been clear, my course was marked 100% complete and I was the proud owner of a certificate. And then the FA emailed me to say, "we've looked into it, and your course is complete. What's the problem?" Sigh...

So now I was qualified. Right? Wrong. MyLearning showed that I had completed the course. But My Learning, over on MyAccount, did not know this. My Learning did not think I had completed any of the course. Do pay attention to the typography here. Spaces matter. Remember how the County Safeguarding Officer wanted my completion certificate? Remember that? Well, it turns out, she needed me to send her the certificate that the FA website issued to me, so that she could upload a copy of it to the FA website, to be attached to My Learning record on MyAccount, so I could then be registered as a Welfare Officer. Yes, really.

So here I am, as a Welfare Officer, and it has been my great joy** to discover that there are several more sections of the FA website that I now have privileged access to. Guess what? They look nothing like the rest of the site.

* I could, of course, write reams, almost every day, in which I rant about the government, but I'm mostly sure that most of you are as tired of the shit-show as I am, and being permanently angry is exhausting.

 ** It really hasn't.

Isolation and exhaustion

Preamble: I started writing this about three weeks ago. Since that point I have added to it and deleted from it as my mood has ebbed and flowed. I have hit crashing lows where the world seemed unmanageable and I felt broken, and I have had days when I've wondered what I was being so melodramatic about. I have tried to capture both sides of my emotions in my editing.

Even at the best of times, I find interacting with the world hard work. And I think we can all agree that 2020 and 2021 very much come outside the boundaries of "the best of times". 

So, where normally I would find myself second guessing my every social interaction, questioning whether I have been too abrasive, too sweary, too self-absorbed, too needy, too rude, too oblivious, too opinionated, too me, I now find myself doing all that but beyond the veil of face-to-face interaction. I am robbed of even the clues of body-language and tone of voice that used to tell me when I wasn't welcome, or my views weren't needed. My social world has collapsed down to WhatsApp, and three-minute conversations outside the school gates. I now spend more of my free time talking to a football manager who trains on the pitch next to us* once a week than I do to people I once thought might be my friends.

I say "once thought might be", because there are now a surprising number of people, with whom I once thought I shared some kind of friendship who I essentially haven't seen, spoken to, messaged or otherwise interacted with for about a year and a half. And against my existing background of being perpetually anxious about whether I am saying the wrong thing, looking out of place, getting in the way, or in other ways transgressing subtle social rules, the isolation of lockdown has eroded what little confidence I had about my place in society.

The rational part of me knows that as much as these former-maybe-could-have-been-might-still-be friends are not contacting me, I am also not contacting them. As much as I am struggling with holding my life together, and navigating the emotional and psychological barrages of a pandemic, they are too. As much as I may be questioning my place and value and worth to others, they may be too. I doubt very much if I am the only one feeling isolated, anxious and alone. I doubt if I'm the only one whose child still will not sleep through the night and who is whimpering with exhaustion**. 

But inside my own mind, the degree to which other people may or may not be struggling doesn't change the reality of my own anxiety. No amount of rationalisation silences the voice of a school "friend" that said, "If you changed the way you acted, maybe people would like you." Inside my own mind, the loudest voice is the one that says, "See? People only ever tolerated you, they're probably all relieved not to have to spend time with you." 

Which isn't to say I don't have friends, or that they aren't enormously lovely people. I do, and they are. But when I'm reduced to electronic communication, or fleeting, mask-obscured exchanges, I am also reduced to doubting everything that I say and do, even with those lovely friends. I obsessively re-read messages I've sent to ponder whether somehow I have caused offence. I replay those fleeting conversations in my head to question if I managed to remain the right side of socially-acceptable. Was I too flippant? Or did I over-share? Am I wearing people out with my complaining? Have I failed to listen to other people? Am I oblivious to an undertone that is obvious to those who find human contact easy? 

Always, always it boils down to "am I too much?" or "am I not enough?"

The less I sleep, the more I find myself to be either too much, or inadequate, and the more I am sure that others do too.

The less "normal" contact I have with my friends and acquaintances, the more isolated I feel, and the more convinced I become that I will always feel this way.

I have spent so long without much face-to-face social contact that I have now reached the point where I cannot really imagine resuming it. Regular pub nights? Having friends round for a meal? Having play dates for LittleBear's friends? These seem like wildly improbable events now, and almost as daunting to consider as I previously found meeting new people. 

Back in the mists of time, I wrote about how hard I find it to move from casual acquaintance to genuine friendship, and how much I tend to feel as though everyone else is friends with each other and I'm the outsider. Well I'm right back in that state now, convinced despite all evidence to the contrary, that I alone am alone. That I am adrift in a sea of vague acquaintanceship without the dry land of solid friendship anywhere in sight. I have a small life raft of dear and lovely people, but I fear that if I cling on too tight I may either draw them under the waves or be pushed away by them before I sink us all.

In an attempt to dig myself out of my self-fulfilling hole of isolation, I am trying very hard to step outside my isolated bubble and reach out to other people. And it's not as bad as I feared. I am met not with rejection and horror, but with warmth and enthusiasm. It turns out other people aren't desperate to avoid me. It turns out other people may just be waiting to be invited too.

I went out for a drink with two people I've never socialised with before. 

I'm having lunch with two members of my life raft. 

I've suggested meeting two people for a drink who I've barely spoken to since before covid.

I am not alone.

We are not alone.

* To put this extensive friendship into perspective, we exchange pleasantries and ask whether our respective teams won or lost the previous weekend. Yet this is still a greater level of conversation than I manage with most people.

** I'm too tired to fix my participles. We're both whimpering with exhaustion - read it however suits you.