At 9 p.m. on a Sunday night, what should a parent be doing?
I’ll tell you what we were doing.
The wife was in the dining room, working. I was doing laundry (yes, on a Sunday night), intermittently wandering into the family room, keeping one eye on R and the other on the Rams game. Technically, he should’ve been in bed half an hour ago. (R, that is, but maybe Matt Stafford too, the way the Rams had been playing.) But do I really force him to pretend to sleep when the NFC Championship Game is happening?
Eventually, the other adults around me—his grandparents especially—insisted he had to be asleep, because he had school tomorrow, and so I took him downstairs, but we surreptitiously went straight ahead at the bottom of the stairs instead of left to his bedroom; without turning on any lights to give away our last-second plan, we watched the Rams engineer an amazing, come-from-behind, record-breaking comeback.
Then, and only then, did we get to getting to bed.
Last night, bedtime was about two minutes long. We did the surahs—R and whoever’s putting him to bed any given night read Ayat al-Kursi, Surat al-Fatihah, and the Three Quls. This night, though, he was half-asleep before we even made it halfway. I like to try to get us to reflect on something meaningful that happened that day too, to put the bad—and the good—into perspective, before he’s out for the night.
We were pretty over the moon that the Rams had won. Especially the way they’d won. (Sorry, 49ers fans.) But of the three big matches that day that I was invested in, that wasn’t even the biggest one.
Mostly, you see, I’d wanted Mr. Stafford to get a chance to play in the big game. San Francisco and Mr. Garoppolo are great, but he already looks a lot like a South Asian Jake Gyllenhaal, so what does he need another Super Bowl for? (The Rams were my no. 3 team. No. 2 had been the Bills, because Buffalo deserves it. My no. 1 team you can surely guess but, if not, I’ll get there in a second.)
Because football wasn’t the only game in town today.
For me personally, though less so anyone else in the house, Rafa Nadal’s Australian Open Final was (and still is) hard to comprehend. He’s hands-down by far my most favorite tennis player, and has been for years and years and years. To see him still competing, to see him dominating, is insane. It makes me realize that during the pandemic I’d really let myself go.
And I had no excuse.
I’d figured that because the world had shut down and I’d crossed forty, I might as well pack it in and wait for the End Times.
In the last year, thank Allah, I’ve snapped out of that absurd, defeatist, loser mode of thinking, which doesn’t even make sense for the End Times, which is going to require, I would assume, a fair amount of HIIT. I want to thrive again. I want to do stuff. Get places. Be a someone. I want to try again. Even if I can’t control the circumstances, I can still make an effort. And what else counts except that we make the effort?
Not only was the previous win against the Titans thrilling, exciting, and totally worth all the money we’d shelled out after for game-day gear, but that match set up the Bengals to be one game—one game!—away from the Super Bowl. That, we felt, was miracle enough, and the way the first half of yesterday’s AFC Championship game transpired, was all the miracle it seemed we were gonna get.
But. Improbably, determinedly, beautifully, the Bengals defense pivoted, Burrow found his groove, and the Chiefs all but fell apart, going entirely scoreless for a huge stretch. We went from losing hope, convinced that, well, some teams just have certain destinies, feedback loops no one can escape, to screaming so loud my throat feels like it’s been torn open and shredded the next day.
It still seems hard to wrap my bald head around.
That’s what I told R as we went to bed last night. Sure, every day is special. Every day is in fact a blessing. But some days—some days, you want to remember forever. How often, after all, do the three sides you’re rooting for in big, big games actually show up and win, and win in devastating, heartbreaking, edge-of-your-seat fashion? That’s a day to be truly, immensely, unbelievably grateful for.
So, yeah, COVID’s been rough. We didn’t get to see a lot of the people we would’ve wanted to. Gone to some of the places we might’ve hoped to. Done the things we thought we needed to. But in a time of hardship, how much did we really suffer? Life isn’t fair. But maybe that’s because we spend more time wondering about the things we don’t have and less time about the things we do.
Pretty sure he was asleep by the time I got there, though.