The stopwatch on my phone barks at me like a coach who forgot his manners: thirty seconds rest. I lean against a park bench, towel around my neck, lungs still mad from the last sprint, and there they are — my son and three of his preschool friends clustered under the shade of a maple, scuffling over a stick as if it were the Stanley Cup.
He doesn’t see me. He never sees me when he’s with his friends; he sees the game, the rules they’ve invented five minutes before, the hierarchy that matters to them in this precise moment. He juts his chin, makes a proclamation I can’t hear, and two heads nod like they’re getting instructions from some tiny general. I wipe my face with the towel and try to keep counting my breaths like a disciplined athlete, but my mind has wandered off the track.
Mid-sprint, your brain does this funny thing. You force your legs to keep moving, and your thoughts sprint somewhere else. Coaches call it compartmentalizing. I call it a loophole. While my heart rate hammers and my quads burn, I’m watching a four-year-old negotiate an entire social contract with wooden spoons and magnified earnestness.
They’ve made a circle on the grass, palms touching like it’s some sacred ritual. Someone declares a captain. My son, who at home demands we sing ‘Wheels on the Bus’ twice in a row, lifts his hand as if he’s simply been appointed and the world must adapt. For a moment — half a second, less than a rest interval — I am exactly where I was at eighteen, thinking I was the smartest guy in every room. It’s both hilarious and alarming to see a miniature version of my old self making terrible, earnest leadership choices.
He chooses to enforce a rule: only purple rocks allowed. The other kids comply with the solemnity of jurors. One boy, protest already forming, looks at my son like he’s negotiating with a referee who just made a bizarre call. My son points emphatically at a rock, makes a speech about fairness, and the kids break into a chorus of agreement that sounds suspiciously like pretend. They are operating with the same gusto I once used to argue playbook diagrams in a college locker room, but their stakes are different. Their victories are small and public and immediate — a laugh, a look, a shared secret. I feel stupid for needing that same immediate win in meetings and in email threads.
Thirty seconds. My lungs slow. The stopwatch buzzes. I force my eyes away like it’s a reflex test. I’m supposed to be training my body; it turns out I’m training my patience, too. Watching them, I notice habits I didn’t know I’d taught: the way my son tilts his head when making a point — that’s me. The flourish with which he claims a ‘captain’ title — mine again. DNA is a heavy inheritance; it’s embarrassing, like someone showing up to your game in your old, ill-fitting jersey.
There’s comedy in it, though. One of the kids proclaims they need a password to enter the club. The password is a series of giggles, and the enforcement mechanism is to tickle anyone who gets it wrong. For a second I watch my competitive instincts bridle at the unfairness — tickling as governance? — then I laugh because it’s ridiculous and because that laughter slips out of me and becomes real pride. When did I start rooting for him to be the kind of leader who makes kids laugh instead of fear him? When did I learn the difference between authority and terror?
Mid-workout thoughts are honest in a way the rest of me is not. There are no whiteboards or inboxes buzzing at me on the track. There is only a patch of kids and a man trying to act composed while his lungs remind him that he is, in fact, mortal. I think about the absurdity of bringing the elements that make me feel like ‘me’ into his sandbox. As an athlete, I am practiced in control: pacing, strategy, delayed gratification. Parenthood mocks that. My son has a schedule of needs that give no regard to my training blocks. He decides to crown himself captain of a stick-based league while I’m trying to crown myself fit enough to keep up. We both practice things the other will someday need.
When the group dissolves into an argument about who gets to be ‘the dragon’ — a role involving a shoelace and the sound of wheezing — my son sidesteps and offers a compromise: dragon time is shared. The kids cheer like it’s the greatest diplomacy they’ve ever witnessed. I sit up straighter, proud, and then annoyed with myself for being so relieved. Proud because he found a solution. Annoyed because I’m weirdly surprised that his solution isn’t a direct copy of my combative instincts. Where did he learn generosity? Is it my partner? Is it preschool? Is it gravity, just making him fall toward decency?
Humor keeps undercutting the seriousness of watching him grow. I want to hoist myself up out of the bench and run over, to coach the nuances of compromise, to high-five, to stamp it into his brain that this is the right move. But I’d get in the way. Much of parenting is learning how to be a supportive spectator of your child’s autonomy. It’s wanting desperately to intervene and knowing the intervention is often the selfish option.
By the time the next set of sprints comes due, my body has a rhythm and so do my thoughts: push, land, inhale, watch, wonder. The kids have migrated to a game of ‘house’ where everyone is both tiny and ferocious. My son assigns me the role of ‘dad’ in play, and they appoint another kid as ‘mom’ and something in me softens at the ordinariness of that. He hands me an imaginary cup of tea and says, with absolute authority, that I’m allowed one more cookie. I take it and feel like I’ve just been given a medal I didn’t earn.
There is a competitiveness that I still carry, the kind that wanted to be the best athlete in the room. Sitting here, panting between sprints and watching him with his friends, I realize the goals have changed but the feelings are eerily similar. I still want to win. I want to be exemplary. I want to shape outcomes. Only now, the victories are private: seeing him negotiate a fairy-tale ceasefire, watching him choose kindness when a faster option would have been louder. And the losses sting differently — a missed bedtime because of a work call feels like a lost set you can’t redo.
The whistle on my phone demands motion again. I get up, legs screaming polite protests, and run. My mind keeps half a step behind the physical effort, looping back to the maple tree, to the ludicrous seriousness of purple rocks and dragon shoes. When I hit the last interval and slow to a jog, I glance back once more. They’re all bundled together, whispering, plotting a revenge on some imaginary foe, and my son looks at me and waves like he knows I was watching the whole time, even though he clearly wasn’t.
I don’t feel like I’ve figured anything out. I do feel like I’m learning to be present between bursts: to watch without crowding, to cheer without coaching, to laugh at the small absurdities that hold up the huge, fragile thing we’re building together. Maybe that’s the training. Maybe my best reps are the times I sit, breathless, and let him be the captain, even when he’d pick purple rocks.
