It is springtime here, and among other things, that means it’s Stanley Cup time! I am in no way a diehard NHL fan, and really I’m a hockey enthusiast come lately. But I do enjoy it. If I didn’t, it would be much harder to live in my house, where we have hockey on our tv every night, week in and week out, this time of year. I knew next to nothing about hockey until one adorable evening about 8 years ago, when I had a date night in with my now husband. His passion for hockey is rivaled only by his passion for soccer. So, after we ate a delicious meal he cooked for me at his apartment (the details of which are still a point of contention between us), we retired to the living room where we watched a hockey game. He was very patient in answering all my questions; we sat there for a good two hours, and it only took him an hour and a half to pluck up the courage to put his arm around me! Ah, memories.

In the 8-plus years we’ve been together, we’ve traveled a lot to watch collegiate hockey, both nationally and internationally. We went to Ireland for our honeymoon, which was amazing, but the impetus of that trip was to attend a friendly hockey tournament his college team was playing in there. We have also caught the occasional NHL or AHL game together over the years. These days, most of our hockey watching happens from our living room or bedroom, and it comes as no surprise that our daughter really enjoys it too. She says her favorite sport is hockey and she would like to play (we’ll see how she does when we can get her on ice to skate for the first time – which we haven’t done quite yet thanks to Covid, but it’ll happen). She tries to participate in our conversations about games, bless her heart. One evening a few months ago, she was laying between us in bed while we watched a Devils-Blues game; my husband is a Devils fan. I was telling him that while I support his rooting for his team, I happened to generally like the Blues. She then piped up right on cue to say, “and I like the Pinks!” I’ll admit, maybe it was one of those things where you had to be there, but it will always be really funny to me.

Ever since the start of the Stanley Cup playoff games, though, she’s been saying something that just hits different.

She doesn’t know the names of the teams, so she goes by what color their uniforms are for any given game. My husband was trying to encourage her to cheer for his team, who on that particular night were wearing their red jerseys. She didn’t want to do that. She wanted to root for “the white team” (which I think was playing in a different game, anyway, as he tends to flip channels during commercials to go from game to game, when so many games happen at once in the early stages). The more he good-naturedly teased that she should support his team, the more she whined that she wanted to pick the other one. Then she said, matter-of-factly, “I deserve the white team!”

It brought me up short. Obviously, the context isn’t quite right for such a statement, and it sounded so odd that I needed several minutes to process what she meant. It’s a jarring statement, or at least it was for me to hear. What I think she meant was that she had the right to choose for herself who she wanted to cheer on in the hockey game. And that is true, even if her father and I like to argue in good fun about whether she’ll be a fan of his teams or mine. But her choice of words was and still is unnerving to me.

I think that’s because the concept of “deserve” is something I struggle with, hardcore. I guess at least I can be grateful my kid has no such issues with it, apparently. But to be able to state in a clear, ringing, self-assured voice that she deserves to make her own choices? I’ve never been able to do that. I’ve been working for years in therapy to be able to whisper it to myself in private, and I generally still can’t manage that. Here she is saying it boldly without any qualms. It makes me wonder where she got the word from, because I will admit it is not something she heard from me.

I’m going to try now to delineate some things that I feel kids deserve, because maybe if I can figure out those basics in the context of providing them for my kid, it will help me see that I can provide them for myself too (since the ship of having them provided for me by my caregivers has long since sailed)…

Kids deserve:

1) Love.

2) Respect.

3) Structure and/or stability.

4) Safety.

5) Peace.

6) Their basic human needs met.

7) Someone who will listen to them and make them feel seen, heard, important.

8) Responsibility at a level that is appropriate to their age, and not more.

9) Protection from matters that they are too young to be involved in.

10) Opportunities to thrive as their own independent little selves.

I am really glad that my daughter can express herself so well. (Honestly, she is very much like me; I like to joke that someone hit copy/paste in my uterus.) I am hopeful that her saying she deserves to root for the hockey team of her choice is a sign that she is well-adjusted, confident, comfortable with speaking her mind to us. If anything, her choice of words about these hockey games is a reminder that when it comes to mental health, I am walking – on broken glass, it feels like sometimes – so that she can run. Or skate, as the case may be!

P.S. Is anyone curious about my preferred hockey team? Well, if you’ve managed to remember that I am a New Englander by birth, it shouldn’t surprise you that I identify chiefly as a Bruins fan. 😉