“Then what is going on with you?” she asked. “Are you partying too much? Staying out too late?”
“Are you working out?” Dad asked, on an extension on the landline at home in Sudbury. “You have to stay in top shape.”
“I am working out. And I’m not partying. I mean, I go out once in a while.”
“Are you seeing someone? Is it a girl? Is she disrupting your schedule?”
“No! Jesus, Mom.” I sighed. So I had a little online obsession with a pop star; that wasn’t impacting my game. “One of the assistant coaches is helping me with some stuff. It’s just one of those things. I’m trying to relax and not focus on scoring goals.” And you’re not helping.
I loved my parents, and I knew the sacrifices they’d made for me to play hockey, and I appreciated them with my whole heart. But they were a bit helicopter-ish when it came to my hockey—my dad was a coach and a team manager, my mom watched at every game, and they were super involved in every hockey-related decision in my life. They weren’t the craziest parents at the rink, but they were up there. I’ll never forget when I was about seventeen, I was on a breakaway and my mom was yelling at me “Score! Score!” Good advice, Mom, thanks. I wouldn’t have thought of that myself.
When I started playing hockey, I was small for my age and not the best skater. I’d been a little fearful on the ice…afraid of falling down. Afraid of the bigger kids. I didn’t tell my parents I was scared. I told them I wanted to quit.
They were pissed.
I remembered it clearly, even though it was so long ago, because it had felt like they didn’t love me anymore. The atmosphere in our home became chilly. They were still my parents—still took me to school, still fed me meals—but there were no hugs and kisses, no teasing words, no bedtime stories. I lay in my bed at night, cold and scared. I’d felt so isolated and alone. No kid should ever feel like that.
I’d known what I had to do to earn their love. I started playing hockey again.
That made my parents happy. When I played well, my parents were pleased. When I didn’t play well…they were pissed. Or disappointed.
I remembered driving home from a tournament in a van full of hockey equipment that smelled only slightly better than if we’d been carrying around a dead body since 1996, in thick silence because my team had just lost the championship game because I turned over the puck to the other team’s star player in sudden death overtime. My parents’ disappointment had pulsed like a living thing. Then my dad had ended the silence by saying, “You broke another three-hundred-dollar stick.”
Yeah.
Then there’d been the time I’d bruised my ribs. They weren’t broken, but it was fucking painful. I’d tried to tell Mom and Dad I didn’t want to play because it hurt. Well they were having none of that. I kept playing. So the time I took a puck in the face, I got stitched up and went right back out there.
Every kid wants their parents to be happy and proud of them, so I worked my ass off to try to please mine.
I loved hockey, don’t get me wrong. After a rough start, I grew to love the game. I wanted to play and I wanted to be the best, but I always knew that my parents’ love and approval depended on how I played.
When I’d been kind of screwing around in New York my first few years in the league, my parents had been all up in my business about it. They’d made numerous trips to New York, even talked to my coach, for fuck’s sake. I was only twenty years old, but I’d been away from home for a few years by then, after playing Major Junior hockey in Windsor and a season in the AHL, and I felt I was an adult. Having them come to babysit me had been humiliating.
Now they were riding my ass again because of how I’d been playing lately.
“We’re barely into the season,” I added. “Relax.”
“I don’t think ‘relaxing’ is a proactive way to tackle a problem,” Mom snapped.
“It’s not your problem,” I snapped back.
A two-ton silence met my ears.
I closed my eyes. “It’s not,” I said in a lower tone. “It’s my problem and I’m dealing with it.” I lifted my chin. “I gotta go, sorry. Talk soon, okay? Love you both.”
“We love you too, Chase.”
I wanted to roll my eyes. I knew they loved me deep down inside, but sometimes it felt like they only really loved me when I was as good as they wanted me to be.
I dropped my cellphone on the kitchen counter in my condo, closed my eyes, and tipped my head back. I took in a long breath and let it out.
It was my problem, not theirs, and I needed to put them out of my mind. More pressure was not what I needed. I was trying to focus on the things Danny was working on with me, and part of that was positive mental talk and not constantly thinking about the goals I wasn’t scoring. My parents meant well, but their input was the opposite of what I needed at the moment.
It was a night off between home games, and I was home alone. My day had started early, at nine o’clock when we’d watched video of last night’s game. Yeah, all my mistakes up front and visible for us all to relive. But one thing I learned from those disappointments as a midget player was that you couldn’t wallow in self-pity for screwing up. You had to let it go, think positive, and look forward. That was what I was trying to do, learn from my mistakes.
After the videos, I’d worked out—yes, Mom and Dad, I really did—today’s workout focusing on my core. I’d spent some time taping my sticks; I was super picky about that even for practices. Some guys don’t care unless it’s a game, but I wanted my stick taped to perfection all the time. Our practice was an easy one since we’d played last night and we played again tomorrow night, but I skated hard and tried to focus on the things Danny had talked to me about. And I stayed on the ice after everyone had left, putting in some extra time. Tomorrow night we were playing Pittsburgh, so we went over a bunch of tactical things about how they liked to play. After that was the usual stretching and I had an awesome although painful at times massage, working out a few kinks, then a couple of meetings.
The X-rays hadn’t shown anything wrong with my wrist, which was good news, I guessed, but I’d been given a cortisone injection, which would help if there was some inflammation. Things had been feeling pretty good so I was hoping that whatever the problem was, it was healing up.
I was tired and tempted to go to bed early, but I stretched out on my big couch in my TV room with my phone and the remote control. It happened to be a night the Condors were playing, in Vancouver, and sure enough, Jordyn was on Twitter, happily commenting on the game, which just started.
I smiled. She made it fun to sit alone in my condo and watch another team play hockey. Over the past few weeks, I had to admit to looking forward to the nights when this happened. Not that there were many, the way the schedule was with my games and Condors games, and she was probably busy too. I saw her posts on Instagram—lunch she was having at some outdoor café in Hollywood, a selfie with a monkey filter that was ridiculous, or another selfie of her at the gym, sweaty and wearing skimpy workout gear and absolutely gorgeous.
We got this, boys! #GoCondors
I heaved a sigh. I was going to have to disagree with her tonight. There was no way the Condors were going to beat Vancouver, who were on a hot streak. We’d just fallen to them ourselves last week. Also, the Condors were on their last game of a Western Canada road trip, the last two games back-to-back, so they had to be tired. The Condors were going to have a hard time shutting down the Vancouver offense.
Sorry, song girl, your team won’t win tonight.
#Faith
I smiled. She was a good fan.
We traded comments about the play and the reffing. Then I remembered something important. Hey! Congrats on your Grammy nomination!
They’d been announced a couple of days ago. I didn’t pay much attention to music awards, but Jordyn’s name had come up and I was all over that. Wow. A Grammy.