Mourning the Last Day I Stepped Onto a Soccer Field
By Melissa Bandy
In 2019, at age 34, I fractured a rib. It wasn’t a full break, just a hairline crack, impossible for me to see on the X-ray without the doctor pointing it out. Nevertheless, that barely perceptible line on an X-ray reshaped my world.
The fracture happened when I was playing goalie for an adult soccer team I’d been part of for over a decade. Now, more than three years later, I can still visualize the play that caused the injury. It started when a male player, with a few inches and at least 50 pounds on me, had a breakaway toward the goal.
As he tried to cut around me, I dove in front of his feet and deflected the ball. He kept moving forward until he tripped on my outstretched body and his knee came down hard on my midsection. It hurt like hell, but not as badly as some other injuries I’ve endured. But when I got up, I couldn’t take in a full breath or move my torso without a sharp pain.
Initially, I decided going to the doctor for an X-ray was a waste of time. The treatment for a bruised rib and a broken rib is the same—time. But after two nights of waking up every half hour from the throbbing in my side, I decided to schedule an appointment. I needed something to help me sleep.
A client of mine still tells the story of that doctor visit (even if the details have become slightly exaggerated). It goes something like this: We were in the middle of a huge transaction, about to buy a property worth tens of millions of dollars, and Melissa broke her rib playing soccer, but she didn’t miss a beat and closed the deal from the doctor’s office, struggling to breathe.
As a story, it ranks right above closing a deal the morning after an emergency room trip for a dislocated thumb and right below playing in a soccer tournament—four full games in one weekend—just five weeks after giving birth.
I love those stories. And I loved playing soccer. I was good at it, in a way it’s hard to be good at other adult things I have to do. I think I am a good lawyer, based on the fact that I have clients who keep paying my bills and hiring me again. And I think I’m a good mom, based on the fact that I’m doing the best I know how to do and I haven’t yet screwed up my children (as far as I can tell). But soccer gave me the opportunity to prove my skill and my worth during a specific contest, a chance to compete week after week.
Soccer also connected me to a previous version of myself. Playing soccer in high school and college had been a major part of my identity. I am a mom and a wife and a lawyer, with a mortgage and a demanding job and too many decisions to make. But out on the field, it was possible to forget all of that and mentally return to a time in my life when my performance in a game was the most pressing thing.
There is a framed picture in my office that I’ve had since middle school. It is a drawing of a girl kicking a soccer ball, with “Melissa” written below. When people notice it, they ask whether I played soccer. I enjoyed replying that I did play soccer and, in fact, still played in an adult league two nights a week. (After my injury, I said that I still played but recently broke my rib, which felt pretty badass to tell colleagues at work.)
I am a mom and a wife and a lawyer, with a mortgage and a demanding job and too many decisions to make. But out on the field, it was possible to forget all of that and mentally return to a time in my life when my performance in a game was the most pressing thing.
I intended to go back to the team, but I just couldn’t recover. My fatigue never went away, even as the discomfort in my midsection subsided. Everything felt off. At first, I thought it was because my injury had left me unable to exercise at the level I was used to and decided I needed to get back into shape. I started increasing my gym attendance, registered for a half-marathon, and began a training schedule, but the extra workouts didn’t help. Then, I started waking up to fingers swollen to the size of sausages and pain shooting up and down my forearms.
Several weeks and many tests later, a doctor diagnosed me with rheumatoid arthritis, which explained the pain, the swollen joints, the fatigue, and a whole other set of symptoms I had chalked up to getting older. Mentally, I knew rheumatoid arthritis was unconnected to my injury, but the fracture plus the diagnosis turned the year 2019 into a string of betrayals from my body, of which I had always taken fairly decent care.
At the end of that year, I got on a medication regimen that improved how I felt. I made a plan to make 2020 my year, vowing to get back in shape and rejoin my team in the spring. We all know how that went. With the league canceled for most of 2020, I got further and further from returning to soccer, and my kids got older and started adding their own sports to our family’s busy schedule. Eventually, my team stopped asking me if I was ready to come back and now it has been over three years since I’ve set foot on the field.
I miss competing and have toyed with the idea of taking up a non-contact sport. I started taking tennis lessons, but holding the racquet for long periods of time aggravated my wrists. I like to run, but I can’t maintain any consistency in training because I never know when I’m going to wake up feeling like I have weights strapped to my legs. So I walk, run when I feel like it, and pick up dumbbells when I remember.
Now when people see the picture in my office and ask me if I used to play soccer, I say yes and leave it at that. My cleats and my goalie gloves are still in my garage, next to my children’s equipment, the rubber from the gloves dry and crumbly, the shoes stiff from non-use. They are a tribute to a past version of myself, a version I mourn, though she lasted a lot longer than I thought she would.
I am able to maintain my health most of the time, and I am fully invested in being a wife and a mother and a lawyer. That is everything, and that is enough. And yet, sometimes I look at the girl in the picture in my office, and I miss her.
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Melissa Bandy lives with her husband and two children in Little Rock, Arkansas, where she works as an attorney and writes as much as she can. She used to play soccer, and she was pretty good.