Preseason Anxiety: When Summer is Over but the Season Hasn't Begun

It happened again. Summer passed, and I’m sitting here looking at my calendar, writing in games, practices, meals. The squares are filling up all the way until December 8th (6:30PM). The pre-season anxiety is filling my fingertips up with the weird feeling I get right before an anxiety attack tries to get me. I will do my best to work through it, but I am almost positive I will text Coach with something that sounds very depressing and slightly bitter before the first game happens. It's happened every year around this time. I wish I could learn from the past and be an overcomer, but I’m not mature enough for that yet. The feeling is more than anxiety, if I have to be honest. It's a mixture of dread, excitement, wonder, frustration, and stress. I tend to ride on the negative wave before the season gets here; I’m not sure why. I think it's okay to sit in those feelings and to really feel them and to live in them, kind of be lonely and be sad and be bitter . . . but only for a minute. You have to find your way out of them. I don’t think one coach's wife will tell you they’ve never felt feelings like that. But the difference between the “good” ones and the “bad” ones is their ability to still face the world and their families with righteousness they can only get by knowing where their hope lies. We don’t need to stay in the funk, because we don’t find our happiness in what our husbands are doing for a living. We find it in the Lord. We can’t depend on our spouses to make us happy. If you can summon up the Why, why you are called to this, then it makes it easier. The Why is because this is a ministry. Try to remember that this season. As much as I can, I try to be involved. When the season starts, we get involved in games, practices, dinners at our house, football club lunches, team pictures, festivals. And when we fall into the rhythm of being without our coach-spouse-father-friend, the loneliness and stress don’t hit me as hard. But right now, with camps and workouts, we just miss him. We miss the players and we miss our coaching families. As hard as it all is now, it won’t be long before we are wearing long-sleeves, hats and gloves, hopefully making arrangements for Thanksgiving dinner at the field house and having a Christmas celebration around 9PM on December 8th. Happy Season, friends. It's almost here.