The Soccer Mom Wobble-Stumble Dance Party in Karmi's Kitchen

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We get together two to three times a year. Nancy is the driving force behind our gatherings. After enough time has passed since our last gathering, she texts, Who’s up for a Rovers meeting? I admire this about her, and so do the rest of us soccer parents. At the end of each gathering, we all salute her as we hug and kiss goodbye. All these years meeting together, long after our kids stopped playing soccer, and now after they’ve graduated from college, gone off, some married — it’s always because of Nancy.

Then there’s Karmi, whose house often serves as our meeting spot. There were restaurants and bars, but mostly Karmi’s house. Karmi is one of the world’s best storytellers, and between Nancy and Karmi, the Rovers soccer parents have kept in touch these past sixteen years.

We’ve been through accidental, cardiac, and cancer deaths of fellow parents, with the accompanying shock, funeral, and sadness. We’ve been through a murder-suicide of an entire soccer family of ours, with the accompanying trauma it set into our veins. None of us can drive past the church that held their closed caskets without feeling a familiar hard grind in the stomach and remembering how it was.

We’ve managed exhausting tournament concession stands and wrapped ourselves in sleeping bags on the frigid sidelines in support of our kids and our beloved soccer family. There’ve been splits, divorces, and new marriages. We’ve served as a special jury to decide whether a new boyfriend or girlfriend was a keeper — or not. That’s not to say our verdict was ever announced, or whether it would have been heeded if it had, but we’ve had our opinions on things, as any friend-turned-de-facto-sibling would.

Over these years, we’ve stayed in touch and grown closer as the bulkier aspects of life now start to set in — empty nest, death of parents, questions of financial security, declining health, and walking oblivious into the last chapters of life.

After all this time, we still call ourselves “The Rovers,” which was the name of the four-team soccer empire that Coach Dudley built. When I schedule one of our gatherings on my calendar, I write Meeting w/Rovers. As Dudley used to say, “Once a Rover, always a Rover.” How could she have known way back then how true that would become?

The other night we met at Karmi’s. Five Rover moms showed up. Karmi ordered Chick-fil-A and I brought grocery store cake. We like delicacies. Karmi served up the remainder of her Christmas wine and beer. Water was fine for me. We sat on stools in the kitchen at a high-top table with a music speaker nearby playing tunes managed by world-renowned DJ, Alexa.

We took turns telling stories that wove themselves into the conversation. There were tales of hardship, our kids, and ex-husbands. There were questions asked and only partially answered about aging in place. There was lengthy discussion about passing time and missed opportunities. We mused about how to process regret. We let out quiet sighs.

Through the undulating conversation, my lovely tinnitus kept blaring at me: turn the music down! Starting with me, then circling the table, we barked over our shoulders, “Alexa! Lower!” I barely knew this DJ, so I spread my wings wider and shouted, “Alexa! Shut up!!”

That was just to get a few laughs.

So it went — stories, laughs, hollering at a portable speaker, until a song came on that had a real fine groove going. It was infectious. First one, then all of us started a little shoulder action, finger snapping, head bopping — dancing in our seats.

Then I got off my stool, slid over to the center of the kitchen floor, and started to let loose and boogie on down. Karmi was two seconds behind. Then Heidi. Then Nancy and Carolee. All five of us late 50s early 60-year-olds shaking our booties on the 9’x9’ dance floor tucked between the sink, oven, and refrigerator.

One of us had a deteriorating left hip. Another had a bad left ankle and a shabby right knee. One had some fake joints that had their limitations. One was a stroke survivor, and another a more sedentary type.

Oh, we were a sight.

Plus, if you don’t know what 9’x9’ looks like, I can promise you — five ladies dancing (flailing) together in such a space feels like a fire-code-busting over-stuffed disco from the 1970s, which I never witnessed personally because I was a little kid then, but I can imagine it.

Was our dance party fun? No. It was incredible. I kept looking at the others’ faces, into their eyes, as we all laughed hysterically. Something unique was happening. It was as if I was seeing the inner beautiful truth of people I’ve already known so well.

Then Paul Simon’s “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” came on. For the duration of that song, the five of us were at a middle-school dance singing every word in a terribly inexpert pitch.

Not only did the truth of us spill out onto the dance floor that night, but it curled around us and pulled us closer. It was a hilarious, singular moment. We were all kids together, dancing, shouting lyrics, carrying each other into the last decades of life. It was a gift punted across the soccer field for the win.

The vulnerable act of dancing for the first time together, so impromptu and wobbly, was a bonding force. An even greater one was how we sang lyrics right into the other person’s eyes, our friendship-love riding a musical wave. Then we’d come to the parts of songs where we had no idea what the lyrics were and do a blab-blah-blam in unison — mouth-stumbling in sync. This goofball singing — an intrinsic feature of any dance party — is really what caught all five of us into an eternal net of friendship.

When some of us met up a few days later, we discussed living in our own commune someday. We were joking, but underneath the jokes, it was fun to imagine.

“Wouldn’t that be something?”

“How would we do it? Live in a townhouse complex?”

“Maybe. Or we could buy a plot of land and build houses next to each other.”

“We could live in tiny houses.”

“We can die in each other’s company. It’ll be great.”

“Yeah. The Rovers Commune.”

The Rovers commune indeed, and I can just imagine it. Dance parties that rotate around the kitchens, friendship a stone’s throw away. Laughter and tears to the end, because as we’ve long known, once a Rover, always a Rover.

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Hope you're well, friends.