Moving forward

It's that time of year, the time of year that we football wives fear.
It's firing season...the time of year that schools make changes
to the football programs.If you spend any amount of time in this world
 you will more than likely go through the experience. As a wife we
 face a new challenge in this role we take on.

For many wives, football wives in particular we are our coach's
biggest supporter. We listen to countless hours of recruiting,
and game planning. We fully commit ourselves to this program.
Our children grow up saying things like "Let's Go _____(Insert Mascot).

We explain to ourselves that our husband's absence is due to
his commitment to the program, his love of this school and his
desire to do what it takes. Every single away game, week spent
on the road recruiting and late dinner is explained as doing what
it takes....then one day it is all over.

You may feel angry, betrayed, and more often than not sad. We
try to hide our feelings, in an effort to support Coach, who we know
is now more stressed than he'll ever admit. We start doing things
like focusing on packing up the house, telling him that no matter
where we go or what we do we are doing it together...

As we pack up the home, we realize that a lot of our life goes
with it. For many of us it isn't just changing jobs, see most
coaches don't find a job in the same town they live in. So we
pack up our lives, preparing to be in a new town, away from
those friends we've made in the amount of time that we lived
in the place that we did.

Now the thing about those of us that have been through it before,
we know what it is like and if we are on a staff that has a new family
coming in we do everything we can to make them comfortable. We
fill them in on the area, the doctor's, the schools, the parks, and all
the things that someone else filled us in on..

Whenever a staff gets fired, I say a prayer for those families, knowing
how hard it is to deal with those situations. Praying that the families
find new jobs fast, that they can move easily and that the stress won't
be too much.

Take it from someone who knows, having an out of work football
coach hanging around is not something I wish on anyone. They often
struggle with the thought that they aren't good father/husbands because
they expose their families to this kind of instability. They struggle
with the fear they won't get a good job, or that they will stay in the
"one year wonder" position that keeps the family moving every year.
They say they are thinking about a different job, but everyone knows
that a coach has it in his DNA and we all know that DNA doesn't
change.

So we cry, we feel sad, we feel angry and we pack up the boxes. We
move forward. We move forward with our lives, we move forward with
our worlds and we say goodbye. Goodbye to the school we loved for
so long, goodbye to the homes we created and goodbye to the friends
we made. We move forward and know that we will likely make new
friends, and we will love new homes and cheer passionately for new
teams because at the end of the day we are just grown up cheerleaders
and our jobs are to bring cheer to the worlds we live in...