What Gets Passed On Anyway

On the burden of knowing and the negotiation of letting go

I drove past a cluster of soccer fields on my way home today — multiple games going at once. It looked like a tournament. An indication that spring is here and summer just around the corner. The fields were woefully vacant and hollow during the winter months. Seeing life and joy and community coming together in this third space again always stirs happy memories for me.

I thought about my father on the sideline, and my parents working together to figure out how to keep me playing — the logistics, the cost, the weekend practices and cross-province tournament trips that add up in ways you don’t fully appreciate until you’re the one doing the math. I thought about the friends I made on those fields — some of whom I’m still close to twenty-two years later. The thrill of scoring a goal. Of winning. Of making something magic happen in a game after you’ve practiced the same skill over and over and over again until your body just knows. I thought about what sport was before I knew what it could cost.

All I had then was the dreams. Reality came later.

Now I’m pregnant — a boy, due in the fall. And I drove past those fields today and did the math I never had to do as a kid. Not the schedule math, not the registration fees — the other math. The risk and reward calculus that the book Rebound frames as a negotiation: what are you willing to accept in exchange for the right to play, to move, to belong to something?

The authors were mostly talking about physical injury. The body’s ledger. Return to sport after harm.

But I keep thinking — why does the negotiation stop there?

The risk I keep returning to isn’t physical. It’s the risk of loving something so completely it becomes you. Of building an identity so fused with a sport, a team, a role — that when it ends, and it always ends, you don’t know who’s left.

That’s not a hypothetical risk. That’s the one I know most intimately. That’s the one I’ve built a whole body of work around trying to name and reduce.

And yet I drove past those fields today and still felt the pull. I want that for him — the belonging, the discipline of a body learning what it can do, the social world that opens up inside a team. The third space that isn’t home and isn’t school, where a different version of yourself gets to exist.

Sport done well is worth something real. I know that too.

So the question I’m sitting with isn’t whether to hand him sport. It’s how to do it without pretending I don’t know what I know.

There’s a version of parenting that uses everything you’ve lived through as a shield. You don’t need to touch the stove to know it burns — someone who has already been burned can just tell you. And some of that knowledge is genuinely transferable. I believe that. I want to pass down what I know.

But I also know that some lessons don’t stick until they’re yours. That hearing about the burn and feeling it are two different kinds of knowing. And I keep asking myself — is it responsible to withhold the experience? Is it even possible? Or is the most I can do to make sure that when he touches the stove, and he might, there’s someone there who knows how to treat a burn?

And then there’s the thing I’m carrying.

I don’t want what I’ve lived through in sport to become his inheritance. Generational trauma doesn’t always announce itself — sometimes it’s just jadedness passed off as wisdom, caution mistaken for protection, resentment that never got processed quietly becoming the lens through which the next person sees the world.

I’ve felt that resentment. I understand it. And I’ve also lived long enough to recognize that people do the best they can with what they have. That understanding doesn’t erase the harm — but it does mean the processing is mine to do. The work of letting it end with me is mine to do.

What scares me is the in-between. The place where I haven’t fully finished that work yet and my son is already watching. Where my distrust of the system, my hard-won knowledge of what it can do — becomes the first story he hears about sport before he’s ever kicked a ball. Where my protection becomes its own kind of wound.

There’s no clean endpoint to that tension. I’m not sure there’s supposed to be.

He’s a boy — or that’s who I’m imagining on those fields right now. But I’ve learned enough to know that identity doesn’t stay where you put it, and the world won’t wait for him to figure himself out before it starts making assumptions. He’ll enter sport as a mixed race boy, which means the space will receive him in ways I can partly anticipate and partly can’t. And I don’t know yet who he’ll grow up to be. The negotiation I’m doing on his behalf is provisional. It has to be.

My husband and I have already started making decisions we’re not entirely sure are ours to make. Some sports we’ve quietly written off — football, for the concussion risk alone. Rugby sits in a grey zone; we can see the appeal, the full body engagement, the culture of it, but we’re not sure yet. And hockey — I can already hear my father and father-in-law’s disappointment — but who genuinely wants to wake up at 5am on a Saturday to sit in a freezing arena for hours? Not us. It’s basically paying a premium for cruel and unusual punishment. No thank you.

These feel like reasonable lines to draw. But I’m aware that drawing lines on behalf of someone who doesn’t exist outside of me yet is a particular kind of hubris.

Maybe the goal was never zero harm. Maybe it was always about building the capacity to navigate it — and making sure the supports are there when you need them. My advocacy lives in the space of reducing harm in sport. That’s real and I mean it. But the realist in me knows there’s no utopia. We aim for it anyway. Knowing perfection isn’t the destination changes what you’re actually building toward.

What you’re building toward is a person who can be in the arena — fully, joyfully, eyes open — and find their way back to themselves when it gets hard.

Or maybe he’ll hate sport entirely and I’ll have made it too complicated before he ever even kicks a ball.

That would be okay too. Because that would be his choice.

What I know is this: sending someone you love into a system you understand deeply and trust only partially is its own kind of negotiation. One I’m not finished making. One I suspect I won’t finish for a long time.

For now I drive past the fields. I watch the kids fall down and get back up again. And I let myself want it for him — all of it. The longing, the loss, the hope. Unresolved and imperfect. I’m sitting with that. For now, that’s enough.