The air smells of asphalt and plastic. I wear shiny new soccer cleats I purchased a day ago at a shop in an U-Bahn, or subway, station. I stand on a hard-turf field in Wedding — a district in Berlin known for kebab stands and Eckkneipen, kitschy corner bars where prematurely aged men play darts and start drinking before noon.
A group of women in their 20s and 30s surrounds me. In the center of the circle is their coach, a petite woman in her 50s. She bounces on the tips of her toes and speaks with the contractions and tight vowels of the local dialect.
“People, we almost missed our chance to move up to the higher league. Is that what you wanted?” she says.
I catch the eye of the woman who’d invited me to join the team. Her look is apologetic. I stay still, hoping I won’t be noticed, an interloper eavesdropping on a drama I have no part in.
“No, we just like living on the edge,” a player says.
“I have another word for it,” the coach replies. Her remark is met with laughter.
“Yeah, it’s not funny,” says a woman with a broad, imposing stance, the certainty of a once-professional goalkeeper. “I’ve never seen us play so poorly.”
When practice is on the verge of spinning out of control, the coach claps her hands and instructs the team to run four laps around the field. The tension deflates.
Afterward, she tells me to join the novice players. I feel insulted, but then I notice how tentatively I hold the ball at my feet. How it smacks awkwardly against my new cleats. How what I’d once done with hard-earned confidence now feels so unfamiliar.
* * *
Back in middle school, back when I played on four soccer teams at once, my favorite practice T-shirt read, “Aggressive by Nature, Soccer by Choice.” I wore it until the cotton frayed along the neckline and holes appeared under the sweat-stained armpits. I felt the shirt captured the essence of me.
I dominated the defense with pride. Parents from opposing teams yelled at me from the sidelines, frustrated with how I gave their daughters no foothold on the game. Off the field, I took a similarly aggressive approach to life, telling people exactly what I thought, exactly when I thought it. This was not a recipe for making friends.
The soccer field was my refuge. Until it wasn’t.
My soccer career ended with a whimper. By my senior year, the prospect of college scholarships, the politics of playing time and my own impossibly high standards had infiltrated my sanctuary. The high school team I captained lost 6-1 in the playoffs. My club team lost 6-1 in the state final. I took the losses as personal failures.
In the years that passed, I played the occasional game. During one of them, a short pass from my future husband, Bidjan, caused me to sprain my ankle. (He remembers the story differently.) But my cleats mostly sat at the bottom of my closet, collecting dust. The leather peeled away from the soles.
I channeled my excess determination into professional pursuits. I rode the wave of my unreasonable standards all the way to a role in the White House budget office overseeing billions of dollars in public funding — and to a burnout so deep and abiding that I urged Bidjan to facilitate my escape by finding a job in his hometown, Berlin.
* * *
“Your job is to run,” says the coach, nodding toward me.
The team sits in the locker room before our first game of the new season. On a small whiteboard with an outline of the field, the coach moves a marker back and forth along a semicircle marked “Jo.” I’m taken aback that she has assigned me the position of striker — charged with leading the team’s offense.
During practices that summer, I’d compensated for my rusty ball skills with physical conditioning. Since giving up soccer, I’d taken up long-distance running. I could keep going after most players had tired.
In the first game, I score a goal, striking a rebound off a defender into the back of the net. We win 4-1. Back in the locker room, another player — at least a decade my junior and a merciless defender — gives me the nickname Flummi, or “bouncy ball.”
I feel the glow of triumph on the U-Bahn ride home, and a gnawing regret that I likely won’t be able to play many games.
Bidjan and I are trying to conceive. I approach parenthood with ambivalence. I’d thought I’d have more figured out before I had a child. If I had a child. Over the past year, I have pined for my once-promising government career. I spend my days clawing for a new identity, routinely violating social codes I didn’t know existed. Interviewers try to ascertain my “family plans” with oblique questions. They want to assess the likelihood that I’ll be taking Germany’s generous maternity leave soon after they hire me.
In their eyes, I’m already a mother. Yet my period keeps coming, month after month. So I keep playing, and to everyone’s surprise, the team keeps winning.
By November, we’re playing for the top spot in the league. I score two goals. We win 3-0. On my best plays, I draw deep from a well of summer soccer camps and afterschool practices more than 15 years in the past. A header off a corner kick, drilled into the net. A breakaway that ends with a perfectly chipped shot over the opposing team’s goalkeeper. In these moments, in between solid if unremarkable play, I’m once again the player that I was, or maybe could have been.
After practices, the team occasionally visits one of those Eckkneipen in Wedding. The bar is lined with gold tinsel. A beer costs 1.5 euros. The team captain — an earnest woman who wears her blonde hair in a short ponytail — hands coins to a grimacing bartender. “At the end of the money, there’s still so much of the month left,” she jokes.
Months in, I have only a vague idea of what my teammates do for work. The goalkeeper issues parking tickets for the local municipality. A few players work in childcare, another at a startup. Nobody asks about my career, and it’s a relief. Here, my identity is clear.
I’m Jo. I’m Flummi. I’m the American who doesn’t stop running.
* * *
In the spring, the team is still undefeated, and my period is late. A pregnancy test shows two blue lines, not just one. I tell Bidjan with a mix of euphoria and dread. I text the coach to let her know why I won’t be able to play for a while.
“I had a feeling,” she responds.
I’m convinced we’ll have a daughter. I can see her brown eyes and smirk. Then, we have a prenatal appointment. The ultrasound shows a black hole of a gestational sac. No heartbeat. No signs of new life.
Bidjan and I sit on a park bench. Children and pregnant women are everywhere, the landscape is fertile and in bloom. I email and text the few people I told, because talking is too much.
“That does me much pain” is the literal translation of the coach’s response in German to English.
I cry while running along the Spree River, while buying lettuce at the grocery store, while watering a plant that dies. I sign insurance papers at the hospital, get anesthetized and wake up in a white room. My roommate is a belligerent woman who yells at the nurses. Someone steals 40 euros from my wallet. Bidjan holds my hand and takes me home. I spend days on the couch watching bad television.
* * *
A few weeks later, I return to practice. The coach hugs me when I step onto the field.
“I’m glad you’re back,” says the goalkeeper, her arm around my shoulder. “There wasn’t nearly enough running while you were gone.”
I sprint out to the middle of the field in the bright light of a summer evening in Berlin. I’m filled with grief and missing a child never born. My teammates pass me the ball. They have big plans for the next season. We’re moving up to the top division in our amateur citywide league.
Slowly, the sadness softens. My chest becomes so open and full that I think I might float away.
I’m so grateful for the women around me, for the chance to escape into the game, to revel in the simple joy of a play well made.
Here, thousands of miles from the first soccer field I played on, I tap into dreams long buried. I pull on the thread of who I used to be, run forward to the person I will become. I rediscover a piece of me that was lost, just when I most need to.
Joanna Mikulski is a writer and policy consultant who lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and daughter.