Enthusiasm: Part I

Enthusiasm. I’ve thought a lot about enthusiasm over the past year. That’s because there’s a lot of it about over here. Americans are so unembarrassed about it, and you know what? I’ve come to admire that. I know, I know, it’s all very unBritish, and don’t think I can’t see you, over the Atlantic, wincing a little and gripping your shoulder blades together, and thinking “oh Iota, no, please not”.

It’s not cool, is it? Enthusiasm. It means celebrating your kids’ achievements publicly (dreadful), or being proud of what and who you are (ghastly), or telling people all about your favourite occupation and why you enjoy it (anorak). I have to say, however, that having experienced rather more of it in the past year than I am used to, I can see it does have a lot of upside.

My study of the enthusiasm phenomenon started when I went to 10-yo’s first soccer match of the season. I was horrified. All those parents cheering the team on, and seeming to mind very much how they did. I mean really mind. Not just showing up and being supportive in a generally parental way. I mean running up and down the sidelines and shouting encouragement. I guess this happens in Britain too. We hadn’t quite reached that stage before we left, so I asked my brother in Sussex, who has soccer-playing children. He said “yes, I’m afraid people do get rather keen, but just shout “go deep” every now and again, and you’ll be fine”. Yet in spite of his advice and this evidence of the existence of enthusiasm on the south coast of England, I couldn’t help feeling that somehow this unapologetic eagerness and commitment was something of a different animal in America.

I tested out another mum, by making a conspiratorial comment about not understanding the offside rule. Now, women do not understand the offside rule. That is just how it is, as any self-respecting member of the sex will tell you. They are not biologically designed to. It’s to do with hunting and gathering, or staying in the cave, and superior non-understanding DNA being passed into the gene pool. It’s been scientifically proved. So imagine my horror when the other mum said “oh don’t worry, you just have to see it in operation a few times, and then you’ll get it, but actually FIFA have just brought in a new ruling which has nuanced it a little”. Now that really wasn’t cricket at all. Here I was, having left family and home to start a new chapter in another continent, and I couldn’t even make a connection using the most fundamental of womanly bonds. I diagnosed a case of over-enthusiasm, but worse was to come.

There was another mother there who said she had been at the soccer field on Saturday AND Sunday. When I joked about “beyond the call of duty”, she said, straight-faced, “I wouldn’t miss it for the world”. That was the moment I realized I was adrift. Lost and alone on a sea of unembarrassed enthusiasm, without the raft of irony to cling onto. That was a bad moment.

To be continued…