Parenthood and Checkmates

This weekend my daughter participated in her first chess tournament. More accurately, she participated in our first chess tournament, as my chess tournament experience is non-existent. The whole thing was a bit tornadic for me, my emotional winds driven primarily by pride and love and fear. I loved chess in middle school, and especially as a high school student, but the idea of participating in a chess tournament was somehow beyond my reach. I knew they existed, and where they happened, and when they happened, but my insecurities were (and are) too great, and the whole thing seemed like something other people do. This was despite my membership in U.S. Chess and enthusiastic participation in the Internet Chess Club. I desperately wanted to be a part of the chess community, but taking the leap required some inner strength or certainty that I lacked entirely.

(Playing online was no problem, though it wasn't really possible until I was in high school, when Internet service providers proliferated. I wonder about millennials, who always had the Internet [and at high speeds!]—whether a nontrivial percentage of that generation wasn't marred by growing up entirely in a secure, antiseptic online environment. The monstrous behavior of online gamers is perhaps a result of this; children playing with friends without ever leaving their bedrooms, or even meeting them face-to-face. It is play without the risk of rejection and free of consequence for words and deeds. My daughter's generation is therefore suffering a kind of overreaction to this. We're foisting our own insecurities on them—insecurities about ourselves, and about the causes of what we see as a lost generation.)

My daughter somehow discovered chess at school, and asked to join the school chess club, and the whole thing caught me off guard and I am thrilled by this turn of events, of course. I bought her a regulation chess mat and weighted pieces, and an obnoxiously pink chess bag because she likes pink, and on some level, I guess, to make some kind of political statement that she's too young to make. I fought wars on my own mat in my youth, and I hope hers lasts as long. (My chess clock wasn't so sturdy and I replaced it with a $20 job I found on Amazon.)

I've tried to remain cool about all this, but it's hard because she's surprisingly good and really seems into the game. She pesters me constantly to play, and I always do when asked. For the last couple of months, a board has remained unfurled on our kitchen island, and we sneak quick games in before school or between homework assignments. When her chess coach informed the team of a tournament, I asked him (when she was out of earshot) if she would embarrass herself by participating (I had no idea how kids her age played or how experienced they were) and he said no, that she was more than ready. I later asked her if she wanted to play, and she said "Of course!" and that was that. We were on our way.

It was held at a local middle school^*. Honestly, the setup was just like you see on TV: a giant auditorium (in this case a gymnasium), tables as far as the eye can see, and thousands of chess pieces arranged neatly and ready for battle. (Her age group didn't use a clock, though she's become quite adept at managing time and would have done fine with one.) Here is how a tournament works, logistically, from the point of view of a parent. We arrived 30 minutes before the tournament began and signed in. (We had pre-registered.) She was given a name tag of the Hᴇʟʟᴏ ᴍʏ ɴᴀᴍᴇ ɪs variety. Everyone—parents and players—gathered in the gymnasium bleachers and waited for the official start. The tournament director—an enormously charismatic man with a deeply held belief of chess as a force for social change—spoke briefly, thanking the volunteers and sponsors for making the event happen. He also explained the rules of the tournament to a room of nervous young people from grades first through twelfth. Kids asked questions and he graciously answered them. (Note: I didn't get his name to my great regret; if you happen to stumble upon this page and know, please contact me.) He then explained the rules for parents. Basically, there was only one: no talking. At all. No—taking—at—all in the tournament hall. In previous years, parents weren't welcome in the playing hall, but this year was a bit of an experiment. For what it's worth, I would prefer, for sake of the players, that parents again be expelled from the room at the tournament's open. By and large, everyone remained quiet over the course of the day, but frequent trips in and out of the auditorium meant the opening and closing of doors, which sounded like cannon-fire amid the silence.

After the Q&A, kids were assigned to tables based on their ages and skill levels. My daughter was at the "K-2" table for the youngest children eligible to play. (I cannot figure out what K means, exactly. Kindergarten is the obvious guess, but the other tables were K-5 and K-10 and so on. So I have no idea.) The kids were called by group (with groups being labeled on their name tags), and where they might sit was determined by staff at the tables themselves. I couldn't hear anything going on, and could only scarcely see, so far were we from the kids. (A line on the floor became a demarkation point: no parents could cross, to prevent us from distracting our kids. This was a very smart decision, though like every parent with a smartphone, I wanted desperately to get a picture of a games in progress.

An exterior room was set up for parents to play games of our own, or eat or read or work or whatever. We were all encouraged to leave. I did not. I couldn't see my daughter, and on her behalf, I stood (I was too anxious to sit) and willed her to have fun and hoped that she would do well. (Before we arrived, I didn't know what to expect, and told her that even losing every game wouldn't be something to be embarrassed about. That she was young and many had been playing games much longer than her, and that our real job was to just learn what tournaments are like. When she expressed nervousness, I asked her if she knew how to play chess, and she said yes, and if she had fun playing chess, and she said yes, and said that there was nothing to be nervous about, then. She would get to spend the day playing a game that she enjoys! She seemed to like this argument, and expressed no further anxiety.)

Once the games began, I remained largely in the dark. The first game was a total mystery, as was the second. On her third game, she had moved to a different seat at the table, and while I couldn't make out the game or the position of pieces, I could see her hands and the confidence with which they moved, and knew right away that she was in command on the board. She handed some little boy his ass. Her chess coach had a better view of things, and said that it appeared she was doing very well. He pointed out that she was no longer sitting. She was on her feet and "in the zone," moving pieces decisively and, for the most part, effectively. When I saw her face and the way she leaned into the board ready to pounce—a four-foot Garry Kasparov—I could see that she was happy. She was having fun. She was having a great time playing in a chess tournament!

Meanwhile, on the sidelines, I attempted to maintain a poker face and hide any anxiety I might be feeling. I'm not sure what I was nervous about, exactly, or even what my feelings really were. While I tried to work through this, I felt immense pride at how effortlessly she settled into the tournament. The games were played in a round-robin format, and she played 6 games in addition to others for fun while waiting for the next game to begin. She seemed to be in her element. Two and half hours of chess concentration is an exhausting business. I was moved by how smart she is, how old she's getting, and how few years remain before she goes off to make a mark on the world. In a way, the tournament was like a little glimpse of the future. Parents couldn't go anywhere near the players, and that was fine, because they didn't need us! That was a hard reality to consider: adulthood, and her leaving the nest.

In many ways my daughter and I are alike, but she differs from me in one big way: she can fit in with any group of people. She knows how to say hello and get invited to do what they are doing. It's a beautiful thing to see.

At last the tournament ended, and she met me for lunch. (We brown bagged it, though there was jambalaya for sale from the gym snack bar.) She told me about the games she played, and that she had fun, and that she won some and lost some. She was in great spirits, though a bit fatigued from the play. We ate—I even grabbed her a box of Girl Scout cookies that we're selling. After lunch and before the awards ceremony where we would get the results, the tournament had set up a craft station for the young players, and they were able to decorate little paper crowns with jewels and such. She enjoyed that as well.

Parents packed the ceremony. When the director got to her section, I stopped breathing, I think. Then they called her name. She had earned Third Place, which came with a lovely trophy topped by a knight. I was over the moon. She was thrilled, too, but not entirely. After pictures were taken of all the winners (she was one of the only girls to place in the tournament), she told me what was bothering her. She had seen a beautiful marble buried in the dirt along a sidewalk, and wanted desperately to get to that buried marble before someone else dug it up. To the marble we went. We used a twig to excavate it, and when she finally had her trophy and marble, she beamed. She has greater perspective on the "importance" of these things than I can ever hope to have. And she's still my seven-year-old, with a few years left before she's off to college. We celebrated with ice cream.

(^*About this middle school. It was Scotlandville Magnet Middle School, and was very clean and nice—the kind of school any parent would be thrilled to find when moving to a new area. [We are not changing schools; we're all-in for Baton Rouge International School through 12th grade. As a taxpayer, however, the quality of schools in the area matter to me more, perhaps, than they should. When I see terrible schools, I want to know why, and why my money and those children's time—present and future!—are being squandered by mediocre adults.] The classrooms impressed me most. Lessons were still on the boards of a couple of the rooms, and the things kids are learning today, at least at this particular school, are extraordinary. Video game development—I don't know the details but would be curious to learn—, and serious science and engineering topics that escape me but are far beyond what we learned when I was in middle school. The granularity of the topics under discussion blew me away. I'm assuming a lot, but the way the notes were organized and written on the board suggested that the topics weren't passing references in a simplified lesson, but rather, were actually the lessons themselves. It was inspiring. I only had an available sample of three classrooms to gather this information, but it seems unlikely that I encountered three outliers in a row. Based only on what I saw, this school is the real deal.)