Across the Pond
He earned this. I'm still learning how to let him go.
On 22nd July, I’m getting on a plane with my son. When we land, I’ll hand him over to a life I won’t be part of day to day. That’s been the deal since the winter of 2024.
At nineteen, Loic is heading to Auburn, New York, to play for the Cayuga Spartans, National Conference champions. Not a trial. The real thing. And he’s earned it.
It’s easy to look at where he’s ended up and skip past everything it took to get there. I’ve lost count of the drives - the early starts, wrong turns, motorway services, matches in the wind and rain where I couldn’t feel my feet by half-time. I’ve watched him get dropped, get injured, get overlooked, question whether any of it was worth it. And I’ve watched him get back up every time, because that’s who he is.
There’s a particular kind of pride in watching someone refuse to quit. Not the trophy kind - the kind paid for in instalments, over years, in quiet drives home when there was nothing clever to say.
I remember one of those drives. A bad game, a worse mood, both of us staring at the road instead of each other. I told him what I always told him - that ability was never the question, that the only thing that would decide this was whether he kept working when it would’ve been easier to stop. He didn’t say much back. He rarely does, straight after a game like that. But something stuck, because he got back out there and did exactly that, over and over, until a serious team on the other side of the Atlantic decided they wanted him.
What’s in question now is what happens to all that time we spent doing it. The lifts. The sidelines. The debriefs. They weren’t logistics - they were the relationship, disguised as errands. I didn’t feel that then. I feel it now, watching the space where they’re about to stop.
So this is where I am, ten days out. Proud in a way that’s almost too big to hold. Sad in a way I wasn’t expecting. Not about missing matches, but about missing him. The ordinary, in-between version of him that only shows up on a two-hour drive home from a stadium somewhere we didn’t know existed.
I don’t think those feelings are meant to cancel each other out. I think you’re just supposed to carry both.
He’s going because he never stopped trying. I’m going with him because I never stopped either. Then I’m coming home without him, which I guess is the part nobody prepares you for.
Underneath the ache, that’s what I’m left with: real excitement for what’s in front of him, not just what he’s leaving behind. A new culture to get under the skin of. Who knows who’s watching now.
He’s not just going to play football in New York. He’s stepping into a bigger version of the game, at a bigger version of his life.
That’s not nothing. That’s everything I hoped this would become.
More on this when I’m back, with the photos, and whatever this actually turns out to feel like once it’s real.
Love you, Loic. You earned this.
