Parent life / Waiting through the chess tournament
The chess parents are outside
Inside, the children are thinking several moves ahead. Outside, someone has read the same page six times.
At some chess tournaments, the anxious parent is dealt with very efficiently. The playing room closes and the parent is put in the corridor.
The child goes in to think. The adult goes out to wait, where thinking is still allowed but has nothing to work on.
I find something almost restful in this. So much parenting is being useful in small, interrupting ways. You can find a missing shoe. You can suggest a jacket. Outside the chess room, your contribution becomes not contributing.
Nobody has given you a clock to press, a piece to move or a respectable way to influence the afternoon. Your child is developing strategic independence. You are developing a detailed knowledge of the carpet.
Jennifer Vallens, writing in Chess Life in December 2018, remembered her first US Chess-rated tournament. She backed away from her son's board, was herded out with the other parents and sat cross-legged on the hotel hallway floor. The book she had brought did not help. Neither did her phone. Nearby, someone was knitting.
Knitting seems the sensible choice. At least something advances, row by row. The book is more ambitious. A novel asks you to care about people who are not your child. They may be in a perfectly serious fictional crisis, but when the doors open you will have to abandon them.
Catriona, a mother writing for the Witney Chess Club in England, waited in a school classroom with half an eye on the door. Every time a player came through it, she looked up from her book. When her daughter came out with good news, there was banana milk, a description of the moves and a mother politely pretending to understand them.
There are many ways to listen lovingly without knowing whether the bishop should have been somewhere else. You enjoy the child's pleasure and make an interested face. It is useful to have a face ready.
The hard part is the time before the explanation. A quick exit could be wonderful or dreadful. A long game could be going well or badly. The door provides movement, occasionally, but very little analysis.
Meanwhile the child has an actual problem to solve. The parent has invented several possible problems and cannot check any of them.
Then a door opens, and the parent has a job again. For the moment, it may simply be holding the banana milk.