Everyone is looking for a place. I see it every day as a teacher of eighth-graders who try on different roles throughout the year and toy with various career goals as the months roll by. Today, we tried to help them a bit by providing a career day — probably close to fifty professionals came in to talk to kids about what their jobs entail, what they require, how they’re rewarding, how they’re frustrating. A little bit of everything.

We guided our homeroom classes through three sessions, and my homeroom’s second session was with a police detective. It quickly stopped being about potential jobs and transformed into a “… ever … ?” session. Have you ever shot someone? (No, but I’ve pointed my gun at someone.) Do criminals ever leave notes like in movies? (No, but we’ve investigated some guy who was harassing females by leaving weird notes under their windshield wipers.) Have you ever been in a car chase? (Yes, but he was intoxicated and our top speed was 38 miles per hour.) Do you ever question people in those rooms with the windows that look like a mirror? (No, our interrogation room has cameras, and any officer in the building can watch the interrogation from his or her computer.) The vet and waterworks specialist didn’t get a third of the questions.

The Girl is looking for her own place as well, specifically a place to improve her volleyball skills in the off-season. We as parents thought this would be fairly simple; we thought she’d get into any club she tried out for. After all, she played for her school, which went undefeated and won the final championship tournament. She’ll have her pick. So why waste time trying out for more than one? We never thought about the obvious: clubs that have their regulars will choose their regulars over newcomers. And so this afternoon, I got an email:

Thank you for attending tryouts for X’s 2019-20 club season. We had a record number of players trying out this year, so unfortunately we were not able to place everyone on a team. We are sorry to say that your daughter has not been selected for a X team.

I sent it to K. She texted back the obvious: “She’ll be devastated.” And she was. And we felt like terrible parents because we didn’t do the research, didn’t do the thinking. “And now all the other teams have finished tryouts — what are we going to do?”

I was angry because I thought, “If she doesn’t have the requisite skills, how is she going to get them if you don’t let her on your freaking team?!”

It turned out, though, that two teams had make-up tryouts. One was at six this evening. We learned this at 5:05. So off we went.

The club owner said at the end that every girl will get some kind of offer: “If your daughter wants to play volleyball, wants to learn volleyball, we want to help.” Already, I liked the team.