Before Summer Begins

A reflective practice for family gatherings, big feelings, and summer expectations

Hello Readers!

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When our kids were very small, we started calling our family of five teamcoyle. It may not be the cleverest or most original name, but it stuck. We bought baseball hats with teamcoyle” embroidered on it, which mortified our children (then again, what didn’t?), and we actually wore them until the kids were in their tweens. Michael’s cap still gets a fair showing in his cap rotation decades later. We didn’t stop with hats, each of us had an email address that ended in teamcoyle.net (mine still does—I can’t give it up!), and our groupchat is called… you guessed it: teamcoyle.

At the time, I thought Michael’s idea to wear matching team hats with our three munchkins was cute, even if the name was a little on the nose, and it was perfect for rounding up our small circus. It wasn’t until much later that I realized by giving our family a name and distinct identity, we were also cultivating a family culture that showed our kids where they belonged, that they were part of something bigger than their individual selves, that teamcoyle is where the center holds—for all of us.

We are a wildly imperfect family, and we’ve had some incredibly difficult seasons and huge failures as parents, but the five of us show up for each other. No matter what. Teamcoyle is a lifetime membership.