Halen wet his bed this morning at 1:30. I have learned to
change his pajamas and sheets without fully waking up, moving by instinct, the
way you feel your way through a dark, familiar room. I peeled the Thomas the Tank
Engine sheet away from the mattress, and Halen sat in his fresh nightclothes,
his back against the wall, knees hugged. He said blearily to the nightlight, “I
have baseball practice today.” The nightlight just palpitated. “Yep,” he
assured himself. “I have baseball practice today.” The truth is, anticipation
doesn’t sleep. And Halen was really anticipating his first big-kid baseball
practice.
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| Many, many more feats than flops. |
He’s wearing his stiff new Wal-Mart mitt proudly in the
late-afternoon sun. We’re in pairs spread across the infield, tossing real
baseballs back and forth. Nobody is catching anything, the boys because they
can’t catch, the parents because the boys can’t throw either. Halen steps with
the wrong foot—his back foot—when he
throws. You can imagine how it looks. It’s a weird, grotesque pirouette with a
baseball popping out of the top. I laugh, but I’m secretly a bit shamed. I
glance furtively around through my sunglasses to see if the other parents noticed
that I haven’t taught my son to throw a baseball.
Coach Chris tells Halen to play second base. Halen asks
enthusiastically where second base is. The other parents in the bleachers
laugh, but I know what they’re thinking: “There is no excuse for a first-grader
not knowing where second base is.” Really, they’re thinking, “Cookie dough ice cream cookie dough ice cream
cookie dough ice cream cookie dough ice cream,” but the truth is you
irrationally feel like you failed somebody somewhere when you hear your boy
tell the whole baseball diamond he’s never heard of second base.
Halen redeems himself seven minutes later when he crushes a
dribbling ground ball toward first base that not a soul on the team can handle,
so he ends up with an inside-the-infield home run, even though he went from
first base to third via the pitcher’s mound. As he crosses home plate and I
holler, “Good job, buddy!” I irrationally feel proud of myself. I can’t identify precisely why. My son just hit the world’s
lamest home run. I didn’t do anything, and even I had, Halen’s baseball practice
isn’t about me, right? A doting mother beside me nervously nibbles her colorful
Latin fingernails and cringes every time the baseball enters a five-foot radius
around her son. Out on the diamond, her boy timidly shrinks from the ball as
well, and it occurs to me that our kids are just echoes of us.
This is an obvious exercise in chromosomal mathematics. But
maybe moms and dads sometimes believe that their little boy’s feats and his
flops reflect on their aptitude as parents. And, though I lack the
disposition and the inclination to berate my kids’ miscues from the bleachers,
in a flash of understanding, I think get why some parents do. I obviously can’t
condone it—it’s ghastly behavior. But I think I at least understand, as I unconsciously,
instinctively define the clumsiness or the competence of my fathering by Halen’s
baseball cluelessness or his power hitting aptitude.
I look up. Halen has left his post at second base to head
off the base-runner chugging toward first. The ball is somewhere in right
field, so Halen just tackles the boy before he reaches the bag. Coach Chris
laughs. The base-runner picks himself up and sprints toward second. “No fair!”
Halen calls. He doesn’t know very much about baseball, but it’s okay because
baseball is complicated. Besides, it’s turning out I don’t know very much about
life, but it’s okay because life is complicated.