Little League, Pride, and Shame

Baseball season just ended. Thank God.

For 6-8 weeks each year, little league consumes us. With two children in different leagues, we often shuttle from one game to the next (they are on different fields in different parts of town), trying to show our support for both kids. For several weeks we need to abandon completely the very idea of family dinners, as we find ourselves at games or shuttling to and from practices every day of the week.

I am not knocking little league, although I approach and sit through the season with a degree of dread. The truth is that my kids love playing; it gets them outdoors and active (in a baseball kind of way); develops skills; and reinforces all the right values. The coaches in our league are dedicated and great with the kids, and I will not hesitate to send one back next year.

One, though, just finished his little league career. He managed to do so without a single hit over the past two years. He made plays (including some spectacular catches), walked on balls with some frequency, had a good positive attitude, and was generally an asset to his team. But he couldn’t hit. Maybe he made contact three or four times over two years.

I am proud of this son in so many ways, but whenever he got up to bat, and struck out, I felt a swell of emotions that I recognize as not particularly healthy or useful. Not to put too fine a point on it, I was ashamed. My son’s inability to hit shamed me. And sometimes after games I vented that shame on him with comments sharp enough that I would regret them later.

Nobody needs to tell me that I shouldn’t feel ashamed. I know, and I am ashamed of my own response. It is not that I am afraid of looking bad in front of all the other parents and the dads of kids who can hit, although there is a small degree of that – of course I want my son to excel so that I can stand a little taller in their eyes. Rather, his lack of ability here recalls for me for my own short experience playing organized baseball as a child.

I couldn’t hit either. Athletically, in fact, I was probably a good deal less gifted than my hitless son. And I suffered dearly for it. My teammates and coaches were not at all supportive, and the combination of failing at something (which rarely happened, except in sports) and being mocked and taunted for it, verged on traumatic for me. Part of me still hurts and seethes over that, and part of me wants my children to succeed in order to redeem my own failure. When my son strikes out, I do too. And although his teammates and coaches encourage him afterwards, I feel the blood rise as somewhere very deep in me I am being taunted.

My son ended his season feeling great. I, though, was ashamed, primarily at my own shame. And I look forward – with dread again – to his younger sibling’s games next year.

The Paradox of Children

My children were on vacation last week.  In order to economize on babysitting, my wife and I each took off some time to watch them.  I had two days, and on one of them we went to the zoo.

I love the zoo, not least because I loved it as a kid and my children still love it.  I like watching the wonder and joy in their eyes as they  watch the  animals.   Aside from the bathroom trips and the incessant requests for popcorn, they are engaged.

I also enjoy zoos, though, because they help me to reflect on our own lives.  Zoos bring home to me the basics of life.  We are born; we nourish ourselves; we breed; and we die.  The the enormous bulk of life on earth the fundamental goal is simply to produce more life.  Children are the point.

There are many things that we strive for, whether it is knowledge, fame, or the accumulation of stuff.  But in the end, of course, none of it really matters – only the lives we create and personally touch.  I cannot articulate the love that I feel for my children, and I am grateful for those moments that remind me that this, in fact, is what it is all about.  For humans, though, it goes beyond mere procreation; it is not enough just to create life.  We also nurture and shape it.

And here is the paradox.  I know that I am not an ideal father, but I do my best to at least do no evil.  I also realize that if I am privileged to reach a ripe old age, I will never regret having spent more time with my children, even if it means that I would have written less.  I know this.  But for much of the time that I do spend with my children I feel anxious, guilty, and a little resentful that I am not working.
They being to annoy me; I crave time alone.  I do spend a lot of time with my kids, but it is not all quality time.  Much of it is conflicted.

It is usually at about this point in my reflections that we come to the lions.  On occasion we’ve been lucky enough to find them with cubs.  Watching the interaction between cubs and parents is little different qualitatively from watching household cats and kittens, but with lions the entire charge is certainly dialed up a notch.  The cubs grab and play with their parents, who are generally gracious.  Until they aren’t.  Then they take the cub in their mouths and throw it several yards.  The cub yelps a bit, but is back soon enough doing the same thing.

What do lions have to teach human parents?  Maybe that it’s fine to look after oneself, not only our kids.  That we, at base, are animals too, and that we too can draw strong boundaries between us and our children with no guilt.  That we can love and protect our children fiercely and recognize that they are in fact the very purpose of our own existence, while at the same time carving out a space for our own lives.

It was not a particularly light day at the zoo, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.