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Baseball Moms  

By Amy Lyons

            I emptied my coat pockets after a long Friday afternoon. The students in the media center had been loud and energetic. Cell phone, paper clip, keys went drop, drop, drop on the countertop. I looked at my cell phone and tried to switch gears from one full-time job as high school Library Media Specialist to other full-time job as wife, mother, homemaker.  I picked the cell phone back up and texted one of the baseball moms.

            Board meeting this Sun or next Sun?

The text referred to my youngest son’s travel baseball team “board” on which I serve. The board consists of four or five moms who organize the fundraisers, choose uniforms, and attempt to manage practice and tournament schedules and the other necessary evils of expensive competitive youth sports.

The text came back. Next sun I believe was what we said.

I could read between the lines that this baseball mom thought I was remiss for not remembering the meeting day.  I was apologetic and kind, because being anything else was futile.

My answer text read: I’m sorry, I thought it was next sun, but I just wanted to be sure. I promise I will get an agenda out with a reminder. Thank you so much!!!!!

In my head I was thinking, “Travel ball is so time-consuming; our team isn’t even very good; the only reason I offered to have the meetings at my house is to force me to clean at least once a month.“ I know I was grouchy after a long day, but still, there was truth in those thoughts.

The real truth is I have always been different from the other moms. At best: quirky and unique; at worst: socially awkward with a desperate need to belong.  Suffice to say I don’t fit in. I certainly do not think myself superior to them or anyone, for that matter. However, I have kids closer in age than the other moms, I have more education, I come from a different state, and I have more varied life experiences than any of them. In addition to that, I have a vastly alternative perspective on the purpose of youth sports, baseball drama, and life in general.

Allow me to provide a visual:  Two summers ago we were standing in 90+ degree weather waiting for one of the summer’s MANY games to start. Two moms were whining and stressing about what seed we were going to be in the tournament, and whether or not we would have to play the best team or the second best team.

Not caring AT ALL whether these 9-year-olds win or lose, I lightheartedly said, “Hey, it’s not brain surgery, it’s just baseball!” and I meant it. I meant it because our family was just three weeks out from spending a week in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit with our older son, who had just had major brain surgery.

These two moms looked at each other and with serious but insensitive faces said to me, “Well, in our houses, baseball is as serious as brain surgery.”

It was at that exact moment that I knew. I knew that regardless of my best efforts to be one of the mob, I was profoundly and forever different from the baseball moms. Those moms had never experienced eight hours in a surgery waiting room while their child is under the knife. The worried look on a nurse’s face before she says, “Um, we’re going to have to call the doctor,” because craniospinal fluid had leaked on the pillow. The sleepless nights in the hospital room when their child absolutely cannot, no matter what, get comfortable enough to fall asleep. The steep vocabulary learning curve, the countless specialists’ appointments, the seemingly endless bodily fluids. They had no idea.

I was glad for them that they had no reason to endure these experiences, thus granting them my level of perspective. I tried to be happy for them that they could stand under that tree and have the luxury, as it were, to stress about that pointless baseball tournament. Simultaneously, I stood there still worried that the antibiotics would be strong enough to ward off any serious infections such as meningitis, and the summer heat would not be too oppressive for his temporarily compromised ability to self-regulate body temperature. I felt as though I was falling deeper into a black hole of social ineptness and awkwardness that existed before my son’s diagnosis and surgery. I realized that this experience had made me even more separate from my peers than I already was. 

I am a baseball mom; I have two baseball players. The younger one, who plays on a travel team, and the older one who had the brain surgery that resulted in this amazing and un-returnable gift: perspective. I am different from the other baseball moms. I thank God for that.