Hits and Home Runs
May 2024 || It's time to be Just Mom™️.
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Thunk. The baseball hits mid-thigh and sends ripples of pain through my leg. In the outfield, one of my best friends and our oldest daughters gasp. Every eye goes wide.
“That’s what you get for trying to be Fun Mom™️,” my brain screams at me, before I’ve even had a chance to register the degree of damage my 10 year-old son’s fast pitch has done to my nearly forty year-old body. Nothing is broken, I know, thanks to layers of protection. But gracious, it hurts.
He stands in shock on the pitcher’s mound. There’s a chance he regrets the “I’m not going to go easy on you!” he’d so proudly proclaimed just minutes before.
It was all he’d begged for, for days, this makeshift home run derby turned pickup game of baseball. And I — trying to embrace this opened-jawed summer break with all the optimism, courage, and spontaneity I could muster — made it happen.
Recently, a neighbor asked, “So how’s summer different for you? You know, with homeschooling and all?”
“Besides the twelve additional hours they’re home, instead of at tutorial? Well, not much really.” I said, and she nodded in reply, her assumptions likely correct.
“Except,” I added, “I get to be Just Mom™️.”
Indeed, it’s still spring. But on this simmering, first Monday of break, you’d have had a difficult time convincing us of it. School as we’ve known it for the last few years, slips away into a haze of rising temps, gnarly storms, sunscreen and bug spray, garden harvests, and lots of question marks.
I take the Walk to first base, coaching myself: Be a good sport. Be a good sport. Be a good sport. All I really want to do, though, deep down, is take the bench. One thing goes wrong, and the whole thing’s over.
Staying in the game, even just-for-fun, I know is my next right thing. Sure, it’ll be the bruise I’ll wear for more than a week, blooming shades of blue, purple, and then yellow like wildflowers in the overgrown fields. Every step I take, for days, will feel just a little off as my muscles work out the impact.
But it will also be both deposit and interest on the investment I make in play.
Sometimes I forget that optimism, courage, and spontaneity — qualities of play, both in life and art — don’t guarantee goodness. Obvious goodness, at least.
There is no promise that being Fun Mom™️ means your kids will be happy, respectful, and kind to everyone (especially you), that the weather will turn out beautiful, that everyone’s bones remain intact, or that you don’t come home with stowaways.1 Nor does getting to be Just Mom™️, at this stage in life, mean the days are all only open for fun and games.
There is no promise that sitting down to create, just because, means you’ll finish by floating away on rainbow clouds of fulfilled artistic dreams, forever.
Sometimes, in both cases, you end up with a big pile of WELP, THAT DIDN’T WORK! Because whether it’s on the field of parenting or at the desk of creativity, the hits still come, don’t they?
Each landscape of life, even at play, is ripe with risk. But worth taking, I think.
Despite pummeling me, over the course of the afternoon my middle son hit two beautiful home runs off my lousy pitches. I laughed (and sweat) with the people I love while we plucked cicadas off our shirts and sucked our water bottles dry.
Our shoes and shins caked with red dirt, we drove home happy, dreaming of more afternoons full of summer play. Oh, and ice packs; I dreamed of lots and lots of ice packs.
Living
In case you missed it, I turned 40 last Friday and threw an online “party” in the form of a thread. Strangely, my e-mail did not go out to everyone, so if you’re in the fifth of my list that didn’t receive it, here you go! The lovely thing about an online party is that it just… keeps… going…
Writing
I’ve long referred to this month as Maycember, as full as it is with festive events, traditions, finishing up school, buying gifts, and more. To that end, I knew I’d get very little work done this month, book-wise.
But I was reminded that even very little work adds up.
Reading
For fun, I’ve made a Bookshop list of the books “brought as gifts” to my 40th Birthday Thread. Shockingly, I’d not read a single one! A few were already on my TBR (to be read), one later submission I picked up on my actual birthday, and the rest I’d never even heard of. I cannot tell you how thrilling this was!
A standout in my May books was reading aloud The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster to our boys at bedtime. I’d somehow managed to not yet read this quirky, clever, and poignant take on one discontented boy’s adventures through an absurd world.
It was just odd enough to keep me wondering what play on word and concept we’d run into next, like this hits-close-to-home description of the city of Reality:
“No one paid any attention to how things looked, and as they moved faster and faster everything grew uglier and dirtier, and as everything grew uglier and dirtier they moved faster and faster, and at last a very strange thing began to happen. Because nobody cared, the city slowly began to disappear. Day by day the buildings grew fainter and fainter, and the streets faded away, until at last it was entirely invisible. There was nothing to see at all.”
“What did they do?” the Humbug inquired, suddenly taking an interest in things.
“Nothing at all,” continued Alec. “They went right on living here just as they’d always done, in the houses they could no longer see and on the streets which had vanished, because nobody had noticed a thing. And that’s the way they have lived to this very day.”
“Hasn’t anyone told them?” asked Milo.
“It doesn’t do any good,” Alec replied, “for they can never see what they’re in too much of a hurry to look for.”
Listening
I also compiled a playlist of songs that were added to my 40th Birthday thread, which really covers a lot of genre ground in a short amount of time. Some new-to-me artists and songs here, too:
In other news, our kids bought themselves portable cassette players this month, which has been as brilliantly nostalgic as you might imagine. The Top Gun soundtrack, Ace of Base, Bon Jovi, and all three Guardians of the Galaxy volumes are just a few of the cassettes getting passed back and forth and played, often without headphones, by all.
Adding the art of making mixtapes to this summer’s unschooling.
Watching
I’ve watched this under-five-minute speech by Fredrik Backman several times, now, each one better than the last. Perhaps I’m biased (he’s my favorite author, if you didn’t know), but I love the way he lives and writes so fully human and whole: highs, lows, and laughter in between.
Enjoying
We’re big fans of build-your-own bowls in our house, and one we’ve added more solidly to our rotation lately is Burger Bowls. I realize there’s nothing novel about the concept of a deconstructed burger, but this has become the most requested meal of our pickiest eater (who enjoys a cheeseburger with only ketchup), so I consider it a triumph of a meal.
Well, friends, it’s time for Fun Mom™️ to get her bug spray on and skip rocks by the Roaring River (no, literally) after a breakfast of donuts and building Hagrid’s Hut with a recently minted eight year-old.
Here’s to hoping the season ahead, however it looks, is full of more hits (of the positive kind) and home runs than you can possibly imagine.
Until next time,
Four days into our summer break, we’d collected four ticks. NO. THANK. YOU.
my niece is 2.5 and she has been giving me a good run with a few of these "welp" moments. when she moves in hyperspeed, i wonder if the thing she'll remember most from me is all the edges she's pushing against! oy! play is, indeed, a form of risk. thank you for sharing your lists. there are some great titles to try!
Kristine, this article hit me in the gut. I was forced to recall a few times when playing with my kids and something didn't go quite right. I reacted badly and ruined the experienced. It took me some years to figure that piece out. Now I tend to go the route you did by sucking it up and moving forward but I so regret my immature reactions when my kids were litte. I am sure your son will have great memories of this day. Well done.