Category: A Contemplative Life

It was one of the saddest moments of my childhood, and it happened on a warm summer evening. I was laying on the sofa with my dad and we were watching baseball. He was tired from a long day at work and was drifting in and out of sleep. The air was muggy and warm. I don’t know where everyone else was in the house.

“When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up?” I asked him, staring at his face, his closed eyes, his straight mouth. I probably thought he looked old. He was probably younger than I am now.

“Dad?” I asked again.

“Yeah?” he said in a sleepy voice.

“I said, ‘What did you want to be when you grew up’?”

“I always wanted to play baseball in the Major Leagues,” he said in a quiet voice. “I wanted to play center field.”

“Really?” I asked. The thought of my father wanting to do something other than what he was doing upended me, as if I was on a boat and someone had pulled down on one side. The world tilted on its axis.

He nodded, somewhere between being awake and sleeping.

“Yeah. Always baseball.”

* * * * *

I’ve been thinking about my own conflicted past when it comes to sports, especially now that I have children old enough to want to play in some of our local community leagues. On the one hand, I love sports. I feel like sports taught me a lot about myself, a lot about perseverance and teamwork and pushing beyond surface levels of comfort. When I had to run a five-minute mile or when I got benched or when I scored a goal – all of these things changed me, gave me insight.

On the other hand, I hate sports, especially what they have become these days. What happened to just showing up and playing and having fun? These days it seems like you can’t be a 12-year-old and just play a sport unless you’re striving to be on a travel team so that you can position yourself well for a club team so that you can get a scholarship to college so that you can play professionally and hey hold on a second what happened to just playing and having fun?

I’m realizing with my oldest son right now, I have two major pitfalls when it comes to him playing sports.

First of all, I want to guard him from any disappointment. I know what it felt like to be the star of the team, and I know what it felt like to get cut, and I hated the latter. I find myself heading him off at the pass, discouraging him in subtle ways from trying certain sports or activities because I don’t want him to experience the disappointment of rejection. That’s not okay. If there’s something he wants to do, I want him to try – the possibility of failure will always be there, and I want him to come to grips with that now, when he’s young. Fail and learn about yourself and try again and fail and learn more and  try again. That’s life.

Second of all, I take his performance way too personally. I went through some challenging times playing sports, especially in college, where I got upset about not playing as much as I thought I should. Now, when he gets pulled to the sideline, I feel my blood pressure rising. It’s like I’m back there again, getting pulled off the field, or on the sideline waiting to play. I have to separate my playing experience from his playing experience.

This article put things into perspective: The Only Six Words Parents Need to Say to their Kids About Sports (Or Any Other Performance).

Here’s the spoiler. The six words we need to say to our kids?

“I love to watch you play.”

* * * * *

On that summer night when I had the saddest realization, Dad fell asleep for good, and I was left staring at the television, watching Major League players live out their dream. I was heartbroken, because that’s exactly what I wanted to be when I grew up, and to think that my dad had wanted it as badly as I wanted it and hadn’t made it…I felt so sad for him in that moment. I didn’t move. I stayed there and watched the rest of the game, his arm draped over me, his steady breathing like a metronome behind me.

I think we bond together in our common failures more than we do in our uncommon successes. Maybe that’s what I have to look forward to with my son, even in his failures. We’ll get through it together, and we’ll be closer because of it. We’ll walk off a field someday, or a court, or away from a recital, and he’ll know his time in that activity has come to an end, and I’ll remember that feeling, what it felt like when something I enjoyed was over.

Maybe that will be what bonds us together. I’m okay with that.

In the mean time, I’m going to encourage him to try the things he wants to try, and when he comes off the field my first words will not be suggestions for improvement or a list of things he needs to work on. I want to always say,

“I love to watch you play.”

She creeps into our room, wheezing, barely able to breathe, but she does not come to the bedside to complain. No, I had given strict orders the night before that mom needs her sleep so if you come to our room please curl up on the floor under the blankets provided. I wait a moment, but it sounds bad, her breathing, so I slip through the darkness and stretch out on the floor beside her.

I count her breaths. Forty per minute. Her heart is racing, her throat pulling in with all its might, but the air, it won’t go in. She struggled again and again to catch her breath.

“Are you okay?” I whisper in her ear.

She nods.

“Should we go outside to see if that helps your breathing?”

She nods.

I wrap her in a blanket and lift her, light as a blossom, and carry her down the stairs, out the front door and on to the porch that looks over James Street. It’s strange to be there in the middle of the night without any cars, without any people. The street lights shine steadily, the wind rises in a clatter of leaves and paper in the gutter, then dies down. It’s cold for a May night. We sit on the chair and I wonder where the time goes.

The cool air does not help like I hoped it would, like it did when she had the croup and we sat on the back deck in the dead of winter, our breath rising in one steaming cloud. The spring air does not help, so after five minutes or ten – it’s so hard to tell in the middle of the night, when sleep is heavy – I carry her back up to the room and soon it’s 6am and Maile is leaving for work and Abra is in the bed with me, sitting up, still struggling to catch her breath.

The urgent care clinic doesn’t open until 8 so we try to wait it out but I can see she is beginning to panic, such a slow drowning, so we get in the truck and Maile comes back from work and I drop the two of them off at the ER two blocks away. I watch Maile carry her in through the doors that open automatically, like a sea. I watch and I take a deep breath.

* * * * *

It’s always the breathing isn’t it? It all comes back to the rising and falling of a chest, the drawing in of air, the expanding of lungs. It’s the first sign of life when we’re born and the last thing to go. I remember when each of our five children was born, and we waited the agonizing second to hear their scream, their breathing. I remember when my grandmother was dying. Her eyes were closed, her body still, and yet the breathing went on. Sometimes she wouldn’t breathe for 30 seconds, 60, 90, then her lungs would open up one more time, sip it in, take only what was needed. She carried on for days that way, the bare minimum. Only breathing.

Life is in the breath.

I’m breathing again. It comes with waking up. My eyes are open again, and the air. Oh, the air! I take it in and look around, eyes wide, and it feels like I’m seeing the world for the first time in a long time. It feels like I’m in the middle of a new life.

Friends have asked me, Are you really going overseas? and I laugh. Not that I know of. Not yet. Not today. I don’t know where this new wakefulness will take us, what it will show us. But I do know that there’s an African-American man who lives across the street, a man I’ve waved to for the last year since we moved here. He’s a kind man, and he always waves back.

For the first time, yesterday, I walked across the street and offered him my hand, and he shook it.

“My name is Shawn,” I said, “and I see you over here all the time, but I don’t even know your name.”

He smiled.

“I’m Eric,” he said. “Nice to meet you.”

This is what it looks like, to wake up.

This is what it feels like, to breathe again.