Batter Up

M is starting t-ball. She had a softball clinic last week. She was totally pumped about it until they did the pitch rotation. She was one of the last to bat and all the girls were watching her. She only hit a few and one of her friends started to yell “Strike” every time she missed and she got embarrassed. Suddenly she decided she didn't want to play t-ball anymore.

She felt a little better after I told her that no one would be pitching to her, she would be hitting off the tee. She's still a little hesitant but we're making her do it anyway. It's important that she give it a chance. And I want her to learn that she can't just quit anytime she gets tired, doesn’t like something, or finds something hard. If life worked like that I would have quit a long time ago.

I told her that I played, that I didn’t play very well, but I still played and had fun. Well, maybe not “fun”. There’s nothing fun about being the weak link in a team sport. In fact, it actually totally sucks. Thankfully I was young enough that no one really cared. Too much.

I told her I would show her my old softball pictures. I have to have those as evidence that I did actually do something athletic once. For most people, it’s kinda hard to believe. I was digging around trying to find them last night and I found my old scrapbook.

I started a scrapbook when I was in 6th grade. It isn’t the kind of scrapbook that people do today. It actually wasn’t cool back then and I remember my Mom and I had a hard time actually even finding one. It’s a plain red book with brown paper and all my stuff is just glued in – there is nothing cute about it. But man, it was so funny to look through it and to see some of the things that I saved. Like the wrapper from a piece of gum that I got from the first guy I liked and the grocery list from the first time my mom sent me to the store. I guess these were big things back then.

I also found some old writing awards. I had completely forgotten that I had received them and it was weird to be reminded of how much I used to write. To remember how much I enjoyed it. That’s what I did for fun – wrote short stories and poetry. I wanted to be a writer, the next Sylvia Plath.

When I got older and became burdened by life’s injustices, I wanted to do something to make a difference, to change the world. I thought politics was a way to make that happen so I decided I wanted to be a speech writer, the person behind the words. After working for a US congressman and interning in DC, I decided politics wasn’t really my forte – it was vicious and cut throat and I didn’t have the heart for it.

I never really thought of being a writer after that. I filled up my life with so many other things that writing lost its priority and was forgotten. That’s how I know it wasn’t my calling. That and the fact that most of what I wrote wasn’t very good. But I have just enough writer in me to put together a birthday poem for the girls each year. It’s not great poetry but it’s something special just for them and that pretty much makes it the best writing I’ll ever do.