A Baseball Mom's Survival Guide

So your son's summer baseball season is finally over and you have a few minutes to read this article while opening the stack of mail your postal carrier has held for the last three months. Maybe you'll also do a quick once-over of fresh nail polish on your sun burned toes plus squeeze in a round of five deep breaths you've relied on during your pitcher's mound time or outfielder's at bat.

If you're a true baseball mom, you're feeling the same wave of relief sprinkled with a whisk of nostalgia for the summer that has just been. Your son (or sons for the heartiest of you) has practiced/conditioned every day he's not playing in a game, which could easily have totaled to 60 games or more since he jumped from classroom to ball field in late May. You have driven him untold miles, MapQuested or GPS'd to remote ballparks in suburbs, college towns and rural hamlets to face other players and parents with the same dreams and aspirations of excelling in this beloved All-Americas sport. You have washed and sorted in laundromats near midnight, you have advised strategy for motel poker tournaments during rain delays, you have improvised hand-off sandwiches from your trunk between double headers, and you have competed at dawn for scoops of ice clinking from miserly motel ice machines to fill your son's cooler of "G" for the entire day.

How did you do it?

Maybe you are fortunate to be young enough to have also competed in high school or earlier in a sport you were so passionate about that you gave up slumber parties, double features, sleeping until noon and even boyfriends. But for those of us pre-Title Nine, we never knew what it was like to think about just one, absolutely one, thing from waking to sleeping, and then to dream at night over and over of that perfect two-seamed screaming fastball hurdling from our finger tips to a face of fright at the plate. Or that mythical white orb soaring from the sky straight for us, or a little to the right of center field, which only a flying leap and a half-twist could put the arm and glove into the catch.

So how did you do it?

We all know the answer, and we should all be applauded for it, because "For the Love of the Game" is what we see every day shining in our son's eyes even if he sat on the bench until the last inning to bat or be sent to left field, or endured waiting until the final game of the tournament to be sent in for relief with a score of 3-11 in the fifth inning, with your son's pitching as the only hope of escaping the dreaded game-ending spread. It's his love for the game that's maybe more intense, more devoted, more earnest than any love he may ever feel again, a sort of First Love that only a mother can appreciate and cherish and do anything to make sure it goes well, with as little heartbreak as possible.

Am I right?

So put your feet up, baseball mom, you have survived another season and no matter what your team's win-loss record was, you deserve loads of glory. You may never hear about it, but the gratitude is all there in the glow on his face and his upturned chin and his easy saunter, as he heads back to school to face the academic/social game with a new attitude. And whatever happens this fall and winter - and you know a lot will - Spring Baseball will be here before he knows it - and you will be right there, too.