Chapter Twelve: Single Parenting, Sports and Things
I was a competitive golfer by the age of seven and a competitive tennis player by the age of nine. I have two daughters whose idea of physical exertion is to walk fast while shopping. The Universe works in strange ways.
My son, however, loves sports and it was with some confidence that I dropped him off at the Little League field for the first time. I was a single mother and working by the time he was three so I was really looking forward to his bonding with the guys, the other six-year olds. All the fathers were there, each playing catch with his own son. All their sons, and not mine, had already had been to baseball camps so it didn’t take long for me to figure out that, yet again, I had permanently ruined my child’s self-esteem. I backed up, parked the car, introduced myself to the coaches and thus began one of the best experiences of my son’s life and my own. Thanks to the head coach, Tom Martin, who became my dear friend because he was so kind, I began to go to all the practices, play catch with my own son and the other boys. I was actually invited into the dugout to help coach. I observed how men and boys communicate. Unlike girls, it is essentially a non-verbal, tactile, always understated and primitive ritual that includes a lot of nodding and grunting, head rubbing and slapping: backs, shoulders and bottoms. The point? You don’t have to be a man to be a good father or a woman to be a good mother.
