Cody
Williams
T-Ball and Being a Black Father
So my five-year-old son played his first t-ball game on Sunday.
His first up at bat he swung, knocked over the T and plopped the ball a couple of feet away from home plate where he just stood there quite pleased with himself. I was pleased with him too and started yelling with everyone else for him to run to first base. When he took off running I took off too. I ran parallel to him from home plate to first base. I don’t know if he heard my cheers or if it mattered but I felt my encouraging him each step of the way was necessary. His little legs got him to first base just about the same time I ran smack into the rather large mommy rooting on her daughter -- the first baseman, ops, I mean, first-base-person – to catch the ball and tag my son. I didn’t see the woman standing there, nor did she see me barreling her way.
I run as a hobby and am used to running through The Wall about half way through a 5K sprint. This imaginary wall was nothing compared to the 250 lbs of mother love that landed me flat on my back, looking up as my son rounded first and headed towards second base. I heard the wallop, muffled somewhere in between, “catch the ball baby,” and “Tag him! Tag him!” Lying on the ground I turned and saw stars dancing around my boy sprinting off across the diamond.
Mama First Base turned to look down to see if I was alright and offered her hand to help me up, but only after she picked up her daughter, smothered her in humongous bosom, kissed her and sent her back out into the field to play.
Mama First Base and I looked at each other and smiled. “I guess we both broke the t-ball rules of conduct for parents?” she asked me.
“You mean the one that says parents stay behind the fence at all times,” I answered.
“Yeah, that one,” she said.
It was my son’s first game playing any organized sport. I’m sure that I was more excited than he was. I wanted to make sure he knew exactly where to go and what to do.
You see, contrary to what I thought before becoming a parent, we do not come here instinctively knowing a whole lot about anything. Some of the really basic skills I’ve found out someone has to teach us.
I remember the night Frank was born, how his mother, and me in the hospital cot next to them, had to actually teach him how to suckle at her breast. I’ve seen the animal channel documentaries where baby giraffes to newborn orangutans come into the world and head instinctively to their mother’s milk, their life support system. I thought all species had that trait genetically hard coded in them. Wasn’t it a survival thing, and ain’t humans supposed to be the fittest of the fit? I mean we are at the top of the planet’s food chain.
My son’s grandparents bought him and plastic big wheel tricycle for Christmas when he was 2 and I remember putting him on it for the first time and he just sat there. I had to show him how to put his legs on the pedals and push to turn them to get the thing moving. Something I just assumed babies automatically knew how to do. They don’t.
Now, I don’t want to give you the wrong impression. My son Frank is quite a gifted child. At 18 months old he knew, not only how to say the alphabet but he could identify each letter independently. He could count to 20 too and to 10 in both French and Spanish. This he learned from watching Dora the Explorer and listening to a French songs CD for babies while riding in our car. Frank was reading sentences by age four and now at five he knows every state in the union, their capitols, every planet in our solar system and his multiplication tables. His reading, writing and spelling are equal to many fourth and fifth graders. The kid is no dummy. He has a veracious appetite for learning and like a lot of kids will ask, “but why,” and “what does that mean,” at least twenty times in each half an hour.
Nonetheless, being a parent has taught me that our children, the little sponges that they are, don’t instinctively know what we adults do as standard operating procedures. Most everything they learn, people teach them, have shown them how or help them become experts at.
Occasionally I have to correct Frank when I hear him yelling at his little sister. It takes me aback, the intensity in his voice, the anger sometimes. Then I ask myself where did he get that? Where did he learn that behavior?
I’m almost embarrassed to say, most likely from me.
A good friend of mine insists on not putting his toddler daughter in our church’s nursery, instead keeping her on his lap with him during Sunday services. He says, “If we don’t teach her how to sit through an entire sermon without being disruptive where will she learn?”
I think about the kids coming up today in our communities who have been written off by authorities and our learning institutions as being un-educate-able. I think about high dropout and black male incarceration rates that are many times higher than other communities. I think about crime that seems to be all too rampant and the reported cases of domestic violence that holds our nation in rapt attention all too often. I think about the 50% plus of young boys growing up absent a father, or the countless number of troubled men I’ve met who grew up with their father absent. I think of black male unemployment. I think of racist hiring and employment practices. I think of political and religious clashes not only in developing countries, but here in America, in our state houses and halls of congress. I think of gangster rap. I think about those of us who were taught that we have to lie, cheat, steal, take advantage of others to get what we need in life, taught to discriminate and dishonor others.
I come back to the innocence of my son’s first t-ball game. Those little boys and girls were playing for the fun of it. No one kept score. No one was called out. Each child got as many chances at bat as it took to land on base. Boys and girls played equally. Little black and Hispanic kids played well with white kids.
I was glad to be on that t-ball field, running along side my son to show him how to get to first base. He needed the instruction. My goal, my hope is to at the least, show him too how to navigate the bases of life, where much more is at stake. Where it is too apparent, many of us are not taught the best way to move through life, or someone somewhere assumes our knowing how is just hard coded in us genetically.
It’s not.
I need to teach him how to be a loving father, just as my dad taught me. Teach him, like my being knocked down at first base, that as black men we are bound to run blindly into some things that can simply knock us flat on our backs (love, heartache, white folks, our own missteps). Running the bases of life is one thing; we also need to be taught how to get up when knocked down. Too many of us just stay there.
I read somewhere once, “To prize the effort above the prize is true virtue.” At the end of their game the kids from both teams were lined up to slap hands with the opposing team, congratulating each other for good sportsmanship and good play. Those kids enjoyed that as much as they enjoyed the game it self.
Maybe some of our really good qualities are hard coded after all. Unfortunately life has a tendency to wipe those codes out.
All men, married or single, should make sure to periodically coach t-ball, teach a kid to ride a tricycle or change a baby’s diaper. Do these in order to keep that good in us, that innocence each of them can remind us of, with which we came into the world, like children, unspoiled by life, alive and active.
© 2005 Cody Williams
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