I Was a Driveway Baseball Mom

All kinds of moms exist for our kids.

For the first years of my son’s life, I wasn’t really a mom. I had given over his care to grandparents, neighbors, babysitters, and friends. Those illustrious, mysterious, anything-but-glamorous hours of long days and nights were, instead, spent at my husband’s side as we navigated his cancer diagnosis.

Watching my stepdaughter and her husband now with their two children, ages 2.5 and 3 months, I feel naïve, unqualified other than intuitively, when it comes to parenting at that stage. My memory of that time is short. My longing longer.

Raised on Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care by my own mother, moms of my generation birthed and weaned our babies on What to Expect When Expecting. Now the de facto resource has become crowdsourced parenting from momfluencers.

Regardless, no book or meme can take the place of the lived experience.

As mothers, we label ourselves full-time, working, remote, situational, or part time when it comes to our status inside or outside the home. We name ourselves single, divorced, married, step, or simply parent, when it comes to our marital and parenting designations. We consider ourselves teacher, politician, religious leader, or writer as such relate La to our jobs.

Do any of those adjectives tell us what kind of mom we really are?

Maybe we’re an ice cream mom, with a pint or a cone at the ready. My backyard neighbor was a great wake up from a slumber party and feed my kid mom. There were Lego moms, and fashion moms. As I consider the parenting of friends from that era, Kristi was the tell it from the heart mom. Jenny, when I needed it later as a single mom, was the let’s get out of the house and stop being a mom. Mary Kay was my welcome into my family mom. I think of Dee now as the I’ve been through a lot and I’ll still be here for them mom. Aunt Lynne and T are the best kind of aunt moms. My mother-in-laws are the best kind of card-giving and hanky-pank-making (Cincinnati reference) mom (Carol) and generally positive, upbeat, we can do anything, mom (Judy). Eva, the best kind of community-making, Chicagoan mom. My own mother, the best kind of feeding with love and Italian cookie making mom.

I hated the idea of superlatives bestowed upon students in high school by others who didn’t know their subject matters very well. We can create our own lineup of adjectives and superlatives for “mother.”

And what I know about myself—I was a driveway baseball mom.

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What did that mean?

Typically, it involved listening as my young son read aloud baseball scores at breakfast while eating Cheerios. Or I dragged myself outside in the August simmer to pitch to him and his friends. Reaching into a pink bucket filled with worn tennis balls, I tossed the heater, the curve, the loop-de-loop to little batters who stood at the ready in front of the backyard stand cottonwoods or at the helm of the driveway flanked by Italian terra cotta pots.

That pink bucket is now a repository for gardening tools. I’ll drag it outside to prune roses, branches, and other debris that might have obstructed the game if we were playing baseball now in the confined courtyard of my city home, and not the woods-encased back lawn or the expanse of driveway at my former suburban home. Particles of green felt probably still line the bottom, stuck to flecks of dirt and peat.

It’s not lost on me, the metaphor of gardening tools such as pruners, trowels, gardening gloves, bulb planters, taking up space where baseballs once relished in their place in my life. The tools we have as mothers we offer as gifts to the world.

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If you’re an NPR follower or any car radio listener, you’ll know what a driveway moment is, where one sits in the car in a driveway long enough to finish hearing a story on the radio. There other driveway moments, ones that signify a life of work, or a time gone by, but not wasted. One still worth listening to or writing about.

Why a driveway baseball mom? Why did we start playing the baseball games on that concrete approach? Once my husband died, I needed to be seen. Or more so, I needed to see the world for myself again. To exist when it would have been so easy to slip into grief. To ground myself. Nothing says grounding more than a poured cement driveway dotted with white rubber bases.

That’s what a driveway baseball mom is, someone who doesn’t care about the grass, the windows, cars that might get socked with a tennis balls, but truly and deeply cares if a kid hits it “out of the ballpark” and goes to bed dreaming that night about their homerun “over the fence” which really meant the O’Connors front yard. That’s a driveway moment for sure.

The truth is, if we shut out noise from the rest of the world, we get to be whatever kind of mom we want to be. At the time, I granted myself the standard, three-year, widow’s exemption to be, do, or say whatever I wanted. I could run down the street with my hair on fire. I could get carried away in the real world of driveway baseball. People would have said, there goes Annette, grieving, living, mourning, momming.

The pink bucket will be around for ages. Why? Maybe it’s the rosy pink color that always stood out against the tennis balls in neon green, the Reds hats on little boys’ matted heads of hair, or the beige of cracked bats and summer hot concrete driveways. The bucket was easy to find. A way to be seen. A simple reminder it’s okay to be a driveway baseball mom, even if I got nothing right as a mother again.

Those days as driveway baseball mom, I never wanted them to end. Like the stories on the radio, I could have relished in them forever. Like mothering, too.

What’s your superlative as a mom? I’m curious to know.

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Up and Coming

May 10 – Climate Writing Workshop. My colleague Elaine Olund leads this climate writing workshop as part of Studio Kroner - All Else Pales - 2.

If you want to know more about All Else Pales 2, you can read my work in Soapbox Cincinnati.

May 13 – Caring for the Caregiver writing experience. Giving Voice Foundation with Pauletta Hansel and Annette Januzzi Wick. In-person. Free. Continues with three other sessions. Sign up here.

May 14 - An Evening of Poetry - All Else Pales 2, Studio Kroner. Poetry readings about the environment Anthology will be available for purchase. Sponsored by Just Earth Cincinnati, a catalyst, empowering residents to make the Cincinnati region a vibrant community in which just, reciprocal and harmonious relationships with the Earth, her people, her creatures, and her ecosystems are cultivated.More information.

August 12 – Caring for the Caregiver writing experience. Giving Voice Foundation with Pauletta Hansel and Annette Januzzi Wick. Virtual. Free. Continues with three other sessions. Sign up here.

November 14 – Caring for the Caregiver writing experience. Giving Voice Foundation with Pauletta Hansel and Annette Januzzi Wick. In-person. Free. Continues with three other sessions. Sign up here.