The Other Mothers

After another strikeout, I watched Kelly quietly exit the dugout.  In her brown Padres uniform, Kelly picked her way through the bleachers and found her mom Annie in the third row. They didn’t speak; instead, eleven-year-old Kelly subtly laid her head on Annie’s shoulder and let just a few tears fall. Only then, soft words were spoken as Annie bent her head towards her daughter. 

The inning ended. Kelly wiped her eyes, nodded subtly at her mom, and headed back to the field. It was then that I saw her mother take a deep, shuddering breath and let the forced half-smile fall from her face.  

I observed the whole exchange from the other baseline’s bleachers, knowing in my bones the exact set of mixed emotions running through Annie’s mind in that moment, having guided my own kids through their individual tragedies in the past. After the game, I chatted with Annie, asking her how Kelly was doing. “Oh, you know, she just wants to get one hit this season. She’s feeling really down on herself.” We talked for a while longer before parting ways to dole out our respective late dinners from the slow cookers waiting for us at home. 

I didn’t know Annie or most of the other players’ mothers before this season. But I know them in the way we each plead silently as our own kid steps up to the plate, the way we whisper-yell run, run, run as they round first, the way we exhale after a missed ground ball and yell out, “Next time, buddy!” anyway. We sit on the sun-baked stands and carry each and every one of the emotions our kids try to hide on their faces. We ride the highs of their victories, the lows of their losses, their embarrassments, their frustrations, their rejoicing; in all of it, we are there with them

Two days later, we were all back for the next game, wrangling our other kids, trying to keep water bottles from rolling to the ground while doling out snacks. We were nearing the end of the season, and I watched Kelly slump back to the dugout after two more strikeouts, even as our team took the lead. In the last inning, she trudged back up the plate with a quick glance at her mom from under her helmet. Next to me, Annie smiled and nodded slightly at her daughter. 

A strike. 

Two balls. 

And then…a swing. 

The end of Kelly’s bat found the ball and sent it soaring upwards towards second base. It was pin-drop silent for a second as we all, I think, contemplated the ethics of actively rooting for another child to fail, but I did it anyway, shooting DROP IT daggers out of my eyeballs at the second baseman lining up to catch Kelly’s ball. He just missed it, and Kelly found herself safe on first base, surprised as anyone.

Let me tell you, the stands ERUPTED. We all cheered as though she’d just hit a grand slam. Her teammates and coaches practically made the dugout shake as they jumped up and down and yelled her name. And Annie? I looked across at this mother, hands in the air, screaming WOOOOO! WOOOOO! like a maniac, while tears streamed down her face. Annie kept cheering as Kelly adjusted her helmet on first and looked at the stands, a huge smile absolutely taking over her entire face as she found (and likely heard) her ecstatic mother. 

It took us mothers about three more at-bats to finally calm down. Annie just kept saying, “I can’t believe it” as we took turns patting her shoulder and telling her how happy we were for Kelly. Matt’s mom rushed over from her chair behind home plate and told Annie, “When she hit it, I stood up so fast that my cell-phone went flying out of my lap!” Kyle’s mom announced, “I was praying for that kid not to catch it.” We all laughed. (At least I wasn’t the only one). 

When Kelly crossed home a few plays later, we all lost it again at her beaming face as she looked our way. Again, I watched Annie wrap verbal arms around her daughter, from ten feet away and through chain-link fencing. Kelly nodded and headed into the dugout, where her entire team basically mobbed her in their shared excitement.

And all the other mothers cheered. 

My friend Marta teaches in a doctoral program. This summer, she is leading a two-week workshop, made up of primarily female students, two of whom have young babies at home. Last week, she told me about how her student Mercy had a family emergency and needed to bring her seven-month-old baby Andrew with her to class. 

Marta explained that as Mercy arrived holding her baby, she was full of apology and disclaimers. Mercy took a seat near the back, creating space for her diaper bag and car seat and a small blanket for Andrew to play on. When Marta had received the late-night text about the necessity of the baby attending class the next day, she admitted she wasn’t sure how the other students would react. But then she recounted the change that came over the room as Andrew entered, how immediately there was a softness in the air as multiple people offered to help Mercy throughout the day.

Marta laughed as she told me it became “pass the baby day” in this doctoral class, how the baby fell asleep in the arms of one student before being held by another as his mother got to deliver her presentation that day. 

—-

This essay did not, by any means, need to be longer than it already was. I was all set to send it out last week, and then in the rush to get our family ready to go to a weekend family camp, I wasn’t able to put on the finishing touches and send it out. But now I think I know why.

We had a great time this weekend, but on Saturday morning, my oldest came running, herding my youngest towards me, with the report that the baby of the family had been hit in the head by a rogue pool ball during their most recent round of Carpetball. Cue my imagination taking us straight to the ER to treat his concussion, but I thought, let’s start with an ice pack for the dark blue goose egg forming just above his eyebrow.

We hiked over to the camp office, procured the ice, and then found a quiet bench to sit on. A few people passed us — a dad and his daughter on their way to the zipline, a gaggle of eleven-year-old boys in shorts and slides on their way to the beach, and then, a lone mother. She passed by us quietly, but the look we shared as we made eye contact was everything. She didn’t stop to ask what happened; she knew it would only embarrass my son whose head was in my lap. She didn’t say anything. But I knew that she knew. She knew what it was to calm down a hurt child; she knew what it was to try to keep them still for 15-20 minutes so the ice could do it’s job. She knew what it was to be the sidelined mom, trying to coach your child through an injury while what feels like the whole surrounding world is one carousel of fun that you're missing out on. She knew it was to be the parent that is sought out in sadness, worry, and sometimes, injury. She knew.

I cannot get the image of baby Andrew out of my head, rocked and swayed, shushed and carried by other mothers as his own mother explored and explained world-changing ideas. And while we didn’t carry Kelly off the field after the game on our shoulders, I know for a fact that she received at least nine hearty high fives from other mothers after the game. I keep thinking about the mother that passed by me at camp; her tired eyes mirroring my own, her slight smile as she walked by.

Sometimes I think it’s the other mothers that make this whole thing work.

I am blessed beyond measure to have a supportive spouse who is an involved dad, who has learned, over the years, to be able to see the steam streaming out of my ears at the end of a long day of parenting and push me out the door for a solo walk. I couldn’t do any of this without him.

But it is other mothers who have held my babies when I couldn’t, other mothers who have nodded at me from across the playground picnic table when I’ve shared about what I fear for one kid and what I don’t understand about another, other mothers who have carried my children — their fears, dreams, idiosyncrasies, difficulties, victories, and failures — with me, who have opened their homes to my kids and pulled out the good snacks,  who know as much as I do how much one of my kids hates wearing pants and how the other likes to have her nails painted and how none of them like soup.

It is other mothers who have fostered my oldest’s love of insects because they know I have a phobia of bug legs, other mothers who have taken them to parks when I’ve been sick, and other mothers who have helped me figure out how to get one to stop peeing the bed. They have mourned when I have mourned, cried over lost babies and lost minds, and rejoiced along with me the first time my worst sleeper actually slept all the way through the night. They have pulled their hair out too when I was at my wit’s end with a toddler who seemed to only know and employ the word NO! for the better part of two years. 

The other mothers do this because they know, in their bones, what it is to mother, whether it’s my kids or theirs. They know the distinct feeling, full and uncomfortable, of having a piece of yourself just walking around in the world, striking out and scraping knees. They know what it is to have your heart wrung out like a rag, limp and exhausted, at the end of every day; they know how it feels to hold somebody else’s newborn and have your ovaries leap.

There is a unique knowing shared among all mothers because even at our most lonely, we are truly never alone. 

The other mothers have held space for my kids right alongside me, and in doing so they have carried me through the years. Like the mothers in the bleachers, they have walked through and actually felt myriad emotions with me. And like the mothers in the classroom, they have given me space to be the parts of me that are Not Mother, parts that need to stew in my own words on occasion, parts that need a little time to research book proposals, parts that need to not be surrounded by so much need once in a while. 

I know that sometimes other mothers are easier written about than found. I know that some of us have just moved and haven’t found our people yet, and others of us have been searching for years. I don’t take that for granted. The other mothers in my life are primarily there because I was weird enough to introduce myself to them in public spaces with stellar opening lines like, “Oh I see your child is wearing a Mario shirt. Would you like to talk about what a national treasure Jack Black is?” Sometimes it hasn’t worked, and I’ve scared some poor introvert soul right back to her minivan. 

But often it has worked. 

Because I think most of us want to be seen or to have our kid seen, to have another mother say, “Oh my kid went through a phase where he pretended he was a dinosaur 100% of the time too. You get used to all the roaring.”

We want to feel less weird. Less alone. Less isolated. We want help. We want empathy. We want help carrying it all. We want to be carried sometimes too. 

And that’s where the other mothers come in.