Once, I cried at a baseball game. It was dark, so no one probably even knew. By some sort of twist in the interpretation of a rule…or something…the very reliable little league pitcher for Aaron’s team had to be pulled from the game. Though the details elude me, I remember that much was on the line. This could have been the last at-bat before this precious team of nine-year-old sluggers and playground base runners could be crowned league champions of their beloved summer game… Not, though, before my small backyard hero was called on to face the other team’s hope that the championship would instead be theirs.
He could throw a fierce, hard strike for his fifty-five pound frame. In step with his personality, though, he also tended toward wild unpredictability with his efforts on the mound. Amidst some groans and eye rolls from the gallery of less-than-confident little league fans, I was at once hopeful and terrified as my son kicked the dirt beneath his feet and gripped the baseball with his tiny hand.
He didn’t know. In his starry-eyed innocence, he had no idea of the magnitude of the task at hand. He struck out that batter and his team won the game, earning the title of champions. It was, in the end, just another day, the end of another chapter. But I did cry as my son’s teammates crowded the mound to join him in celebration. It was the flash of the failure-to-thrive infant whom we had propped up through so many dark nights to make sure his airway was clear; that’s what brought the tears: tears from a chapter that had closed years before but the reminders of which still bring me right back to that place of fear and uncertainty, of medical appointments and thoughts of what might have been. I cried because my eyes had been opened, and I understood that the gravity of what had just happened on the baseball field actually extended far beyond the game.
The main bathroom at the farm has a closet that was part of the original house. It extends under the stairs into a small space that was perfect for my boxes of paperwork that I had packed up years before we moved. I had nearly forgotten that they were there, tucked far beyond the toilet paper, extra toothpaste, and guest towels. I thought about this space that nobody knew of except me, considering that it might be worth cleaning out to make a “secret room,” a fresh spot for the little boys to do their schooling. Following an afternoon spent pulling the boxes from the closet, sweeping out the spider webs, and setting up a disco light and cushions to make the space enticing, the two youngest boys retreated to their new area while I set out to look inside the boxes that had spent the last five years under the stairs.
Three of the boxes were from my days working as an in-home therapist, packed with obsolete case files and assessment manuals. A slip of paper dropped from one of the folders that held my collection of resources for working with babies with visual impairments.
“Vision is the ability to gain meaning from eyesight.” These words, copied in my writing by an unknown author, resounded in my head with added interpretation.
A fourth box was full of files from our years as foster parents. Letters from caseworkers, service plans, receipts, notebooks used to communicate with parents, licensing files, a few photos, and an avalanche of emotion was unpacked on our kitchen table that afternoon. There was so much inside that box; so much that once consumed every bit of me, so much that I did not even remember, now nearly lost in the tide of today.
All of these books, these files, these papers, opened and closed. Still I am here, turning the pages of the new chapters, chapters which one day soon may themselves be taped up in boxes forgotten with the turning of the years.
These days, as many things keep us quiet and inside, I am trying to find meaning in the seemingly meaningless. In discarding the files of the last few seasons of my life, I wonder if this time of questioning where or what I am is actually a season in itself, part of a greater vision that’s much bigger than me, and bigger than anyone could see with their eyes alone.
Spring will, if I am lucky, bring another season on the baseball field…another chance for a little boy to be a hero and for his mama to remember what brought us to where we are. All of the manuals, medical appointments, emotions, disappointments, sadness, fear, twists of fate, pitches, and even magic that we have taped up and hidden away inside the boxes of our own secret rooms bring meaning to something beyond our greatest vision. When we take the chance to lift the lid just a little, to look inside, we are reminded that through those seasons we have come to be where we are, wherever that is, which is probably just another passageway to the next adventure, disco lights, cobwebs, and all.
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