We celebrated Mother’s Day this year by heading down to the ballpark on a gorgeous Spring day with both kids in tow. When I bought the tickets back at the end of March, I wasn’t aware that this particular Sunday fell on Mother’s Day, but it ended up being a happy coincidence. The day also marked Lily’s first game, Caelyn’s second, and our shared first game as a family – now that we are more than reasonably sure that this will be our final family configuration. The mere thought of another baby is enough to send me running to the “V” section of the Yellow Pages.
In the past I had often taken my mother to the game on Mother’s Day, back when I had my Sunday ticket package and even in the few years after that. She’s a Red Sox fan, owing to living in Boston for a brief time as a young nurse in the mid-70′s, and I suspect somewhat in accordance with her contrary nature, living now in a sea of Yankees and Mets fans. But the Mets are not the Yankees and she has always seemed happy to go to the games with me. She’s a much easier game day companion than my father, far more flexible, and doesn’t feel the need to point out every Mets error or strikeout to me as if I somehow missed it, and then remind me that Mets suck.
But that’s how it is with parents with adult children. Each brings their own set of flaws to the table, and you end up focusing on which of the others they lack and often ignore their positive attributes. I certainly do. I’ve had a somewhat strained relationship with my parents since their divorce. I have no wish for them to reconcile, and I never have. Things were far too poisonous at the end, and when they told me that they were separating I think I felt relief more than anything else. But fairly or unfairly, the other predominant feeling ever since has been one of failure.
I’ve always placed a lot of stock in family, and consider my own role as husband and father paramount to anything else I do in my life. So to see them call it quits after 30 years, 3 children, a newly born grandchild, and a multitude of challenges faced and overcome together – it was difficult for me to see it as anything other than failure. And how can you let yourself fail at the most important thing in your life?
But not everyone thinks as I do, and what is important to me is not important to everyone else, at least not in the same way. And that simple fact has often eluded me. I spent years in fear of suffering the same fate, and it took a lot of time and counseling to realize that I will not. Nothing in life is guaranteed of course, but I am my own person and will make my own mistakes. But I also will place my own value on things and protect what is most important to me.
But at the end of the day, it is not for me to judge them. I did not live their lives and (thankfully) I was not privy to the intimate details of their relationship. Having been married for a decade now myself, I know that marriage is not without its challenges, but I cannot compare myself to them, any comparison of that sort would be biased and unfair.
The past remains the past. Memories can be tainted by present knowledge, but if you can move beyond that and see them clearly you will find that they remain intact. And I have a lot of very happy memories from a time when I was a part of that family. Sometimes it is those happy memories that cause the most pain in the present. They don’t align with the future, as if someone threw a switch on the track, but that too is nothing more than an idealized future. Things don’t always work out the way you think.
I don’t think I’ll ever have the same relationship with them that I used to. I suspect no child, however old, ever does once things have changed so irrevocably. My own father-in-law was ten years my senior when his own parents divorced after 42 years of marriage, 8 children (2 of which died young), and a lifetime together. And I know that his relationship, at least with his father (the circumstances were quite different than mine), was never the same again.
Despite this, I felt some regret at not being able to take my mother to the game this year. We didn’t go last year either, but since I wasn’t at last year’s game without her, this year felt differently. But as I walked the promenade with Kate and the girls, each in their pink Mets hats and on the lookout for Mr. Met and cotton candy, the day felt right.
Things change. Life goes on. Obladi, Oblada.
But seriously, life is a progression, and who’s to say that things wouldn’t have ended up similarly even if things had remained “normal” – a very loose term when describing my family of any era. Because that family is not my family anymore. Kate and the girls are my family, just as myself and my sisters were my parents’ family when I was young.
And now is the time when I take Kate and the girls to see the Mets on Mother’s Day and we scour the park for Mr. Met and we buy hot pretzels and cotton candy at a 500% markup and we buy foam fingers and flags and take trips to the potty. And if we are very, very lucky we get to see RA Dickey throw a pitch or two.
And I’ll still go to a game with my mom this year, and we’ll still have fun. And there’s nothing wrong with any of that.
