I’m a t-ball mom. If national elections took place in the spring, we would be famous. We who drive our kids and black and white balls in the fall switch to kids and baseball gloves in the spring. Same moms as the soccer ones, same kids. Just not the press coverage.

More accurately, I’m a single t-ball mom. I don’t know if those other three moms at every practice, every game–always–are single moms too. We don’t ever talk about it. There is a game to get on with.

Of the ones who come alone there is the mother of the very talented white boy who, at six, wears batting gloves and deserves them. There is the mother of the African-American child who plays like a pro. Her older son is there too and later she’ll take him to his softball game. There is the very attractive woman with long, dark hair, the mother of another veteran player who shows the younger ones how it’s done.

And there’s me, mid-life mother of two of the worst players on the team. Call them inexperienced if you’d like. Call one too young. He is the one who spent the whole first practice in his position on the pitcher’s mound with his back to the hitter, facing the outfield. Well, that’s where all the people were, wasn’t it? And then he spent a few games playing in the dust. And, despite the several gold medals he’d given himself, finally he gave up altogether and sat with me.

My children’s father moved 600 miles away two years ago. He had a reason–he had a job. He had another reason–our marriage was in trouble. I’m not going into detail about this here. I teach minority students whose families are often led by a mother. To me the only new ingredient in the disturbing trend of fatherless families was it happened to mine.

I’ve undergone the metamorphosis–the acceptance of too much work, too much responsibility, a drastic cutback in what I can accomplish professionally, a far crabbier relationship with children I wanted to mother perfectly, an all-out appeal for help from friends and any other source I can think of.

And I’ve gotten good at keeping two boys on the move.

T-ball is just about the perfect game. No pitcher, no innings, no outs added up, no score. For kindergarten boys and girls, it’s noncompetitive heaven. They do their best to hit the ball off the t, run to first (when they’ve figured out what “first” means) where a parent stands to tell them when to try to for second, make it around and home, watch a few other kids do the same, then go into the field–not when three hapless kids have made outs but when half the team has batted.

And then there’s the coach, showing them how to bat, urging them to run, yelling, “Third, third” like mad, cheering them all the way home.

I don’t know if all the coaches are as good as Rusty. And I don’t know a thing about Rusty outside of t-ball. I don’t know what he does all day. And I don’t know where his wife is. (Though Rusty’s son plays on the team, no mom is there to watch him.) Rusty claims he isn’t nearly as patient with anyone over seven.

I don’t care. I’m in love with him.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not confessing here, or sending a valentine. This happened to me with the soccer coach too–and his wife was at every practice. There is just something about a grown man kneeling next to my child explaining how to hit or kick a ball that does me in. When the soccer coach jazzed my six-year-old around by the top of his head at the end of a game, the kid and I were both gone.

A family friend appeared one night when I was lying semi comatose on my bed with the flu while my children played in agricultural lime in the backyard. I knew they were okay–I could hear them–but there wasn’t a thing I could do about the lime. Our friend appeared in the backyard, gathered boys up and put them in the tub, then made them waffles, which the older boy declared, I heard from the bathroom, “The best dinner ever.” I went out to the kitchen, though not being the best advertisement in ratty pink terry cloth and haggard face, and asked our friend to marry me.

The appropriateness doesn’t matter. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t divorced when I proposed to our friend. And it didn’t matter the soccer coach was married. Or that I was born and bred counter cultural and the soccer coach is FBI. That’s how bad it is.

Rusty is pretty counter cultural too. What I do know about him is he has gray hair in a pony tail and slouching jeans clearly worn all day.

And I know he puts his arms around my sons to show them how to bat. He gives them bubble gum before a game so there is a field of five and six year olds merrily chawing away out there. He tells my sons not to srunch their butts when they swing, and this works. He knocks their feet a little apart with the bat. And he tags them as he chases them in Keystone cops fashion into home. He calls my little boy, “killer.”

And I know he kneels in the dust beside my eldest son who is disconsolate. He hasn’t caught a single ball the whole game, and no one has taught him how to lose. When Rusty gets up, he has restored my son to good humor.

I know when I talked to him about my recalcitrant five-year-old–my little guy would go in the dugout long enough to get the bubble gum, sit out the game with me, and return post-game for treats–Rusty said his father had made him catch hardballs 50 minutes every night and he was one big bruise as a kid. His goal, he said, is for the kids to think t-ball is fun and to want to play again next year.

My hopeless children turned out winners this season. The eldest got the “most improved” award and the little one was inspired to play the last game after he got the same trophy everyone else on the team got.

My children’s father is a good man. He sees them when he can, calls, sends money. He would be with them if exigencies of professional life and emotional pressure allowed. But they don’t.

Here is what I wish: I wish my children didn’t have to live with the surgical removal of their father. Failing that, I wish that my boys learn from their father’s absence another way to father, as Rusty learned gentleness from his father’s cruelty.

And here is what Rusty should look out for. I don’t know about those other mothers out there alone on Saturday morning, but, for me, the gratitude of the single t-ball mom knows no bounds. Do I feel another proposal coming on?

(Appeared in Salon.com originally/Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash)