Discover Top Posts Tagged with #t-ball

The Value of Value

Kids these days. AmIright? No respect. No appreciation for how good they've got it. Take my daughter… please! Okay, sorry. I think Rodney Dangerfield possessed me there for a minute. But anyway, back to my daughter. I lamented last summer (and again in the winter) about her demeanor on the soccer field. She' was a jogger. She was a walker. She was a half-hearted gawker. In short, she had zero competitive spirit, but she loved being there with her friends (#facepalm). We made it through both outdoor and indoor soccer without much progress, but I was hopeful that t-ball would be different because it's not a contact sport. Maybe she wouldn't be intimidated so much, and thus she would get into it a little more. Wrooong. She's had two games so far, and both times she's been the kid throwing dirt on everyone else the whole time. And her daddy has never been closer to having a stroke. I'll finish that story in a minute, but I should really get on with the point of this blog first: self-therapy. That's all it is. God's showing me things from a different angle. My daughter loved soccer, and now she loves t-ball. But she refuses to actually play either of them when she's there. Everyone assigns value differently, and it's time that I learned that. So here goes.

Hard work and dedication. If a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing right. Life is so awesome that it's a crime to waste a single moment. These are the things that define me. I'm not a perfectionist, but I try to be. I love creating and learning new things. And I love the payoff—the sense of accomplishment from completing a challenge or goal—and I'm a huge fan of the reward system. As I've said before, 2019 has been an insane year for me. I put way too much on my plate. There hasn't been a week yet that I didn't work at least sixty hours between my "day job" (physical therapy), my editorial jobs (both at Havok Publishing and with freelance editing), and my writing career. There have been times when I've wanted to quit or at least just take a weekend off, but one thing (aside from the thrill of the challenge) has kept me going: the payoff. July 21st. That's the day when it will all be worth it. It's the day after my last writing conference of the summer, and everything's leading up to it. I've edited dozens of stories and hundreds of thousands of words so far this year, and I have many more to go. But by that day, I'll be done with my own book, as well as with the culmination of six months of stories for Havok. I'll be able to sit back and take a breath… an entire weekend away from any real work. And most importantly, I'll be able to enjoy the ultimate guilty pleasures prize package that I've amassed for myself:

1 bottle of Ole Nassau Dark (rum that can only be purchased in the Bahamas)

1 bottle of Tawny Port wine (aged ten years)

1 Romeo y Juliette Churchill cigar (Cuban)

1 farm-raised sirloin steak literally the size of my head

So here's the thing. Everything on my reward list is bad for me. If I enjoyed them for every little occasion, they would turn to ash in my mouth (some more literally than others), and they would eventually kill me. But as a one-time reward for a seven-month sprint, they'll be heavenly. I put value in working hard and enjoying all of what life has to offer, but some people would call me naïve. Where I say life is too short to waste a day, others say it's too short to work all the time (and honestly, they'd be right… until stopping to smell the roses becomes a permanent nap in the poppies). Some four year olds place value on training to be the next Nolan Ryan (you know who you are, kid), and some just like to fill their shoes with as much of the infield as possible before the inning is over.

"If you keep playing in the dirt, you're getting a spanking when we get home."

Quite a dugout pep talk, right? Well, hear me out. Before the game, my daughter had promised me that she wouldn't play in the dirt. Before she walked onto the field, I made her promise again. But within a minute, she was already throwing the stuff everywhere. She was piling it up and packing it in her shoes. I tried to get her to stop. Her coaches tried to get her to stop. Even one of the other kids told her to stop. But apparently she puts some serious value in dirt (I can only assume that she's going to make an amazing excavator someday). And after my dugout threat, she went right back to the dirt. On the way home, I informed her that she would be getting the aforementioned spanking (not because she misbehaved but because she lied. She only gets spankings for lying, though, in this case, there was definitely some interpretation of the law needed to justify the punishment), and I took it one further.

"If you even look at the dirt during your next game, you're never playing t-ball again."

"Okay…" she said in her sweet little voice. "But why?"

$#@&#*$!!! Are you kidding me?! "Because it's t-ball, not dirt-ball!"

And that's when I realized that she really didn't get it. She was playing t-ball. She was out there with all the other kids having a blast. She's even a great hitter (about a .250 batting average with the coach pitching and 100% off the T) even though her mother and I haven't practiced with her nearly as much as we should. Maybe she'll eventually develop a love for some actual sport, or maybe she'll always be a butterfly chaser. Either way, these experiences (and her memories) will go one of two ways, and I'm sure as heck not going to be the father who ruins them. If that means chewing a hole through my lip at every game to keep from yelling at her, so be it. If she throws dirt on other kids or doesn't listen to her coaches, there will be repercussions, but if she's intent on digging her own infield grave, I'm going to have to be okay with that. At least for now. Why? Because she's assigning value in her own way. She's growing and learning where she fits in. And in the end, she's still four years old, and it's just intermural t-ball, not the World Series.

And hey, if I need to uncork that Ole Nassau rum a little early to get me through this season, I don't think anyone would blame me.

#t-ball

Trending Tags

Recently Viewed Tags

#t-ball