When our tee ball team gets tired, they lose all focus. Some of them can’t muster the energy to stand so they sit smack down on the base. Some of them droop their torsos and let their arms hang long like butter noodles. Some get wild with laughter and have snorting contests. Some cry.

When you think about it, these tiny humans have been in preschool or kindergarten all day and by 6 or 7 in the evening, most of them just want their Capri Sun and cupcake from the Snack Mom and to curl up in the backseat with a blankie.

It was the last inning of the second game in my son’s first t-ball season. The sun was low enough that it made colors look surreal, and it cast a long shadow as one 5-year-old, whom I’ll never forget, loped up to the tee. He had spent the previous inning filling his baseball hat with dirt from center field and, at some point, he had begun to cry, so the red soil in his hat and hair now streaked down his face in pinkish streams.

I didn’t know this particular boy and I don’t recall him making contact with the ball on his previous batting attempts. Judging by his tears, he would have preferred to be somewhere else, but his dad was the coach, so there he was. He scanned the crowd and looked down again when he caught my eye. Something about the look on his wee little boy face made we want to go over and give him a cuddle and let him watch the game with me from the other side of the fence until it was all over.

His dad held out the batting helmet, which he slid on. It knocked his glasses crooked and didn’t quite fit right so it perched on top, and, with his small frame, he looked remarkably like a bobblehead.

He pushed the helmet down as far as could and took the bat from his dad, who was kneeling to give him some last minute instructions. The boy’s attention was focused exclusively on home plate, as he tried to cover it with dirt by kicking with his tiny cleats. That’s when a spectator from our team yelled out, “Heads up, team! This kid’s a real whacker!”

The little boy jerked up his head to find the source of the voice. It was a stranger. A stranger who expected that he would hit this ball hard. A stranger who expected that he would astonish everyone with his mighty swing. A stranger who thought him to be a genuine, bona fide athlete.

This was not a boy who had likely thought of himself in such a way before, and you could see it happen, even from behind: A shift took place. Where once he didn’t believe he could hit the ball, he now all of a sudden did.

Now I wish I could say that he swung that bat and slugged the ball right out of the park. (He didn’t). But he did stand a little taller and suddenly and maybe for the first time, thought of himself as a true ballwhacker indeed.

That man had planted a seed in his mind. And the cool thing is that we have no way of knowing where that seed eventually ended up. All of a sudden, this awkward little kid starts to think of himself as a guy whom the crowd is watching; a guy whom the players on the other team had better be wary of.

Sometimes I think that’s the most important part of parenting: just planting seeds. You are smart. You are calm. You are peaceful. You are a beautiful. You are a risktaker. You can do this. You sure have a gift for music. My, my, what a whacker you are.

The seeds you plant have to be sincere – otherwise it’s manipulation, and the kids can tell and it’s no good. Also, you have to assume that many of the seeds will get washed down the gutter with the next rainstorm. Still, it takes so much of the pressure off to think only about scattering them and not about where they might someday end up.

Life is so messy, after all. There are all kinds of big and wonderful, bright and shiny moments where I am really at my best, but there are also a lot of moments raising kids that maybe I didn’t exactly make a good, conscious decision. I just went along. When I have so much to do, and it all gets overwhelming, I can think of it as just planting a few seeds, which comes naturally to me when my head’s on right, and I can do it right from where I am. If I plant enough, some of them, somewhere, are bound to stick. It is this thought alone that gets me through, some days.

Cassidy is five, and she shares a home with two younger siblings whose demands for my eye contact are constant and loud. So I try to orchestrate this one-on-one time with her on a somewhat regular basis. I ask Grandma to watch the other kids so that we can sneak off together, and so she’ll talk to me. I’m always amazed, when I get one of the kids alone, by how very much they have to say.

“I have some running around to do,” I told Cassidy last Saturday. “Do you want to come — just you and me?” I was ready for the usual flurry of words and for the desperateness. “Don’t leave without me. Where are my shoes? Mom, don’t leave without me. Can you help me find my socks? Don’t leave without me.”
But today was different. “What’s Callie going to do?” she asked.

“She’ll stay with Grandma.”

“Do you think Grandma would doctor my baby?” Grandma, a retired school nurse, would most certainly doctor her baby, and she probably wouldn’t be looking at the clock and thinking about the cruddy dishes in the sink while she did it, either, like the dolly’s regular doctor.

And so it was settled. I had to remind myself that this is the same kid who, just six weeks before, was chasing me down the driveway shouting “One More Kiss!” when I left her with daddy one evening to ever-so-subtly bolt for a gallon of milk, a loaf of bread, and ten minutes of peace and quiet at the 7-11 on the corner. Leaving the kids had always made me feel a little guilty but also very, very central and very, very important.

So I left that day, and Cassidy gave me a peck and a quick wave because Grandma had determined that her favorite baby doll had a rather high fever and was at that moment offering detailed instructions on what she, as a good mummy, could do to help.

I missed Cassidy that day as I ran my errands. I missed feeling the way her hand fits into mine. Everyone says we have the same hands. Long, skinny fingers; bulky knuckles, square nails. Eternally dry. I missed the self-conscious way she holds her mouth between sips of hot cocoa that makes me wonder if she’s not imaging herself to be Cinderella. I missed feeling the way time spent alone with my daughter makes me feel — like the queen, with nothing to do but allow each glorious moment to perch on my tongue for a time, like a communion wafer.

The passage of time is an enigmatic thing when you have small kids. In fact, there are two remarks that parents of young children hear at least daily. They are: “You sure have your hands full,” and “Oh, the time goes so fast.”

I’ve always been fond of meeting that lament with a reminder to those older, wiser parents that the years sometimes seem to go faster than the actual days. But now I’m starting to see. I’m starting to look back on the last five years, and I’m starting to wonder where it went. Wondering if Cassidy will still hold my hand in a year or two as we walk the crowded downtown streets with our hot chocolate. If she’ll still look at me like the queen. If I’ll soon be telling the tired mothers I pass that oh, the time goes so fast.

There was a time in the not-so-distant past when I would actually look forward to the time each week following our trip to the supermarket when I would have all three kids strapped safely in their carseats so that I could take one guilt-free minute to push the cart to its corral, to hear my shoes scratching across the cement, to notice any birds in the sky and whether the air felt cold against my skin. One lone time-out minute from my life with three kids under age 6 when, yes, I had my hands really, really full.

But I shock myself by writing that last line in the past tense. Clearly, I’m having trouble knowing just what I want the time to do. This week, I’ve spent time looking for life’s rewind, fast forward, and still-pause. Sometimes all at once. But, even as I’m lamenting the time that is gone, I’m beginning to learn how to slow time for myself with pure reverence. Reverence for the process, and for the puzzling way time passes and the way our children grow, both gradually and all at once. And then to resignedly watch time slip through my hands with a detachment and a sense of grace that comes from respecting the process; the drifting, the slipping, the rushing of time that is gone. To hold each of those God-given moments and then to release it, ripe for another.

Some of my most vivid memories from childhood took place during weekend car rides, just my dad and I. They are engraved in my memory not because we did anything particularly exciting or adventurous – these were mostly just weekly errands, with the occasional stop at a donut shop. And it wasn’t the conversation. We didn’t talk a whole lot. There was just something different about being with him.

It’s that way in the family I’ve created, too. For Cassie and Callie, Daddy is an exclamation point at the end of each day.

I’m sure Cassie doesn’t know how to tell time, but at precisely 6:30 every weeknight, she’s got her nose pressed against the glass, waiting for daddy’s truck to rumble up the driveway.

Calliope, almost three months old, coos and grins at me all day, but when Ty comes home, her muscles start to work. She starts making little jabs with her arms and legs. Her mouth forms an o-shape. She’s a picture of pure concentration. Her dad certainly harnesses – and elicits – a different kind of energy.

When my daughter and I were living with my parents awaiting Calliope’s birth, Grandpa would announce his arrival each evening with two quick honks. “Grandpa! Grandpa!” Cassie would run to the door so fast that her socks would send her sliding across the linoleum.

The wide-eyed way Cassie looks at the men in her life just melts my heart. I can only imagine what it does to them. Like most toddlers, her whole face has a feeling, not just her mouth.

I wonder how things would change – with our husbands, our fathers, our mothers, our children, our friends – if we all greeted one another like this. If we carried this intensity into all of our relationships. If we ran so fast we slid to greet the important people in our lives.

A recent Oprah episode had Toni Morrison asking, “Do your eyes light up when your children come into the room?” Because that’s what they are looking for, she said.
I find myself reflecting on that wisdom frequently. Because isn’t that what we’re all looking for? Today, see if you can make sure someone finds it.