Saturdays aren’t supposed to suck. Saturdays are supposed to be awesome. They’re supposed to be the day you get to sleep in, They’re supposed to be the day that you transfer from the bed to the couch where you lounge until Saturday morning cartoons are over and then flip to TNT or TBS with hopes of finding a classic 1980’s movie to watch until you’ve formulated some semblance of a plan in your mind for how the rest of the day is going to shake out. Saturday is not supposed to be a day for life lessons.
This morning I informed my 12U softball team that after four years of coaching them, I was walking away. I tried my best to make sure that they understood I wasn’t walking away from them but that I was saying goodbye to the game and my role in it. My words were meant to simply say this: Thank you for letting me be a part of your lives, even if for some of you it was only for a short time.
I cried. I knew I would. I’m the reason people like Nicholas Sparks and Nora Ephron have jobs. I tried my best to get through it unscathed, but as I delivered my speech - which was really nothing more than a silent prayer to whoever was listening to please get me through the next few minutes with my dignity intact - I swear I heard a women walk up behind me and say “Look honey, some poor guy dropped his man-card. We should probably turn it in to the Lost and Found.”
Telling the girls goodbye was hard. I knew it would be, but I was ready for it. I thought I was ready for it. I’d performed a trial run the night before by telling Kacie and her cousin Camille when we got home from practice. I’m not sure Camille knew what to make of it, but Kacie did. She barely looked at me the rest of the night.
The game itself isn’t something that I really remember much of. I’m sure it has something to do with the fact that I was snapping photos of the girls every opportunity I got, but in that single game I relived the highlight reel from every other game I’d been a part of over the course of the last nine seasons. I remembered all the girls that had come and gone and wondered how they were spending their Saturday mornings. Were they sleeping in? Watching cartoons? Still playing softball?
When our final inning to play defense arrived, Kacie was forced to sit bench rather than play shortsop as I originally penciled her in for because of some bonehead snafu I’d made in the defensive positioning. I found her standing against the dugout fence, ready to cheer her teammates on, just as I’d preached to the team every game since they were eight. Kacie had always been a loyal soldier. A faithful soldier. But at that moment, she was a crying soldier.
I went to console her – something I’d never really done in all our time together on the diamond – and apologized for my miscue. She shook her head and simply said, “It’s the last inning.” Tears were welling up in her eyes.
Like most kids who play sports, she never wanted to sit out, but she also understood that sometimes she had to because like hitting and fielding, it too was part of the game. Today I wanted her to be on the field as much as she wanted to be on the field. I wanted to watch her, not as her coach, but as her father. For one inning out of all of the innings that had added up over time, I just wanted to be dad.
“I know,” I said.
I hugged her. She resisted. I hugged her again. She resisted again.
“No, daddy. It’s the last inning.” She could barely catch her breath. Her tears were making a jailbreak from the confines of their imprisonment. “Our last inning,” she finished.
I hadn’t prepared myself for that. I had no words to make things better. All I had were my own tears to keep hers from becoming lonely. Kacie and I stood side by side and watched the fruits of all the previous seasons together unfold on the field in front of us. We were two heavy hearts whose worlds, it seemed, were coming to an end.
As I write this, I’m desperately resisting the urge to send an email to the team with a subject line that reads: Sike! The email would disclose that I was only teasing and that I of course will be back to coach the girls in the spring. Perhaps that would be the easier solution to a decision that has me feeling like crap on a Saturday. But I know that no matter how hard letting go might be today, it’ll only be harder tomorrow, and even harder the day after that.
What I was unaware of when I woke up this morning, was that this particular Saturday had a plan for me that didn’t involve Scooby Doo, a bowl of Frootloops, and the last hour of Sixteen Candles. You see, I thought that Kacie and I restoring the Mustang together was just my last ditch effort to fill in the missing pages of time that I lost out on spending with her because I’d let a hundred-and-one other things get in the way. In some ways it is, but now I understand that this rebuilding process is, in its own way, also preparing both of us for how to eventually let go.
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