Elizabeth Rau: Spousal co-coaching adds pitfalls to T-ball

07:33 AM EDT on Monday, June 18, 2007

ELIZABETH RAU

MY HUSBAND and I coached our 6-year-old son’s T-ball team this spring. It was slow going at first but by the top of the second we got the hang of it. Place the ball on a rubber post, stand back, and duck. Henry had a blast. He hit a lot of homers and made new friends, like Marvin, our left-field daydreamer (“Pay attention, Marvin!” I’d shout. “A slugger is up.”), and Henry Z. (no relation to my Henry) who liked to smack the ball precisely where it said “China.”

If I had to do it over again, I’d do one thing differently. I’d insist that my husband and I attend pre-game therapy sessions for Little League coaches who are married to each other and coaching the same team. Had we received counseling, I’m certain we wouldn’t have engaged in the childish bickering that preceded our opener.

Our spat began when we received a notice from the league that our older son, Peder, who is 7, would be moving up to the next level, AA. Peder was thrilled (finally a pitched ball!) but Henry was devastated. Being 6 and of small stature, Henry would remain in T-ball for another season. “I’m not playing without Peder,” Henry said every morning for 21 days, trying his best to choke back a sob.

What a poignant sight: Henry standing on the sidelines at his brother’s games socking his fresh glove with his fist while the boys and girls of T-ball played mightily on a field nearby. I concocted a scheme to get Henry on the diamond that I thought was pretty clever: Mom and Dad would coach. No way, said my husband. He didn’t have the time or energy. I did and pitched this: I’d be head coach; he’d be co-coach. An image of marital bliss appeared before me: Two gloved grownups gently tossing a ball to each other on balmy game nights, communicating in only the most civilized way. Heads up, honey, here comes a pop-up. A deal was struck.

A few weeks before the season started, we got an e-mail from Coach Chris about a mandatory meeting on game safety. I told my husband I’d go. Fine, he said with a shrug. The morning of the meeting he strolled into the kitchen wearing his Red Sox cap and offered a typical male excuse for going instead of me: “I know how to get there.” I’m not big on safety (and I had a headache) so I told him to sally forth. He returned two hours later, a white loose-leaf binder tucked under his arm.

“Good thing you didn’t go,” he said whipping off his cap. “It was all men and all they talked about was baseball.”

I knew then that my days as head coach were over. That weekend, he fired off e-mails to the players. He picked up the team’s T-shirts and caps. (He grabbed the only one-size-fits-all; I had to settle for XS.) He scheduled practices. He collected the health forms and stuck them in his now-beloved binder. In a nanosecond, he had demoted me and appointed himself head coach without the courtesy of even a quick chat. I was miffed. The tension escalated at opening ceremonies when he introduced me to the parents and players as “my wife . . . she’ll be in charge of the snack schedule.” I smiled through gritted teeth.

What I really wanted to do was stand on a milk crate and shout through a bullhorn: I am a jock, people. In my youth I decorated my shelves with regulation-sized footballs and frayed softballs, not Barbies. I have proof of my athletic prowess: scars on my knees and, just as important, the Presidential Physical Fitness Award.

Could it get any worse? You bet. After dinner one night — Norwegian meatballs, my husband’s specialty — he popped the question: “Don’t you think I should look around for another assistant coach?”

“That’s co-coach,” I said. “And I’m not going anywhere.”

My husband is an enlightened guy. He cooks dinner (seven nights a week), does the grocery shopping, folds the laundry into neat piles (even socks), and shares child minding. His hostile takeover caught me by surprise and then, when I noticed a dearth of female coaches on the field, I figured it out. Baseball is still dominated by the men and boys. They love to coach the game and play it. When was the last time you saw a bunch of middle-aged men kicking a soccer ball on a neighborhood field or tackling an older gent wearing a football helmet?

My husband’s sudden conversion to coaching was entirely predictable: He was trying to save face in front of the guys. Of course, his behavior was “pumpkin-seed wrong,” as my sons say when I raise my voice, which is rarely.

I was a mess at our first game. Would we take our squabble public? My husband parked himself behind the tee; he asked me to supervise the dugout, which I did by nervously blurting out phrases like, “You’re up,” and “You’re up next.”

And then something amazing happened. The kids whacked the ball and sprinted to first and missed second (so what!) and collided in a two-player pileup on third and ran home to exchange high-five’s. Henry grounded it to left, knocking in two runs batted in, Daniel slid chest-first into second, sending up a puff of dust. Nina hit a homer. “Run like hell,” I murmured. I looked over at my husband. He was breathing; I was, too. Our nervousness about coaching gave way to a feeling of relief and later joy to see such happy kids.

After the game, I could tell my husband was pleased with the outcome because he asked Lena to lead the post-game cheer: “Two, four, six, eight, who do we appreciate!” the kids yelled in their wavy sports huddle. “Allergy Shots!” Then we had our wonderfully unhealthy snack: Cheetos. As the field emptied of players and parents, my husband apologized for his pre-game rudeness. I did not accept the apology. I sensed that I finally held the upper hand in all matters concerning baseball and asked him to do me a favor: Collect the bases, bats, balls, gloves, helmets, ice packs, Band-Aids, Neosporin, crushed juice boxes, empty chip bags, candy wrappers and 1,000-ton tee; put everything in the big, black, strapless canvas bag and lug it back to the car. “Where’s the car?” he asked. “Somewhere out there,” I said and walked away to visit the ice-cream truck.

Elizabeth Rau, a former Journal reporter, is a Providence-based writer.

From the Baltimore Sun

Why hide war from kids?



By Elizabeth Rau

June 14, 2007

PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- I was eating breakfast with my 6-year-old son, Henry, the other morning and he brought up today's celebration at his school: Flag Day.
"What am I supposed to do?" he asked.

I looked at the flier on the bulletin board: Wear red, white and blue.

"Wear red, white and blue," I said.

"The colors of the flag," he said.

He shoved a spoonful of Cheerios into his mouth. I could tell he was about to say something important, maybe something he had learned in school.

"Flag Day is to honor the flag," he said.

"Right," I said, pleased he got the point.

"And to honor the war," he said.

I wasn't quite sure what to make of that comment. I'm opposed to the war in Iraq but stand by the troops over there. Maybe my son was saying the same thing in his kid way. His next comment stunned me: "We want to win!" He turned his index finger and thumb into the shape of a gun and pointed to the wall: "Boom!"

It was time for a sit-down.

I've been talking to Henry and his 7-year-old brother, Peder, about the Iraq war for years. That's right, since they were toddlers. They would peek over my shoulder as I watched the nightly news reports and pepper me with questions I tried to answer truthfully: Why are buildings on fire? We dropped bombs. Who's driving the tanks? American soldiers. What's wrong with him? He's dead.

Sometimes the boys, riveted to the screen, would make it all the way through a report; other times they would lose interest, as kids do, and rush out of the room to play with their Legos.

It never occurred to me to do what most parents do: Keep the war out of the house. My sister has a friend who rips out all the war photos in her New York Times (from the dead soldiers to the rolling tanks) so her daughters won't see them. I know a parent who never listens to National Public Radio because she's concerned her first-grader might hear the crack of an AK-47. Remember the Newsweek cover photo of an American soldier whose legs were blown off by a roadside bomb? A neighbor turned the magazine over when his son came to play.

I don't understand parents who want to keep the war a secret, like a shameful family scandal. Are they afraid of nightmares and nail-biting? I bet a Scooby-Doo movie is scarier than an NBC report about Iraq. My guess is parents are worried about getting too many questions they can't answer. Their coddling wears me down and gets me down. It's the easy way out.

I'll never forget the newspaper photo I saw last month of Iraqi men pulling a body from the Euphrates River that was later identified as Pfc. Joseph J. Anzack Jr., only 20, one of three missing soldiers who had been the focus of a massive military manhunt. A boy not much taller than Henry was standing on the riverbank, hands on hips, watching. The parents who threw that photo in the trash - what were they thinking? Iraqi boys can see this, but not their children?

I try to be honest and open with my kids about Iraq and the rest of the world. I know they can handle it, as long as I'm there to listen and to answer questions whenever they come, even at teeth-brushing time. If I kept the war a secret, my kids would eventually figure it out and question my deceptiveness. I think it's important to be straightforward, even when the facts are unpleasant.

Of course, the downside of exposing kids to the war is that they can glorify it in a shoot-'em-up-cowboy way, as Henry did that morning at breakfast. That's the first time he has talked about the war in terms of "winning." It's also the first time he has played a gun-toting good (or bad?) guy. But those are the risks I take by leaving the TV on and the newspaper intact on the kitchen table. Anyway, at those times, I step in and do something novel: Talk to my kids about the war.

After unloading his make-believe gun, I told Henry that killing people is bad, even imaginary people on the kitchen wall.

"Who started Iraq?" he asked.

"The United States," I said.

"How come?" he said.

"I'm not sure I know why," I said.

I told him I wanted the war to end and the American soldiers to come home. And then I said what I always say when I'm trying to get my kids to pay attention: "Look at me." He fixed his eyes on mine. "The people in Iraq are not bad," I said. "Boys like you live there."

"How big?" he said.

"Six," I said. "Just like you."

"If they put the white flag up, does that mean you can't fight anymore?" he said.

"Yeah," I said.

"So why don't we put the white flag up?" he said.

I didn't know what to tell him: Our president doesn't want to; people are afraid of losing; life isn't fair.

Henry made sense. Kids have a knack for thinking clearly.

"Maybe we'll put it up someday," I said.

He finished his cereal and wiped his mouth with the collar of his Red Sox T-shirt. "I don't want to talk about this anymore, Mom," he said.

That was OK with me; there would be other days. My son grabbed his backpack and rushed out the door to school.



Elizabeth Rau is a freelance writer. Her e-mail is peders1@verizon.net.