Opening day

Words can be like baseball bats when used maliciously.

Sidney Madwed

Every year right around this time there is a sense of hope in the air throughout all of sports fan nation. Every team still has a chance to win the world series. Every team still has the opportunity to make their fans cheer, cry, lament and remember.
Today is opening day for major league baseball and the beginning of the baseball season marks the beginning of the spring to me. Baseball means that it's time to forget about the snow and begin to focus on all the new things that the spring and summer bring. New plants, new animals, new hopes and new dreams. I am not saying that you can't have dreams and hopes during the winter, they just come out more easily in the spring for me.
Just like a Pittsburgh Pirates fan (if you don't know this all ready, the Pirates are consistently one of the worse major league baseball teams) a new parent begins the journey or new season with all kinds of hope and anticipation. Any real Pirates fan, at least on opening day, will think "This year will be the year that the Pirates will turn it around, they're going to make the playoffs this year." They have all kinds of theories and stats that make this claim sound almost plausible. In reality, it's nothing more than wishful thinking.
The new parent will do things differently than their parents, they will strive to be better, to love their kids more, spend more time with them, teach them earlier the difference between hot and cold or right and wrong. Maybe the new parent will focus on making sure their child can read simple words before kindergarten or do some basic writing by preschool. Every new parent, at least I hope every new parent, has goals that they have for their newborn child. Much like a baseball fan who refuses to look into the past to see how their team will do in the future, new parents don't always focus on how they were parented before they begin parenting themselves.
Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it...someone famous at sometime uttered those words. I don't think they were talking about parenting but they really could have and probably should have been, As a new dad I need to remember what I was taught as a child, how my parents were with me so I can use what I want in my parenting toolkit and leave the rest out. My daughter deserves the best that I can give her as a father, I think that learning how parents influence and affect their kids for life is a sobering, serious thing to do. It shouldn't be taken lightly, it is the hardest job that I can imagine.
I am glad that it's baseball season, Baseball lets me think about hats, hotdogs, balls, strikes, and foul balls instead of how monumental a task my wife and I have undertaken.