I’ve been a single mom long enough to know that when a man gives your child something expensive, it usually comes with strings attached. So when my son’s baseball coach showed up with a $400 glove, I smiled, thanked him, and had no idea how bad it was until I felt something hidden inside the lining.Mason turned twelve last Saturday.Twelve. Which sounds like a small number until you’re the person who got him there on a cashier’s salary, two buses, and approximately four hours of sleep a night for the better part of a decade.I’m not looking for a medal. I’m just saying, we’ve done this mostly alone, my son and I, and we’ve done it okay.Mason turned twelve last Saturday.Baseball is his whole world. Has been since he was six and found an old mitt in a neighbor’s yard sale and refused to put it down for three weeks.

I signed him up for the community league the following spring. And I swear the first time he caught a fly ball in the outfield, he looked over at me in the bleachers with this pure, unfiltered joy, and I thought: this is why you do it.That’s why his twelfth birthday party was a backyard thing. Streamers, a grocery store cake with a baseball printed in frosting, eight kids running around in the June heat. Nothing fancy. Everything real.I didn’t expect Coach Daniel to show up.He came around the side gate just as I was pulling juice boxes out of the cooler, tall, easy smile, holding a box wrapped in gift wrap with a ribbon, like someone had shown him how.