A Different Field of Dreams

When I was a child, one of my favorite summertime father-and-son activities was playing catch with my dad. As captured in the movie Field of Dreams, there's a timeless joy in that simple tossing of a ball back and forth.

Sometimes my dad and I would chat while we threw--we didn’t have many conversations otherwise, so those were special--but many times we just threw with no talking, just enjoying the time we were spending together.

I often looked forward to enjoying that same bonding experience with my own son. But it hasn’t turned out that way.

Motor coordination deficits

My son is not coordinated. That's not unusual among kids with autism. 

Known primarily as a neurological disorder that impairs communication, autism also has other effects, like poor muscle tone and deficits in motor coordination. What that means is that my son never liked to ride a tricycle and still doesn’t ride a bike, even with training wheels. He doesn’t want to go on swings. 

And he has a lot of difficulty catching a baseball.

When Kai was younger, I thought that maybe he was just a slow learner when it came to sports. I would softly toss him balls and they would bounce off his chest or his hands. If I tossed a ball as wide as his body, he sometimes would catch it; anything smaller gave him trouble.

I’ve come to realize that Kai wasn't going to grow out of these core motor deficits. He is still far behind other kids his age. These days, he can catch a baseball-sized plastic ball if I throw it in just the right spot.  

Because I like baseball and I want to help him improve these deficits, I still try to take him out for a game of catch, but he doesn’t seem to like sports much so it is hard to get him interested.

So you can imagine my surprise when he asked me to play baseball with him in the front yard the other day. Of course, it turned out that playing baseball with him is not like playing baseball with other kids. In fact, it was hardly baseball at all. 

A dizzying experience

Kai likes to make up his own rules to games, often as we’re going along. On this day, our game started off as baseball in that I pitched our plastic ball to him and he swung at it with his plastic bat. Remarkably, if my underhanded tosses were in the right spot, he was able to connect. 

After he hit the ball, the game transformed. I tracked the ball down and went to tag him out. He laughed and ran around the entire yard instead of the bases we had set up, and he egged me on to chase him. Baseball had become a game of tag. 

For a little guy, Kai runs surprisingly fast. It took a lot of effort on my part to catch him. But, eventually I tagged him.

Then, while laughing more hysterically, he said, “What are you going to do now, Daddy?” knowing that would spur me to get more silly with him. 

I was out of breath just from chasing him, but I wrapped my arms around him and spun him around. He loved it! 

For reasons that I don’t quite understand, autistic kids can spin all day and not get dizzy. But for me, one good twirl and the world around me was moving. 

I was still wobbly when Kai said, “Let’s do it again, Daddy!”

So, though I had hardly recovered from the first time, we did it again.  Me pitching, he hitting, both running and spinning and falling down laughing.

And we did it again. And again. And again.

I am sure that playing catch was never this exhausting for my dad. But then again, I don’t remember laughing this much over a game of catch, either. 

My real-life Field of Dreams is a lot different than how I imagined it would be.  Yet, right here, in my own front yard, the laughter I share with my son is a dream come true.