Your child wants to play something.

Anything. It can be a sport, but it doesn't have to be. It can be baseball or football or basketball or dance or gymnastics or debate or full-contact macramé. Doesn't matter. All you know is that your child is begging to do something that will take lots of your time, lots of your money and will require a special team bag.

That's because, at the heart of it, ball or no, any and all of the extracurricular activities your child will come home wanting to play will involve certain, inexorable realities.

For one, they are going to lose things. Sometimes expensive things, sometimes inexpensive things, but always, always, essential things without which they cannot compete. A glove, a sock, a mouthpiece. Doesn't matter. Your child will have to have it, and your child ... won't.

You will soon be on a first-name basis with the custodial crew at your child's school, which lets you in to search your child's locker more times than the principal. You will have the numbers of parents whose house your child might have been at on speed dial and, when all else fails (and it will) you will become an expert in the intricacies of next-day delivery.

You won't be able to count the times you're searched a dugout or an abandoned gym with a flashlight and you will know exactly how fast you can drive from some field in Harrison to your house and back again, and how much any given county in Arkansas will charge for the privilege of doing just that.

You will threaten your child with levels of punishment unknown outside South American prisons if they ever do that again. They will swear on all that is to come they'll never, ever lose another piece of equipment.

And then they will.

You will bake in the summer, freeze in the winter and generally expose yourself to weather conditions that would make a Navy SEAL say, "Dang!" You will be able to discuss, with some degree of experience, the waterproof nature of assorted rain jackets and the quality of chili cheese dogs at playing field shacks across a four-state area.

You will meet dedicated parents who just want to give their children a good experience. You will meet unhinged parents who may or may not belong on the business end of a restraining order. You will hope you are the former and fear you may be a little of latter.

You will write checks. Lots and lots of checks. One of those checks will be to an association you have to join if your child is to participate. You will determine this association has two functions (three, if you count collecting checks). One of those functions is establishing safety guidelines for equipment your child will use. By establishing these guidelines, the association will reduce the actual number of makers of that equipment to a chosen few. You didn't sleep through that particular Econ class in college, the one where they discussed supply and demand. As a result, you know what that means.

At some point, you will have to watch as your child's dream dies. Maybe quickly, maybe slowly, but it will die. Reality will set in. He will not play for the New York Yankees. She will not dance with the Joffrey Ballet. There will come a day when the final out is recorded or the final gun sounds or the music fades and all that has gone before will be over, and they'll graduate from Participant to Spectator. And that sticker on the back of the car won't mean a thing.

Maybe they'll cry a little bit. Maybe you will, too.

Will it have been worth it? All that time and money and effort and injury, the missed vacations and holidays spent in a gym? If you had it to do again, would you? You will really have to think about that.

And then you'll remember a moment. Maybe it won't even be in a game. You'll remember that time you saw him in the dugout or her during pre-game warm-ups. Maybe you didn't even recognize them at first, because it seems they had grown up, right then. They were smiling with the unrestrained joy of someone who, for a moment, was part of something larger than himself or herself, something he or she loved. In the big, scary world of teenagers that often trades in fear and sadness, they were happy.

Your child wants to play something. You will say yes.

Commentary on 03/06/2014