Dear Felix,

I was crying when Cal Raleigh hit the home run that propelled the Mariners to their first postseason berth since half a lifetime ago, but I didn’t know it had happened. I was sitting in a cheap recliner in your bedroom, your little triceratops nightlight staining the walls a heavy-handed shade of blue. I should have been downstairs already, just like I should be every night: back downstairs, back at work, and so I was measuring your breaths, waiting for that deep sigh that signaled my freedom.

I would have been down there, would have flipped on the screen just in time. But it was Friday night, and you were tired, and you didn’t want to floss your teeth, and I was tired, and I didn’t want to floss your teeth but I had to. Nearly seven years, a couple thousand bedtimes, a streak of its own, but not enough. You fought because you wanted to stay up, wanted to pull all the cushions off the couch and leap on them, wear your Spider-Man costume and pretend to be a dinosaur, growl and yell and live. 

You used to be younger and do exactly those same things, but it’s different now. I’m different now, and I don’t really like it. You’re nearly seven, old enough to fight, and I’m too old to fight back. Instead I stand there and wait, wait for you to remember what you need to do, to lie on the bed and open your mouth, the barest imaginable exertion. You didn’t. You thrashed around, buried yourself under the covers of my bed, yanked at the sheets, laughed, ignored me. Tired of asking, tired of demanding, and needing, empathy that clearly wasn’t there, I cried. I hated myself for it, the stress of a dozen promises and obligations were already on me, and I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

I cried, hating myself for crying in front of you. You saw me cry. And you didn’t do anything. And in an instant I realized I had accidentally played a trump card and lost the trick. Something between us cracked, a little.

So I yelled, and you cried, and I cried, neither of us understanding how this could possibly happen. and I brushed your teeth as you howled at me, a wordless wail of powerlessness, and I put you to bed. You hyperventilated as your mother kissed you goodnight and I told you that it was time to turn the lights off, no poems, just darkness. Nothing else left. 

Downstairs, behind the black screen, Cal Raleigh swung at a pitch that would have made Miguel Olivo proud, reached down and out of the zone to uppercut it as if he, too, were impatient. As he clubbed the ball he held his bat aloft, pointing it at the gods, as it arced toward the foul pole slowly, lazily, waiting for destiny to flip its coin.

And while we sat together in that room, you fading into forgetful sleep, me angry at myself, the Seattle Mariners won their biggest game in two decades, and players and friends celebrated the culmination of something, a great tearing down of the gallows. So much energy released, a great universal sigh. I couldn’t be there. I couldn’t be there anyway; there are some moments that don’t need writers, moments of drunken confusion and exhilaration, special because of their wordlessness. 

I dreamed, when you were born, that you would be down there with me, drinking in that game, but it hasn’t come to be yet. Baseball is just something that takes me away from you when it gets dark. And that’s fine. Tonight’s game wasn’t for you, really. It was the end of a story from long before you were born, a much simpler story. It was my own Spider-Man suit, my own couch-cushion fort. 

Parenting deserves champagne showers, but there are damn few, and I’m not sure I’ve earned one. I’m not even sure I know how to tell whether I have. There are no box scores, no milestones. Tomorrow you will wake up and it will be spring all over again, and I will wake up in the middle of September in a 90-loss season. I told your mother about the game as she and your baseball-indifferent sister watched a Drew Barrymore movie. “I’m sure they filmed it,” she said. They did. So have I, now. Turns out they record them all, even days like these.

—Your dad