Meltdowns

One of the primary jobs in cleaning up a Remap podcast recording is snipping out the outside noises of the world. The honking of a car. The yapping of dogs. The hum of a vacuum the room over.

The one that Patrick worries about the most, though, is hearing a child begin wailing and stomping around just outside his office door, knowing his wife is struggling to navigate through a tough moment.

This happened at the end of a meeting earlier this week, prompting Rob to think about the kinds of meltdowns one experiences in life.

Rob: I remember my first Little League baseball team, we had this pitcher named Ben. As much as you can say a kid a good pitcher at age ten or eleven, he was good. He'd started a slightly early growth spurt but also he just had one of those lanky frames that lends itself to the mound. The coach was his dad, but I don't know if his dad was putting him under any real pressure or expectation. Ben liked baseball, he liked pitching, and he was a machine in practice. In Little League, it's basically just about ball placement and a little bit about velocity but if you can reliably hit the strike zone, you're decent. If you can move the ball around it, or hit the corners, you're basically Cy Young.

Ben could do that. In practice.

I wasn't any good at baseball those first years. My mind wandered away from the game, and I was antsy about fielding. I liked hitting and was good at it, but I spent a lot of time in the outfield watching. And so I watched Ben and in no time at all I learned Ben's tells.

It wouldn't be one mistake, at least not one that you could see. Something would happen with a pitch and however the call went, I'd see his face drop as he turned back toward the outfield and paced back to the rubber. He looked angry, but also like he was about to cry. He had a rectangular head and his chin was like the corners had been clipped, and he had a very straight mouth almost like a puppet and from right or center field you could watch those features tighten, then tremble. And you knew it was over. Or at least I knew it was over.

He'd throw his next pitch or two and one of them would miss. Clear ball, and now you'd see his jaw working and his lips trembling and with time I almost wanted to just call time and run to the dugout to tell his dad to pull him because there was still time to stop what was going to happen next.

Which was a wild pitch. Usually high, sometimes so far inside it went behind the batter. Rarely hit him. But the second the ball sailed out of his hands like a magician's pigeon making a break for it, Ben was through. Full on meltdown: angry tears, snapping to himself, furiously running his hand through his hair, smacking his glove like it, or the hand inside it, had personally betrayed him.

I don't remember if this went on the whole season. I hope not. But it happened enough that my only memories of that summer's games are of a single pop-up I caught against the lights in the infield, a triple I drilled on the big-kid field, and Ben coming undone on the mound. I remember his dad trying to talk to him, Ben furiously signaling he wanted to stay on the mound like he could hurl his way out of the bases he'd loaded with ten pitches, and then the walk-in runs ticking-up the scoreboard while eight other kids in tiny, dingy A's uniforms stared at each other like, "Now what're we supposed to do?"

At the time I thought Ben's dad must be pretty crappy at his jobs, coach and parent. If I could see what was going on with Ben, why couldn't he? Why did he keep letting it happen, why didn't he take his son out of the pitching rotation? I assumed that Ben was under pressure. He got extra coaching but it's not like his dad was one of those iconically terrible Little League parents who think he's raising the next Bambino. I remember his dad, smoker's face and aviators under neatly combed silver hair, giving me lessons on bunting and sliding. He was a good teacher and a nice man, didn't care if kids were good at ball or not.

I was never a kid who spiraled. Oh, I had my own issues. Anxiousness and some weird behaviors tied to it, an almost painful self-consciousness at times. But what Ben went through was completely foreign to me. Something slight, barely even perceptible, would happen and it just rocked his entire psyche and then it was just a chain reaction until he was a shambles. Didn't matter what anyone did, or how soon he got pulled off the mound and into the shade and privacy of the dugout. He was finished.

For years I saw the situation through my own eyes as a child, imagining what it must be like to be Ben but now I find myself thinking a bit more about his dad, wrangling a kid who loved baseball until he hated it and it made him hate himself. A kid who couldn't calm down, but also couldn't let go of the thing causing him anguish. After you do the loving hug and arm around the shoulders and it doesn't work, what're you supposed to do? What do you do with the feelings that are tied to something real but they're so big and irrational that they resist any effort to comfort or distract?

You mentioned your youngest is in a bit of a meltdown era and I'm curious what is happening for a parent in that situation. One where, like Wile E. Coyote, you see the emotional plunge off the cliff coming, but you can't do anything to stop it.

Patrick: Shit, the nickname I had on one of my baseball teams was “The Magnet.” I had this horrible habit of leaning into a pitch when I was trying to avoid getting hit. They would chant it when I was going up to bat, while I tried to hold back tears. I have no idea why anyone let that happen?? 90s were a strange time.

I’ve described the psychology of my children this way: my oldest (9) wears her emotions on the inside, my youngest (6) wears them on the outside. Raising your voice at the nine-year-old accomplishes little more than an emotional spiral you’ll spend the next 30 minutes trying to pull her back from. Raising your voice at the six-year-old quickly gets uncomfortable, because she just stares straight back at you, like a demon.

Some years back, we were waiting for some bags at the airport. My wife was in the bathroom, and my oldest was chatting with my mom. I’m surrounded by luggage. My hands are full. I catch my six-year-old trying to climb on the luggage carousel, and I politely ask her to stop. She tries again and I ask her to stop. 

Rinse, repeat. But she’s getting mad at me, prompting her to stomp over and…start biting my leg.