My sixteen-year-old son Ben has been standing in front of the television for the last four weeks with a black wooden bat in his hands. His tongue makes a clicking sound as if a ball has made contact with the bat. He does this over and over again like a daily meditation. He wants the Mets to win so badly he can taste it; it's all he talks about. "Hey, what about those Mets?" he says at the dinner table. "Did you see Benny Agbayani hit a home run?" He hasn't done his homework and his sneakers are untied, but he could tell you every second of every game the Mets have played this season. In his mind he's going to join the Mets after high school, though he's never played on a baseball team in his life since T-ball. Or maybe he'll get a job keeping vigilance of their scores with the sports page spread across our kitchen table. And then that clicking sound will return, and he'll be enjoying the vista of the crowds, the run to first base, the pale salmon light as Robin Ventura slides safely into home plate.

I didn't grow up with brothers, and I have no idea what's in the mind of teenage boys. As a mother I can only make the daily leap from crib to crayons to some stranger taller than me and who waves a bat back and forth and substitutes clicking sounds for the real thing. Every morning when I wake him up for school, I touch his curly head and announce the early hour. As I rub his back, my hand remembers to this day the softness of an infant, his sleepy red face, and the smiles that used to come instantly when he saw mine. Now he grumbles, turns his head the other way, and reaches for the covers again. The distance between mother and child grows longer; it's supposed to be that way they tell me. But this halfway place, somewhere between second and third base waiting for a possible out, where exactly is that?

The temptation is to push back, maybe even disappear emotionally from him, let him figure it out all by himself. I'm in the background folding his favorite tie-dyed shirt, making peanut butter sandwiches for his school lunch, picking him up from his friend Andrew's house. When I pull up there's a porch full of boys––some of them smoking cigarettes, some with girls on their laps, some leaning over the railing. Ben gives Andrew a high-five and runs down the front steps to jump into the car. Sometimes as we make our way home, he talks to me about the latest CD he wants to buy, or the Mets' score; or sometimes we are in total silence and I don't know what to say.

"Would you take the garbage out?" I ask as pull into the driveway. "The dog needs a walk. Have you done your homework?" Some days my conversation with him is limited to such mundane requests, and I'm embarrassed as the words come out of my mouth. I want it to be different somehow, but I honestly don't know what to say to this boy who feels like a child in a near-man's body.