Watching a Softball Game While Pregnant with a Girl

May 26th, 2024, my father and I scroll mindlessly on TV and find a Cubs-Cardinals game on ESPN, teams neither of us care about but are broadcast here in the Chicago area. Watching is an easy way to while away the hour between now and dinner. Rain rages outside, and so Wrigley Field is rained out too. The broadcast is no longer in Chicago and takes us instead to Tennessee, a sparse softball field where fans sit on metal bleachers and shout “Vols, Vols, Vols!” 

There’s no active decision to watch or change the channel, not one audibly made. My father and I can do this with any sport, turn our faces to the television like flowers in the sun and fall into the rhythm of the game itself. 

We learn the facts. Bottom of the seventh inning, the ranked-three Tennessee Lady Vols at home against ranked-fourteen Alabama, in an elimination match before the WCWS, which we learn is not a one-on-one matchup like in baseball, but a narrowing of the bracket into a playoff series. The Vols are down 3-1, but they have a threat on the bases and Bama pulls their starter for a relief pitcher, who jogs onto the mound.

I don’t remember her name. I remember her blonde ponytail and her broad shoulders and her firm, powerful legs as she winds up and throws. Stats on the screen show us she’s a senior, 6’1, but she does not tower over the other players. They are all tall, well-built, focused. With the shorter distances between the bases, between home and the mound, you can see their expressions in the batter’s box. Sweat collecting on their foreheads. 

I am thirteen weeks pregnant with a baby girl. Two days prior we’d hosted a gender reveal for close family, spreading jam between cake layers to mark who our little stranger would be. No smoke signals or confetti cannons. In 2024 it feels altogether unnecessary to place so much stock in gender, but we wanted to know. We wanted to turn the nebulous state of pregnancy into something approaching concrete. Images, names, faces.

This is the first time I start to see her. I superimpose her on the pitcher, the batter, the girls on the field, the girls in the dugout. My brown skin, my husband’s sharp nose, her glasses bobbing, her dark hair swept up in a ponytail and streaming out of the helmet or cap. I see her at this lofty level of a sport, watched by mostly empty bleachers and TV viewers only here because of a rain delay.

Bases loaded, two outs.

In the fifth grade my father urges me to try out for the softball team at school, though I have no experience beyond playing occasional games of catch with him in the yard. You don’t need any experience, you’re ten, he says, but this is not the case. The experience I need is elemental. The Florida sun beats down and one hour into practice, I collapse from dehydration and heat exhaustion. I am the only one not to make the team, a team that hadn’t planned to cut anyone in the first place. I am the exception, the liability, chubby for my age and an indoor cat, used to air conditioned rooms and watching sports on TV.

Hundreds of miles away, the boy who will be my husband plays baseball on a kiddie team and does okay for a while, with the coaches tossing underhand to each of the little boys in the batter’s box. Then another boy starts pitching and my husband takes a fastball (how fast? It is all fast when you’re young) to the face and from then on, cannot look at a ball without fear. He cries to get out of baseball games, and even embraces an unusual number of funerals that year as excuses to be absent. 

We grow into bookish, introverted adults. Our parents were athletes, playing basketball and cricket and track and field. When I meet my husband at Notre Dame, a campus of athletes and scholars alike, he is five-foot-nine and 120 pounds. The eighteen year old softball girls would’ve squashed him like a roach under their cleats.

The way we defied the wills and lives of our parents, our daughter might defy ours. She may become an athlete. I envision shuttling her to swim practice at five AM, the car smelling like chlorine as she wrings out her ponytail. Or volleyball at five PM, as I wait in the parking lot with a book propped against the steering wheel. I could watch her, until she inevitably wants me to take a step back and fade into the brick walls. I will take pictures of her in her uniform, watch her legs grow longer and her pose more confident. Hands on hips, shoulders back.

Kiki at the plate.

I remember her name is Kiki because that name is indelible to me, thanks to the 1989 Studio Ghibli movie, perhaps my favorite film of all time. The gentle tale of a young witch learning to make it on her own is also a tale of depression, creative burnout, and finding community in the face of emptiness. I turn to it as a writer but I can see athletes turning to it as well, Kiki straining her body and mind to regain her ability to fly, feeling unworthy when she does not perform.

Kiki, the announcers tell us, is the greatest player in Lady Vols history, the exact person you want in this situation. The bleacher crowd roars. Blondie sets, whirls her arm, and two pitches later Kiki grounds out to short and the Bama players rush the mound, falling on each other one by one like dominoes. My father and I sit stunned, then we realize that softball games are only seven innings, that what felt casual and inconsequential to us was in fact elimination. We could’ve at least been standing.

When Kiki the girl-witch learns to fly again, she steals a push broom from a janitor and saves her friend Tombo from a zeppelin accident. Hundreds of people cry out for her, this once-pariah of a town now its savior. Kiki the softball player is only human, and her career ends like this, an 0-4 night on her final elimination game.

Kiki is a woman of color with long dark hair and light brown skin. On her face, crestfallen, barely looking at the still-screaming crowd, I see my daughter.

All I know about our baby is her chromosome complement, that she has a head and eyes and two hands and feet, all I know is the data printout from blood tests and grainy ultrasound images. We’ve given her a name and do not know if it’ll suit from the beginning, if she’ll fall into it, or if we’ll decide on something else entirely. Nature and nurture. All the science in the world tells me nothing in the end. I look for ghosts on television and on softball diamonds instead. I look for, hope for, a crowd that still chants “Vols, Vols, Vols” even after defeat.

Malavika Praseed is a writer, genetic counselor, and editor. Her work has appeared in The Twin Bill, Defunkt, Identity Theory, the Chicago Review of Books, and others. She is the current Creative Nonfiction editor at The Twin Bill literary journal. A graduate of the Randolph MFA program in Fiction, she is currently at work on her debut novel. She lives in the Chicago area.