You’re only as happy as your saddest child.

My mom, also a mother to three children, said this often when I was growing up. I never understood what she meant until I had multiple children of my own, and specifically, once those children started going out into the world and dragging my heart along with them.

It’s easy when they are babies, when we can shelter and swaddle them and make everyone wash their hands before they hold them. But soon enough, we have to let them go, and when they come back with a broken heart, ours breaks, too.

My youngest son didn’t make the baseball team. He waited all day for the call, but it never came. Other boys got their call, and still, my son waited.

When reality set in, my son rested his head on me and cried into my stomach, the same one that is stretched and marked from making me his mother. As soon as my son was asleep, I cried, too — not because he didn’t make the team, but because this marked the first moment in a long succession of moments that will chip away at his innocence.

My last baby is growing up.

My older boys and husband tolerated my crying for a bit, but then they warned against it.

“What you do now will set the stage for how he handles future adversity,” my husband said. (I mean, no pressure, right?)

“Don’t let him see you cry,” my middle son said.

“The only thing we can do is help him get ready for tryouts next year,” the oldest said.

“He didn’t hit the ball hard enough,” they said too many times. “He wasn’t focused enough.”

The next day, I had an emotional hangover that most mothers will recognize. I had tossed and turned all night, and my eyes were bloodshot. My head felt like it was full of cotton. Yes, I have three sons, but that day, my mind was on just one of them.

Then, while I was out for a walk, I remembered something from my sixth-grade year. Our class was running the mile and our time would be part of our grade. I wanted to run with my friend who played soccer, but when we paired up, the teacher said in front of the class, “Don’t run with Sarah. She’ll slow down your time.”

As devastated and embarrassed as I was, I couldn’t say the teacher was wrong. I didn’t play sports like my friend did, and I was slow.

That summer, I started running after dinner. Sometimes I ran with my dad, sometimes I ran alone. The next year, I joined the junior high track team and became a pretty good sprinter for someone who had only just begun running. And in the spring, I returned to my old elementary school to run in a fundraiser. I placed second for my age group.

Hadn’t my mom urged me to do that, not with her crying along with me, but by her insistence that I meet the challenge, not escape it?

At 3 o’clock, I met my son outside the schoolyard. His tiny shoulders were slumped as he came toward me.

“Why didn’t I make it?” he asked for the millionth time.

I didn’t answer. Instead I said, “What’s going to be your moment?”

“My moment for what?”

“What will be the moment that makes up for all the frustration and sadness you feel right now?”

He thought about it for a few minutes. Then he said, “When I hit a ball out of the park.”

“A little more realistic,” I urged. (I mean, I placed second in a fundraiser, not the Boston Marathon.)

“OK, past second base,” he said.

Reasonable.

So his older brothers, Dad and I took him, plus a bucket of balls, up to the baseball field and let him hit until he was making contact more than he was not. And the next night (and the night after that) he went again with his brothers. They’ve been up there every night. They come home laughing and talking — a moment all its own.

Maybe my son will make it next year. Maybe he won’t. Maybe he will hit a ball past second base. Maybe he won’t. The only thing that’s certain is that my son will hurt again — about something.

It doesn’t get any easier. My heart is still outside my body and walking around in the form of my children. It always will be. One of them will be sad again, and when they are, I will only be as happy as that.