Hoskins celebrates his wife on Mother’s Day

This story was excerpted from Adam McCalvy’s Brewers Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

TAMPA -- Mother’s Day has always conjured complicated emotions for Brewers slugger Rhys Hoskins, who was five days shy of his 16th birthday when he lost his mom, Cathy Reynolds, to breast cancer.

This year, those lingering feelings of loss will be accompanied by a new sense of joy. Hoskins has delighted in watching his wife, Jayme, embrace motherhood since giving birth to the couple’s first child, a daughter named Rory Jane.

“I married my wife because I love her, I’ve always thought the world of her. But you learn quick that you have a different appreciation for women when you see them become a mother,” Hoskins said. “It’s not that I’m surprised, by any means, to how she’s taken to being a mother. But it’s just an amazing thing to find that you have no clue what it’s about because you become a parent.

“It’s almost indescribable. Just the way she nurtures and puts everybody before herself. It’s always about Rory or about us as a family. That’s just been an amazing thing to watch, that nurturing side of her comes out instinctively. I couldn’t be more grateful.”

Hoskins knows better than anyone what a mother means to a child. He’s spoken often over the years, including a lengthy discussion during a recent episode of the Brewers Unfiltered podcast, about the lessons of perseverance he learned from losing his mom. She battled breast cancer for 14 years before passing away.

With age and experience, those lessons are clearer to him now. As a teenager, they were understandably more difficult.

“My sister and I always have a great conversation on Mother’s Day,” Hoskins said. “Sometimes short, sometimes long, but always reminiscing. As we’ve gotten older, we talk about, ‘What would mom think now?’ Or, ‘What kind of qualities do we see in ourselves that our mother had?’

“I think initially, the holiday was not great. But as I’ve grown older, I just have learned to appreciate it differently. It has brought things into my life. And now, it’s a different perspective because I get to watch on a daily basis somebody who is a great mother to our baby girl.”