Escape Points (20 page)

B
ob, my attorney, told me not to bother going to court for the status hearing on the “motion to strike all references to educational expense claims in respondent’s motion for sum certain.” I had not gone to any of them—and there were more than six—since my former husband first started filing motions to dismiss support in the fall of 2011. There were forever the continuances and the requests for more documentation, a cycle of rhetoric and inaction. He had filed a motion for all documents, photos, tapes, electronic messages, and files bearing my name and the names of my boys. That would literally be hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of documents. Then it was dismissed.

“I’ll let you know,” Bob said.

My former husband was attempting to prove he did not owe the seven years of court-ordered back child support or college expenses because he had no money and I didn’t need the money. He insisted I had secret accounts for the boys’ education, said I was not forthcoming with all my assets. I don’t know where or what I was supposed
to be hiding, but if I did have any of these hidden accounts, I sure would get better haircuts, and maybe not eat lunch at my desk every day. For sure, I’d have the cleaning lady come more than once every six weeks.

He claimed for himself annual incomes of zero for the past several years and had the tax returns to prove it. Zero. Yes, though he was flying between Amsterdam and Chicago, living, working, eating, he had no income. None. No money for travel, food, shelter. A former litigating attorney for one of the most prestigious firms in the city and editor of the law review at a major Catholic law school, and he made less money than Colin did in a weekend of dog-sitting for the neighbor’s two bulldogs. I swallowed a missile of fury.

“What did you eat today?” I wanted to ask. “Berries and leaves?”

But I didn’t go to the court appearances, partly because of my teaching schedule at Northwestern and partly because years ago my heart had exterminated him. I had no room left for his chaos. Bob went in my stead. Still, I was curious.

“What does he look like?” I asked Bob.

“Thin. Weird.”

I didn’t ask what he was wearing, though I did want to know if it was a neatly pressed suit. It didn’t really matter. I knew better than to update any of the boys about these latest proceedings, even hint that there were any more. I had learned my lesson. At the close of the summer of 2007, shortly before Weldon left for college, when their father first launched his legal maneuvers to avoid child support, I had made what I thought was a reasonable request at home. I had asked each one of the boys to please be exceptionally cooperative and understanding of my level of stress and to not add to or create any conflict. In other words, let the house just be peaceful.

“Your dad is bringing me to court,” I had said to each of them. “I need it to be calm at home.”

All I really wanted was for them to put their dirty clothes in the laundry room, maybe empty the dishwasher once in a while, come home when they said they would, or clean up after themselves before I got home from work. I hated leaving a house full of sleep
ing boy-men, cleaning it all up, working a full day, then coming home to boy-men and some of their boy-men friends on the couch with a mess in every room. Having the house be somewhat neat would help counter my feeling that my life was out of my control. It’s funny how their made beds allowed me to feel a semblance of order. Funny how a sink without dirty dishes made me feel as if I had it going on.

“Your dad wants to declare you emancipated and have all child support forgiven, past, present, and future.”

I may as well have unpinned a grenade in the living room or set them on fire. Selfish and foolish of me; I know that now. I don’t know why I didn’t realize how explosive that information was, how painful that was for a son to hear. Of course the boys did not care about my level of stress right then. Of course this was not about me. All they heard and all they felt was that their father wanted to discard them, dissolve all responsibility, be done with his children. Pretend they don’t need. Pretend they don’t live.

I should never have said a word. My request was absurd, like asking you to please be quiet while I amputate your hand.

What followed were weeks of rigid tension, fights over nothing, raw hurt translated into aggression. Each son was quick to defend or attack. They all fought with me and each other over the smallest indignations—who ate the last piece of chicken, who lost at a video game. And no one made his bed.

Now, after five years of legal annoyances and denial of support, I was having dinner with my friend Michele, who is a divorce judge. I told her how exasperated I was. But she told me I probably should go to the court date in February, to show my former husband I wasn’t intimidated. She said I needed to be there to be a real person to the judge, not just a respondent, someone’s client, a faceless name in a file. But going would be difficult; I had a class all Tuesday afternoon, a graduate-level editing class with sixteen students ranging from twenty-three to thirty-three years old. One of the students in my class was a younger sister of a student I taught as an undergraduate, another was a man in his thirties who studied at the Sorbonne
and came to graduate school after serving in the military for seven years. I wanted to go to class; besides, it is almost impossible to get a stand-in for a four-hour class.

I didn’t go to court; it was continued anyway.

T
hree days later Colin was wrestling in individual state sectionals. He needed to be in the top four to qualify for individual state, the opportunity to win a medal, what he had been planning for and working for his entire high school wrestling career. “You are steps away from the top of the mountain,” Colin said Coach Powell told all the wrestlers.

I had watched Coach Powell speak to the boys in the lobby of the Holiday Inn in Pontoon Beach, Illinois, the night before the Granite City tournament. All the boys gathered near the pancake machine, toaster, and juice dispenser, some kneeling near a locked refrigerator that held the contents for a free breakfast.

The wrestlers from our team took up almost all of the chairs in the room, but two boys from another team sat at another table tapping on their laptops. They stopped to listen to Coach Powell. The room was silent, each bedraggled son in sweatpants and fleece jacket, his worn wrestling bag at his feet, rapt in attention.

“This is about courage and determination,” Coach Powell said.

They looked at him, silent and believing, like he was Moses.

Ranked eleventh in the state, Colin’s record was good, twenty-nine wins, nine losses. I had seen most every one of those matches this year. One very important match I almost missed. It was the time I flew in from San Francisco on the 6
AM
flight after co-leading a seminar at Stanford. I landed at O’Hare after noon, raced to the high school, which was twenty minutes from the airport, and had another mom from the team meet me at the front, take my car, and park it in the high school parking lot so I would not miss any of Colin’s match. I ran inside the field house to catch Colin one minute into the first period of his match. And I saw him win.

It was like this every weekend, at every dual, every tournament. We were all cheering in the stands, screaming loud, responding with our silly team mantra after each win for each of the wrestlers, “Who let the dogs out?” Then we would all bark.

“You sound crazy, Mom,” Colin said.

Colin had never gotten downstate since he was on varsity his sophomore year. He had MRSA after winning regionals that year; he got the severe concussion junior year at the Huskies Tournament the end of January, two weeks before regionals. This was his last chance. As a senior this was the last time he would be able to be as good as his older brother was, as good as everyone believed he could be. He could be a champion, prove to the outside world he was great at this. He could be someone with a state medal, someone who deserved it all, even if his own father never knew, even if his own father would have to read about it online or in the local paper.

Coach Powell and Coach Paul Collins always told Colin he was good enough to be on the medal stand at state. Colin could dominate anyone in the wrestling room near his weight; he had beaten the Wisconsin state champion in January. He had beaten wrestlers with better rankings. All Colin had to do was believe it—go out on the mat confident enough to win.

Weldon had been calling every day from Madrid, where he was getting his master’s in contemporary Spanish history. The night before Weldon talked to Colin for more than an hour, telling him how he deserved to win, how he needed to win, how he was a champion.

“It’s your circle,” he said to Colin. “You don’t let anybody take your circle.” I could hear Weldon almost shouting over the phone.

Brendan texted Colin from his apartment in Columbus, just a few blocks from the Ohio State University campus, the apartment with rats in the basement and squirrels in the attic. It was the kind of student housing that makes every mother’s stomach churn.

“You can do it, Colin,” he wrote.

It was snowing in the afternoon and I was worried about how long it would take to get from my campus in Evanston to De La Salle High School at 35th Street and Michigan Avenue on the South Side of Chicago, just about ten miles. Traffic could slow to a near stop on Lake Shore Drive when it snowed. The first matches were at 4:30
PM
, so I left my office a little after 3
PM
.

Colin had been OK in the morning, a little nervous. He didn’t want to talk before he left for school and I left for work. He had to make weight—138 pounds in the newer weight classes set in 2011—so he was irritable. He packed two turkey, spinach, and cheese sandwiches for after the weigh-ins and three bottles of pink Vitaminwater. He would leave on the team bus straight from school.

“What can I do to help you?” I asked Colin.

He shrugged. “Love you, Mom,” he said as he shut the back door.

All the other moms from our team were in the stands when I arrived carrying the stuffed Siberian husky we dressed in a singlet and headgear. It’s the dog we call “Champ” that Caryn bought in 2009. We take turns waving him above our heads whenever a wrestler on our team wins. Pat, the mother of the heavyweight, starts the cheer. Otherwise, Champ sits in the stands. After the matches for 106, 113, 120, 126, and 132 pounds, Colin was up. Four mats were going at once, so we could get out at a reasonable hour. This was the preliminary
round; the champions from regionals had a bye. Colin had come in second at regionals, so he needed to wrestle this one.

His opponent was a wrestler with a record not as strong as Colin’s—twenty-four wins, six losses—but Colin looked uncertain. I could see it on his face; sometimes he seemed lost, as if he just woke up from a dream and was surprised to be there. It was a close match, a lot of scrambling, and when the buzzer sounded at the end of the third period, Colin had lost 5–4. After shaking hands with the winner and the other team’s coaches, he ran off the mat and disappeared into the back hallways of the school, where another group of mothers was putting up red foil Valentine decorations for the sweetheart dance that night. I knew better than to follow him.

I have learned that my boys are not like me after they suffer a disappointment or a heartbreak. I want to cry, I want someone to listen to me, tell me I am OK, tell me anything I need to hear. But my sons want to be left alone, and they want nothing to do with anyone, least of all me. I have come to accept that and it is OK. Though every part of me wants to talk to him, hug him, soothe him, I know that is not at all what Colin wants or needs.

I knew that he was hard on himself. I knew that Coach Powell was furious at him, not just for losing, but for not letting himself win. Powell was not going to let Colin get away with losing, not believing in himself. Powell was going to yell at him good. He was going to make him cry.

But the reality is that half of the wrestlers in every equation are losers. Not good odds when you think about it. I think of the sport and the years of my boys on the mat, and I remember the victories, the rumbling din of clapping, shouting, and hugging the other moms. But for each match, one of those two boys slinks away, head lowered, shamed, beaten. Sometimes the loser blames the ref, the call, a poked eye, a wrenched shoulder, a twisted ankle, but I know, really know, each wrestler blames himself. It is hard to watch that torment in anyone’s son. It is almost unbearable to watch in your own.

You sit in the stands so long for so many Saturdays over so many years that you see just how much each win or loss means to these
young men and you see how some parents handle it well and some parents, well, some parents you want to just vanish. Some parents boo the boys and the refs. Today two fathers got in a shouting match in one corner of the gym, where more than a thousand parents and athletes pace, gaze, or fume. Some parents make snide comments about your son or your team just loud enough so you can hear them. Some of the mothers cry in the stands while friends or sisters or mothers console. Some fathers storm off enraged. The whole day is loud, uncomfortable, and confrontational as the whistles bounce off the tiled gym walls and the teenagers step on your coat or your shoes climbing over you to get to the concession stand, bringing back plastic boats of orange cheese they will likely spill on your back.

What you want to say is, “It’s just wrestling,” but you know it isn’t. It’s like telling me, “It’s just a book” or “It’s just a class,” but it is more than that. It is a metaphor for your identity, your worth, your intention, your dreams. It is a measure of how far you have come, how big you have dreamed, how far you have dared to go. It means everything. It is more than just high school wrestling, even if you don’t want it to be.

Weldon called four times on my cell phone, but I didn’t hear it ring in the din of the high school gym. Brendan texted. I texted him back. I e-mailed Weldon and texted him that Colin lost. I knew he would call later.

Going into individual state finals, our team was first in the state for this year; we won our conference and dominated every tournament, sometimes winning by one hundred team points or more. Coach Powell was looking healthy for the most part, not as thin as he was in 2009, but thicker, more like himself. He got a new haircut and grew his beard, as he did every year leading up to state. He acted as if he felt OK, though sometimes he limped when he stood up from the stands or walked awkwardly when he left the chair at the side of the mat at the end of a match. He never complained. If you asked, sometimes he just smiled.

“I’m OK, my numbers are down,” he would say. Then he would change the subject.

His father, Bud, talked about going on vacation for a week with his wife, his son, and his son’s wife in St. Lucia, after team state.

“He’s depleted,” he said.

But Coach Powell had been able to take the seniors on the trip last summer to Angel’s Landing in Zion National Park. They hiked for two days in Bryce Canyon National Park. One photo from the trip shows all the boys with their shirts off on a mesa—plus a shirtless Coach Powell beaming alongside Coach Collins and Coach Boyd. Colin has the framed photo in his room on the nightstand next to his bed; all the seniors had the same framed photo. Coach Powell gave it to each senior on senior night at the high school.

The rest of the night there were plenty of wins for our team. Nine of the boys held out hopes for state; they would be the state qualifiers Colin planned to be.

The next morning was a chance for wrestle-backs, the consolation round; Colin could still make it to state if he won three matches today.

I got to the gym with Caryn about 9:30
AM
. Wrestling started at 10
AM
and my brother Paul showed up shortly after that, asking where the coffee was. With four matches concurrently, it all moved pretty quickly. Colin’s youth football coach, Tim O’Dell, showed up to watch Colin. He had come to the high school a handful of times this season with his son Tommy to cheer Colin on.

Colin was up against a wrestler from a school outside our conference who had a 27–12 record. He had never wrestled him before so I didn’t know what to expect. From the first whistle, Colin dominated, and he won 8–5. Coach Powell was pleased, handed him his shorts and sweatshirt after the match, and went to the side with him to go over some moves. Colin was still in it. He could still go to state.

Between matches, I went over to Colin in the stands and kissed him on the top of his head. He let me.

“Thanks, Mom,” he said.

The next match would be easy for Colin, up against a wrestler with a 19–3 record, someone who Colin seemed to dominate early on. Paul and I were crouched on the sidelines, cheering.

“You got this, Colin,” Paul screamed.

It looked in the first period like Colin would win, and then all of a sudden it was over. He was pinned. And Colin lost his chance for individual state.

I didn’t see Colin for at least an hour; I am not sure where he went. I waited in the stands and knew he would come back when he was ready. Paul said he went to look for him and found him sitting by himself, silent, distraught. Paul hugged him and told him he had a great season and that winning did not matter as much as giving it your all. He had a good season. He could be proud.

Later in the afternoon, before the break in sessions, I saw Coach Powell approach Colin and hug him, another long embrace. From where I sat in the stands across the gym, it was a sight that I pray will stay with me for years.

You don’t have to win to be loved.

Monday shortly after noon, following a two-hour undergraduate Magazine Storytelling class, I was in my office on a conference call, listening to about a dozen people speak back and forth, occasionally inserting a question or responding. My cell phone vibrated on my desk and I could see it was Coach Powell. I hung up on the conference call. I needed to take this.

“How is Colin?” Coach Powell’s voice was raspy, deeper than usual.

“Devastated, but OK. He’ll be OK.”

“Colin could have won, he beat one of those kids twice already,” he said. “But what’s important is that he got the lessons from wrestling that he needed. In the end it doesn’t matter how you did in high school wrestling, nobody cares. It matters what kind of man you are, and Colin is a good man.”

I started to cry. Noon on a Monday morning in my office overlooking south campus.

“I’ll talk to him,” he said.

I started to babble about how much I appreciated Coach Powell and what he has done for my boys, how much I wanted Colin to have that feeling of winning, having his hand raised in the air in an
assembly hall of screaming fans. I said I could not have raised these boys without his influence, that I was grateful for all his efforts.

“He can have that feeling later in life,” Powell said. And, he reminded me, although Colin had lost his shot at individual state, he would still be able to wrestle at team state if the Huskies qualified. He paused. “Part of this is about you. You let all your boys go into this sport and you let them be who they are.”

Maybe it is because I am a writer, but sometimes I see my life played out in scenes.
I could write this that way,
I think as someone is laughing or walking away. This was a scene with the music swelling up, the teary ending. The not-so-happy ending, but the one where you know in your bones it will all be OK. It’s the ending where the hero reveals himself, the villain recedes, and you know the lessons have been learned. But then I knew it wasn’t really an ending at all.