Escape Points

“We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”

—Joan Didion

I
t was a January Saturday in 2011, a home Oak Park–River Forest High School Huskies wrestling tournament with fourteen teams competing in the field house, the squat brick building off the narrow alley where kids tried to sneak in without paying the entry fee at the front door—some parents too, pretending they didn’t know about the five-dollar charge when we all know they did. Colin, a seventeen-year-old junior in his second year on the varsity wrestling team, pinned his first opponent in his first match of the day. A wrestler like his two older brothers, Colin was pumped to place, perhaps to win. Confidence was his strong suit.

A local newspaper photographer shot his photo at the millisecond that he pinned his first opponent. I walked over to the reporter to make sure he spelled Colin’s name right. The reporters never get anyone’s name right; sometimes they get the scores wrong too.

The competition was steep; several wrestlers at Colin’s weight were ranked. Colin had earned an honorable mention in Illinois and had just returned from a shoulder injury and three different checkups with the orthopedic specialist to make sure he could return to competing. The night before he beat the 130-pounder from Downers Grove South at the home dual. I cheered like I was mainlining Red Bull, dressed in orange and blue—the school colors—as my nieces Katie and Maggie shouted Colin’s name.

“Go, Colin. Go, Colin, yeah, yeah!” I was videotaping his match from the sidelines, kneeling thirty feet from him.

Now it was noon and Colin was up against a ranked wrestler from Minooka Community High School in the semifinals. Just one minute into the first period, Colin was trying to escape, get his one point—you have to get your escape point—when the other wrestler took him down and slammed him backside on the mat.

The thud was loud, thick and solid like a bag of sand slammed onto the shore. The back of his smooth, blond head took all the impact. And he went instantly limp.

Oh God, oh God.

Colin was not moving.

I dropped my camera and stood. I could see Colin unconscious, completely immobile, out. But in my mind’s eye, my mother’s eye? I saw him paralyzed. I saw him in a wheelchair, thirty years old. I saw myself pushing him.

These are the visions you have when your child darts into the street, falls off the slide, stands in the high chair. You imagine the worst, the end point, the catastrophe. And you see it—yes, you actually do.

Two matside trainers were trying to resuscitate him with deliberate spiral motions to his sternum. He didn’t move. I watched as the coaches surrounded him, all desperately attentive. Colin still did not move, not a muscle, not a hair. All my peripheral vision was erased. I saw only this tight circle with Colin at the center as if it was spotlighted on the stage and the rest of the world went dark. I waited.

He’s not moving.

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee
.

I held my hand to my mouth so I would not scream. My head and my chest were engulfed in gasoline flames and my hands got hot, damp with perspiration. I just stood there, waiting.

Colin was not moving. One minute. Two minutes. Oh dear God, three minutes.

Parents were mumbling, wrestlers were pointing. It felt as if the entire gym morphed into a hole void of all animation; only the trainers working on him were in slow motion. All I could see was Colin lying on the mat, face up, still not moving, his legs sprawled and his arms at his side, like a Raggedy Andy doll taken down from the cross.

The first part of him to move was his left knee.

I did not rush the mat; I knew Colin would be upset if I did. Coach Mike Powell, the head varsity wrestling coach, who had gone to Colin’s side, turned to me and mouthed the words, “He is all right.”

“He’s moving,” a father said behind me.

The coaches helped him up; Colin wobbled toward me. The gym erupted in applause. He looked dazed. Coach Powell walked Colin to the side where I was and I scooped up his sweatpants and headgear, carried his water bottle.

Colin knew his name. He knew where he was. He knew the date.

“Get him to the ER now,” the trainer said.

“Someone will get his backpack. Call me,” Coach Powell said.

I drove deliberately and calmly to the hospital a few miles away. I was good in crisis. I handled enough of them alone. As a single parent since my boys were six, four, and one, I had been in so many emergency rooms with them so many different times in the last twenty-two years of parenting—stitches, sprains, lacerations, dislocated shoulder, swallowed nickels, yes, swallowed nickels—that I knew how it went. I had good insurance, this hospital emergency room was usually competent and swift, the staff did not make you wait long.

No matter what, it does no good to be emotional, to be upset or distraught or even demanding, you just remain calm. You need the nurses and the doctors to treat you well and your child better. You absolutely do not want to be a pain in the ass. Show your insurance card. Shut up. Do not add drama to the cocktail mix of crisis.

A calm demeanor helped when Brendan nearly severed his left index finger in shop class during his senior year of high school. When the school nurse called me on my cell phone, I was driving down Sheridan Road to my office at Northwestern University where I was an assistant professor in the journalism school. The nurse was more unnerved than I could afford to be.

“Brendan’s hand was severely cut with a blade saw,” she said, trembling.

“Is it attached?” I asked.

They must have ice and a cooler and I can be there in one hour, and if they need him to go sooner, for sure, Coach Powell would take him or I could call a friend who might be at home today and I can meet them at the hospital, and it will be fine.
You cannot afford to be doused in hysteria; three active sons cure you of that indulgence pretty quickly.

The mother’s eye was in full bloom then too; I pictured Brendan with four fingers years down the line, as an adult. I pictured him telling the story to his grandchildren, and then I also pictured it being reattached in surgery. So I have a slew of simultaneous movies playing on screens in my head at the same time.

“He didn’t cut off his whole arm, right?”

“Right, it’s attached.”

I recovered my breath and I knew I just had to keep driving because getting in an accident would be worse. I could call Sue, my nurse friend, and she would call ahead to the ER at Loyola University with the great trauma center I knew well. It was where she worked and everything would be OK; it would just take hours to process it all, get the stitches or whatever else. And then there would be the recovery.

Brendan did not lose his finger. And he later gave me the wooden box he was working on in class; it had dried blood all over the outside. I cleaned it.

Today will be the same. As long as I am not the overbearing mother, everything will go as well as it can. I can stay calm. I only have Colin to worry about today. He is moving, he is talking, he is acting OK. He is not paralyzed. It did not come true. It was the wrong movie.

“Shit,” Colin hissed.

He was angry, aggressive, impossible to soothe. He paced in the small curtained-off area where I sat trying to maintain my own equilibrium.

I turned my back to Colin and quietly told the emergency room doctor—who appeared to be at least twenty years younger than me—that Colin was very agitated and not acting like himself. I remembered somewhere from some class, anecdote, website, book, speech, or maybe an episode of
Grey’s Anatomy
that a symptom of stroke or something more serious in your brain is a sudden change in personality.

“Do you think you’re acting differently?” the doctor asked Colin.

He looked at the doctor, indignant, fuming. “I could have won!”

I sat in the cramped ER space with the blue curtains and scuffed beige walls in complete disbelief. I had imagined his life as a quadriplegic, sipping through straws, and all Colin could think of was not getting a medal at the end of the day.

And he did end up being fine, but it took six to eight weeks, with several visits per week to the concussion specialist at Rush University Medical Center. I tried not to cry when the doctor assessed him by asking him to repeat a series of five or six numbers. And Colin could not.

“Say the months of the year backward starting with October,” the doctor said.

Colin could not.

“Repeat these words:
baby, bathtub, ankle
.”

Colin could not.

I didn’t cry.

Too much was in the news about concussions: a pro football player committed suicide, the magazine cover story, all of it. I knew enough. All I knew was Colin had to be OK. If I could will him to recovery, I would.

But there was only so much I could do. I could drive him to the appointments. I could wait in the blue fabric chair next to the examining table while the doctor questioned him. I could use my insurance card and write the copayment. I could love him. But I could not heal him from this or from anything. Not today, not yesterday, not tomorrow.

I live in a quiet suburb with wide lawns and thirty-foot trees, a backyard to run around in, a garage filled with bicycles and a basketball net just outside it. I live in a redbrick home with cream shutters and blue striped awnings that belonged to my brother Paul and that my mother helped me buy when I was divorced. I do laundry in the basement, I cook breakfast on the electric stove, and I turn on the thermostat for the air conditioner to kick in during the summer and the heat to begin in winter. In the spring I fill the front porch with clay pots of flowers, which I water daily. I take clippings from the irises, hydrangeas, geraniums, tulips, and coleus in the summer and place them in vases around the house. I lock my doors at night, and the neighbors smile and wave when I pull my car into the driveway. My five brothers and sisters offer me help any time I need it.

That’s what you see from the outside.

From the inside, my life would appear as a Rube Goldberg machine with cartoonish and ridiculous gadgets, all moving in complicated trajectories, accomplishing little. That is the easy portrayal, the accepted vision of mothers—and more pointedly—single mothers who work outside the home.

We are seen as holograms of women, eerily transparent visions performing acts of duty in different blocks of time and space, shifting stage sets from work to home and back again. All of it is described with language of desperation and a narrative of drowning—we are made to feel that if we work long hours, we are selfish, and if we spend long hours with our children, we are wasting our brains. And that we never get anything exactly right. It becomes political and polarizing, and it makes you hate the woman next door who drops off her child at school and goes to the gym.

I bristle at the popular cultural notion of single parenting as minefield, a path dotted with traps, the jeep steered through the maze by the overwhelmed hysteric who needs too much wine with her girlfriends to cope. A woman who can’t make it to the meeting or the top of her game, because she has baths to give and books to read to her children. Someone who is always on the verge, always ready to scream because it is all so crazy. There is this idea that a working mother is bound for failure because having it all is a cruel joke, a mesa on the mountain that is unattainable.

I become brittle and defensive when women dig into the barrel of chaotic scenarios to create a story of perennial strife surrounding motherhood, shaking their heads and using
busy
as a four-letter word. It arouses my defenses. You can be busy raising a family; you can also be busy brushing your teeth. Busy is not a bad thing. Sometimes you come home from work after a day that lifts you up out of your shoes and your sons tell you jokes that mentally erase the inconveniences and frustrations from the last two weeks of your life.

We do what we have to do. And the reason it is important to tell the story of someone doing what needs to be done is so the next five hundred women who are faced with challenges see a role model of possibility. That you don’t have to be soaked in drama and vodka to cope. That you can maintain your dignity and your sanity, and raise children who contribute to the world while you do the same.

You can do it all. You just cannot do it all well all of the time. And if you really want to give back to your sisters and model for the young women who are most assuredly watching you for clues, if you are seriously considering turning down a promotion or are wondering if ambition is a selfish thing to have, I am here to reassure you that the choice is yours. Trying to make the most of the life you have been granted is a noble thing to do. And the grace arrives.

It does take a village, and it actually takes much more. It takes villagers, family, and someone other than you to show up, really show up, reliably. Sometimes it takes an unlikely stranger.

I knew I could not make up for the father who left my sons. I may never be able to forgive myself for choosing a man who would treat our sons this way. But his story is not mine. Mine is a story of what happens when the door closes and you stand waist-high in the murky puddles brought on from someone else’s tsunami. When the shock of the water subsides and you realize you would never drown, you count your blessings.

Because all three of my boys wrestled in youth competitions and high school, I can acknowledge that wrestling has taught my sons a great deal about resilience, integrity, humility, and strength. I am not an athlete, not even close. But the lessons were there for them, and for me as well.

This sport they chose was as much about them as it was about their separateness from me, their single mother, raising them without a father at home, a man whose slow withdrawal from their lives eventually resulted in his complete absence. It was as if after a decade of partial involvement following the divorce, he was gone, like a package lost in the mail without a tracking number.

Wrestling gave them other men to respect, and one man in particular to love. To love like a father.

My sons were wrestlers, and I quickly learned what that meant. A wrestler is a boy who wants to be respected for something only he does. He doesn’t want someone to pass, pitch, or kick him a ball. Or a puck. He wants to go out on the mat with no equipment other than headgear and shoes and outwit and dominate with his own strength and agility a boy his size, his age, and his temperament. He wants to be stronger and faster and smarter. And whether he wins or not, he wants to hold up his head, walk off the mat with dignity, and shake the hand of the other coach and the other wrestler. And wait for the next time with a new chance to win.