Escape Points (19 page)

I
n the same stack of mail today are the MasterCard bill I do not want to open, four separate bills from Rush University Hospital for Colin’s concussion treatments, Colin’s report card from the high school, and a letter from my former husband with a return address sticker listing his second ex-wife’s name (it is crossed out in heavy-handed swipes) and address. I recognize the handwriting: big, loopy, childish. It is just the third letter from him to our house in more than seven years.

Inside is a check for $1,000 on an account in his name listing his mother’s address. I wonder which one of these women he is really living with—second ex-wife or mother—and I decide it does not matter. The check is made out to me. It comes with a note dated “26 Feb 11” handwritten in blue ink on a simple white sheet of copy paper—no stationery, no niceties, no formalities. He has taken to the European form of calendar dates.

In the note he says he has read my e-mail about the years of no child support payments. He says he will respond to me soon. In the meantime, he writes that he wishes the boys and me well.

I cashed the check.

I remember back to my twenties when I pictured—literally pictured—our unborn family like a painting, a fertile scene within its finite borders. Clean, sharp angles held a portrait of a family landscape within, a beautiful image that was at once comforting and contained, as well as expansive and limitless. I always felt so lucky to be able to engage in the creation of this scene, this family, these children, this setting, our setting, of our doing, demonstrating the willingness and the desire to be one unit. My illusion was that this picture, this family, would be safe always and nobody would ever want to crawl away or out of the frame, because they knew everything and everywhere else was not able to produce this happy, welcoming warmth. It was home. It was family. Even the sound of those words calms me still.

It continues to baffle me that once inside this picture, not only would someone elect to eject himself from its membership, but that it would never occur to him that such action was wrong. I believed my former husband was still operating under the belief system that his children were accessories. He thought he could cryptically inquire every few years about their well-being but otherwise be completely absent, completely disengaged, withdrawn, invisible. Just blowing smoke into a cavern. That he could go missing with no trace.

But I need the check; Brendan’s tuition is due for spring quarter at Ohio State, and Brendan called earlier asking for more swipes on his Buck-ID meal plan. Thirty swipes. Seven dollars each.

Six weeks earlier I sent my former husband an e-mail with one hundred pages of the copied legal documents in .pdf form with the most recent court appearances, motions, and maneuverings. I included a one-page summary of all that he owed in back child support, hundreds of thousands of dollars. I also wrote that I intended to pursue the case with the State’s Attorney’s office.

I had told myself that for the years he was living in Amsterdam, it was completely pointless to pursue child support. But now that he is living and working in the United States, in Chicago—either at his mother’s or his ex-wife’s, I will take steps.

“Are you moving to put him in jail?” Weldon asks me every time we speak. He doesn’t call him “Dad” or his real name.

I tell him I will pursue it in the next month or so; I need to get through winter quarter, I need to revise my manuscript, I need to get Colin through his treatments, I need to fold the clothes, I need to replace the grout in the bathroom, paint the kitchen cabinets, finally learn how to use the curling iron on my hair, graduate from roller derby class into intermediates, maybe grow my hair longer.

I have had a lifetime quota of legal conflicts and am not eager to go back in the ring. My official stance is that I do not feel engaging in a legal fight to incarcerate their father for nonpayment of support is something that would make me proud. Each one of the boys tells me—often—that is what they want me to do.

“Do it for us, Mom,” Brendan says. “You need to show him he cannot just walk away and pretend we do not exist.” Usually the conversation ends more colorfully: “I want his ass in jail.”

Most days I am trying to reconcile with myself the notion that this fatherlessness my boys live through is not ultimately my fault. I am trying to disassociate from his disconnection, and making the equation of parenting not include him, not even as an asterisk. We are complete as a family without him. We are not a broken home. We are not broken. I am enough. They have other men to love who will fulfill a fatherly role.

I listen to other mothers tell stories of their growing children—happy stories—and I wonder if that can possibly be true all the time. Or if they are delusional or deliberately skipping the less than optimal parts. Does no one else have a flip side to the framed family photographs?

Truth is, it is difficult to be a mother, a parent, even when you have a partner who holds up his half of the house. Truth is, even if you are by yourself, you are never really holding up your house alone.

We have a not-so-old washing machine that may be on its last legs. It is my third washing machine in this house in sixteen years. I know one washing machine is supposed to last that long in total, but
in our house they just don’t—none of them do, no matter the brand, no matter the type, no matter how much they cost. I do about three full loads of laundry a day when the boys are all home—one full load a day when it is just Colin and me in the house—his workout clothes, towels, my workout clothes.

I am currently in full-blown denial about the washing machine and that it should be replaced. It does not spin. Let me revise that; it does not spin without an intervention. It stops on the dial at the spin cycle. It only took me one or two loads of dripping wet clothes to see the problem. So to dry the clothes past dripping wet, I have to open the top and manually turn the basket with one arm, with the dial set to spin and one finger pressing in the hole where the top should be, so the basket will move at all. It takes three, four, five of my Fred Flintstone–starting-the-car turns to get it moving, then
fwack
, I lift my finger and let the top of the machine come down. I pray the spinning continues and I have tricked the basket into spinning. I watch the hose in the cement tub to be sure water is coming out to prove the spin cycle is working.

Most of the time it does. A few minutes later, when the spin cycle stops on its own, the clothes are dry enough to hang or throw in the dryer (which also could stand to be replaced because it can only take a small towel, some socks, and underwear at one time). No appliance in our home is in peak shape. You would never know, looking at the clean clothes in our closets or on our backs, smelling the clean sheets, admiring the clean guest towels in the bathroom off the kitchen, that the spins are not automatic. I intervene.

I can’t change the way it has worked out for my sons. I wish I had chosen better for a husband, I wish that their father had been the man he said he was and the father I imagined he would be, long ago in my twenties when he was young and handsome and full of promises. My sons deserve better.

My close friend Susy recently sent me an e-mail that she was moving out of our neighborhood to be closer to a man she had been dating for a few years since an unpleasant divorce. She had been living in her late mother’s condo, and her youngest son was now out of high
school and she saw no reason to stay in the same suburb. Her boys were grown. She is thinking she may marry this man. She wrote:

I tell my sons all the time that being happy is not the goal of life, it is a by-product of doing what you are here to do, finding your bliss by fulfilling your broader dreams of where you fit in the world. You can be happy eating a cheeseburger. Taking a nap. Watching the Discovery Channel. Life is more than that. There is happy from immediate pleasure, and then there is lifelong happy that sometimes hurts along the way. I am not sure if I am right or not. But I do know this: from now on, I choose happy.

I
t’s a Friday night in January and I am in a Coralville, Iowa, hotel room, a little weary from the four-hour drive from Chicago west on I-88 and then even farther west on I-80, past texting truck drivers and horizontal snow winds, miles of empty ice-dusted fields, and about a hundred signs for Subway. It’s comforting knowing all those Subways all over the country house all the same ingredients—chicken cubes, marinated meatballs, peppers, wheels of tomatoes, lettuce confetti, loaves of Italian herb bread sliced swiftly. There was no need for me to stop at one along the way; I just finished putting six turkey, cheese, and spinach sandwiches I made this morning and about a gallon of Vitaminwater in the small humming refrigerator in room 226 of the Comfort Suites. Colin can eat tomorrow after the weigh-ins for the Iowa City West High School quad against Apple Valley—the top-ranked Minnesota team—Iowa City, and suburban Chicago Marmion Academy high schools.

This is one of my final road trips in nine years of high school wrestling for all three of my sons. I am exhausted, nervous, excited,
eager. I want Colin to win; I don’t want Colin to get hurt. I want to laugh with the other parents in the stands. I want to just for a handful of hours stop thinking about the rest of my life—the pile of bills, Brendan’s dilapidated apartment, Weldon’s whereabouts in Spain where he is in graduate school, my students, meetings, seminars, ungraded papers, upcoming court dates, freelance deadlines, the snow piling on my front porch steps, the weight I need to drop from Christmas cheesecake.

On the way here I was listening to a 1970s and 1980s radio station from the Quad Cities that lasted at least one hundred miles of the trip. So between Stevie Nicks, Journey, and Stevie Wonder, I was woozy from a buffet of emotions—scoops of pride, relief, nostalgia, and grief. With a windshield view of gray ice ribbon pavement stretched before me, I started to think of all the miles I have logged as a wrestling mom, some alone, some with Colin or Brendan in the backseat, some with Caryn at the wheel—wrestling moms have as much stamina and vigor as any screaming sports fan I have ever seen on ESPN. Except we never paint our foreheads or bellies.

I have spent probably thousands of hours logged in the stands for what amounts to fourteen years when I count youth wrestling plus high school. I have heard the shrill screech of billions of whistles, sometimes so loud my ears pop and I feel fogged in from the noise, unable to concentrate on any one sound. And every week, every season, some of the same scenes play out, over and over, like renditions of
Cats
or
Rent
in musical theaters in suburban strip malls across America. The only thing I have done more of in my life than watch wrestling is work. And sleep. Yes, sleep comes second.

Tomorrow for most all of the day I will be in another high school gym, this one in Iowa City. Oh yes, I have learned that all high school gyms across America look pretty much alike—sure, they have different school colors and mascots and some stands even have backs to the seats—but once you are sitting in the stands, the view is pretty much the same. The lessons I have learned watching wrestling have been not just about the sport.

I have learned not to look away, to be present or you will miss something. If there are six or eight mats in a gym, all with simultaneous wrestling matches, you could have a piece of lint in your eye or chat with the mother next to you and miss your son’s match entirely. You have to pay attention. Listen for his name. Follow him to make sure you know where he will be. Then keep watching. The three two-minute periods feel like an eternity when your son is up against someone who looks like he is made of metal, but you need to concentrate, watch carefully, and pay attention. Life, like a wrestling match, goes by quickly. The clock moves relentlessly forward. Daydream and you will miss the entire reason you are here.

This is not to parrot the cliché many soon-to-be empty-nesters say about childhood flashing past. I do not feel any part of my sons’ childhoods went quickly; I do not even feel they all went well. I feel I gave raising my sons all I had, and all my imperfections and impatience came along for the ride. I do feel that now that the boys are twenty-three, twenty-one, and eighteen, their childhoods are pretty much over. That is not to say that I will stop telling them to brush their teeth, be polite, study harder, or call me when they arrive somewhere. That is not to say that I do not worry about what kind of men they will be—are. That is to say that I am pretty much finished with the intense parenting part. And it is humbling to look back.

My sons didn’t like me all the time—and yes, as preposterous as it sounds now, I expected that they would. Our house was not always a calm or predictable haven from the rest of the world’s injustices and chaos. Sometimes it was downright awful. I yelled. They all yelled. Unspeakable things were said. Apologizes were delivered. I punished. I took cell phones. I confiscated video controllers. I enforced bans. I took the car keys and hid them. Sometimes they couldn’t find them. I cried at night. I cried in the car driving to work. I speed-dialed them over and over so they would answer my calls. I waited up. I waited in the car. I waited in the gym. I waited in the doctor’s office. I waited in the emergency room. I waited in the front hall, clutching my cell phone, peering down the block, holding my breath at 3
AM
,
praying to see the headlights of the Nissan Altima before it pulled into the driveway. And then I could breathe.

I complained. Not always, but I complained. When I was tired, when I had eighteen-hour days, when their sweat-soaked workout clothes made the basement smell like a sewer, when the teachers called, when they asked for more money than I had, even though I worked several jobs in addition to teaching just to keep us all afloat. I complained when they swore because they thought I wasn’t listening, when they didn’t ask how I was. I should not have complained. I am sorry that I could not always see with the perspective I have now that this part is almost done. I should have always been grateful. I am now—mostly—I am now.

Because what happens when you raise children as the only parent with all your vulnerabilities showing like neon on snow—through their heartbreak, your illness, and disappointments—is that you raise them without filters. They yell at you because they can. They tell you their secrets because they want to. They hold your heart, not as hostage, but as willing captive. They don’t ask you to go to a tournament because they already know you will. They don’t acknowledge your presence sometimes because they know you will still appear no matter what. They have to know you will always do what they need to have done, even if they scream in a teenage hurricane that they hate you.

On any given Saturday, or for that matter Thursday or Friday night, I am quite sure I could have found something else to do other than watch my sons wrestle. Put in a load of laundry. Go grocery shopping. Drink wine. Sleep late. Read a book. Work. Watch one of those housewives of wherever shows. Go on a date with someone who at first seems plausible. Go for a walk. Think. But I chose to be present for them. And I truly have to believe that it mattered.