Escape Points

by Michele Weldon

  “I had some sweaty guy’s crotch in my face,” Colin reported to Weldon after his first youth wrestling match.

  “If you’re any good, that doesn’t happen to you,” Weldon said and walked out of the room.

  My sons were wrestlers, and to them and their friends I was a wrestling mom. I was not a university assistant professor, an author, a journalist, a sister, a friend. I was in their world every weekend and I was a spectator; I believed in my bones that my presence mattered. Even if all I got was a chin chuck at the end of the day. I needed my sons to know I was paying attention; that I wouldn’t leave, that nothing was more important to me than they were.

  I expected to spend my weekends watching wrestling most of the year. We drove to the suburbs forty miles away and sometimes flew to the regionals and nationals one thousand miles away. We stayed at the Clarion Hotel or Ramada Inn if it was an away tournament and drank the bad coffee in the lobby, where they served bagels if you were lucky and donuts if you weren’t.

  When I met another woman anywhere—on a business trip, in line at the movies, at a conference or a party—who mentioned her sons wrestled, we both knew what it meant. We understood the pre–weight-making mood swings, the nervousness before each match, the sweetness or sullenness after, how they looked like gladiators when they competed and tired puppies on the long ride home.

  “You’re a loser! You’re a loser!” one mother from another team seated about three yards from me in the stands screamed at her son as he slowly approached her. He was sweating and breathing heavy, fresh from a loss on the mat. He looked to be about seven.

  “What is wrong with you? Don’t even talk to me, don’t even talk to me!” she insisted. “You should have won!”

  My stomach tightened. Not one of the women sitting near her from her team blinked. The boy placed his headgear down beside her and walked away, shoulders slumped and head lowered.

  Sometimes the greatest lessons you learn are what not to do and who not to be.

  3

  Protein

  * * *

  1990–2010

  As a toddler Weldon placed on the pediatrician’s growth chart in the seventy-fifth percentile for height, twenty-fifth percentile for weight.

  “Put some cream cheese in his scrambled eggs,” the doctor suggested. “He needs more fat in his diet.”

  For the next eighteen years he grew taller while staying lean, a perfect genetic makeup for a weight-making wrestler. When he hit preschool I stopped making him scrambled eggs every day and he grew into the practice of craving an enviably balanced diet of meat, vegetables, fruit, potatoes, pasta, and bread—lots and lots of whole wheat bread. He didn’t ask for candy, french fries, and all the other childhood junk staples. When his friends were driving their parents crazy with a low-tolerance appetite and a narrow menu of macaroni and cheese and hot dogs, Weldon wanted grilled vegetables. And sushi.

  “Fun Lunch” was launched every Friday at school when Weldon and Brendan were in fourth and second grades. Every week a rotating fast-food menu of burgers, chicken nuggets, or pizza was brought in by a group of hearty mom volunteers. You had to pay extra for it, of course.

  “I don’t think they should eat fast food so often,” I wrote to the principal. “It can’t be good for them.”

  As the lone conscientious objector in the entire school of kindergarten through fifth grade, I lost the argument and succumbed to Fridays of junk. According to the boys, being the only student in the cafeteria with a homemade lunch on Fun Lunch day would be one step up from being homeschooled. The only thing worse would be if I was a Fun Lunch mom volunteer, they said, or if I was like any of the other moms who volunteered in the office or the library every day.

  “Some of those moms need full-time jobs,” Colin said in first grade. The mother of one of his classmates hand-delivered her son a thermos of hot soup every day at 11:15 AM. Colin was mortified. I considered him evolved.

  It seemed that even as a preschooler, Weldon—more than my other two boys—was hyperaware of meal ingredients and preparation methods. If food was deep-fried, baked, or overprocessed, he didn’t want it. He asked me, the waiter, hosts, or whoever set food before him what was in the food and how it was prepared. Years before he began wrestling, Weldon had a phenomenally mature “my body is my temple” approach to what he ate. His diatribes on my daily diet soda and morning coffee seemed a little over the top. He clucked his tongue when I bought spinach dip. You would think it was atomic.

  “You know that isn’t good for you, right?” he would ask. And he was seven.

  At ten, he presented me with a three-page typewritten argument for purchasing a water filter for the kitchen, citing the health benefits. He e-mailed me dietary suggestions—I should eat more blueberries, more salmon. Not those turkey or soy sausages for breakfast. One birthday he bought me vitamins, three enormous bottles of them. Flaxseed oil was one. That was better than the birthday present Colin and Brendan bought me the same year: conditioner for “extremely dry, damaged hair.”

  “Isn’t that the kind of hair you have?” Colin asked.

  For what I thought was convenience for me and a helpful fundraiser for the school, I began ordering frozen food through Market Day—a nationwide movement to give schools a percentage of sales on frozen convenience foods ordered by school parents.

  You may have seen the trucks with the red apple logo or the signs on school lawns that read MARKET DAY PICKUP TODAY. Weldon objected to every monthly Market Day offering I ever ordered, from the chicken Kiev to the ravioli and breakfast burritos. Appalled, he would read the multisyllabic ingredients out loud and gasp at the sodium content. You would think I was offering him cyanide.

  “If you’re so picky, you make dinner,” I told Weldon.

  And he did on occasion. Weldon’s red bell pepper soup was better than any I had ever enjoyed in a restaurant. He started with chicken broth and added pureed and sautéed red peppers and yellow onions, carefully following a recipe he found online. His carrot cake was moist and delectable, even though he somehow got grated carrots on the ceiling—every time.

  The other boys helped too. I figured this was a good by-product of having a working mother. Train a generation of men to cook.

  Brendan took up grilling; his favorite thing to do was marinate—fish, chicken, or beef, it didn’t matter. He would have a dozen bottles of spices, oils, and vinegars set before him on the cutting board island in the kitchen and mix them all up. He, too, would neglect to put anything away. Or wash the pans.

  Colin joined in as chef; his specialties were scrambled eggs; pancakes; hot sandwiches with melted cheese; tuna salad with cilantro; spinach sautéed with olive oil, garlic, and lemon; and grilled asparagus with balsamic vinegar.

  Between the diet of gross reality shows they all devoured (the ones with a circus of dysfunctional families or the skateboarders who wrecked houses), all the boys watched cooking shows. Brendan had a crush on Rachael Ray. Weldon bought me cookbooks and read them himself.

  “We totally smashed that,” Colin said. That meant they ate it quickly, not that they squished it on the walls, which is what I feared at first.

  Food appeared to be more important to them than most anything else. Outside of wrestling season, I could not stock the refrigerator or freezer fast enough. Three gallons or more of milk a week, four boxes of cereal, two loaves of bread, pounds upon pounds of chicken, turkey breasts, ground turkey, steak, lean ground sirloin, pork tenderloins, salmon, pasta, oranges, bananas, spinach, broccoli, tangerines—the boys could eat a wooden crate of about thirty tangerines in a weekend. Four pieces of fruit a day per boy.

  I worked primarily to pay the food bill. And the sitter. And the mortgage. Yes, I worked for my own professional highs, but the paycheck was spoken for before it arrived.

  I would stuff the refrigerator on Saturday morning when I came home from the grocery store, and on the following Thursday night the naked shelves held only olives, pickles, mustard, barbeque sauce, an
d vitamins plus low-fat hazelnut-flavored coffee creamer. After dinner, while we were all doing the dishes, Weldon and Brendan would stop to stand before the opened refrigerator door and graze.

  “We just finished eating,” I said. “You can’t possibly be hungry.”

  But they were. If it wasn’t processed, canned, or frozen, or if I made it from scratch, they would devour it almost without chewing. Each one of them would ask for seconds, rave about how it tasted, thank me for making it. They loved it all—the roasted chicken; the turkey meatballs; the homemade apple pie I made with butter, cinnamon, and apple cognac; plus the fudge brownies with a dash of lemon extract.

  “They’re good eaters,” my mother had remarked about the boys. They ate first, asked questions later, and tried anything.

  This constant, daily stream of affirmation was a very good thing; I cooked, they ate, everyone was happy. I was a good mother making sure my boys were healthy. They smiled at dinner. Each one of the boys would eat as if he was on fast-forward, often finishing the entire meal before I even sat down.

  “Wait for MOM!!” Weldon would shout at the other two—after, of course, he had downed several bites.

  I clearly stated my objection to two-handed eating, one hand gripping a fork and another hand with a knife at the ready. Like Popeye.

  “One hand,” was my abbreviated reminder.

  I reprimanded them over what I called shoveling—introducing new bites of food before the old bites were chewed and swallowed.

  “You’re shoveling,” I would say, trying to model appropriate dinner etiquette. “Put down the fork and chew. Wait. Wait. Wait.”

  Then I threw in what I considered the clincher. “Women would prefer to eat across from someone who was not acting as if he was in a hot dog–eating contest.”

  Sometimes I thought they were afraid there would never be another meal after this one, and that if they did not eat the last chicken breast, sparerib, or baked potato, another brother would get it and they would lose out. Only the alpha male won the food. If I made chicken pot pie for dinner, or turkey chili with three beans, the first son up the next morning would finish it off before his brothers could slip the bowl of leftovers into the microwave.

  “I have thirteen muffins in my cargo shorts,” Brendan announced in the van.

  We were in Florida visiting my brother Paul one spring break and were headed back to his house after dinner at a salad-and-soup buffet restaurant. When we got to Paul’s, Brendan emptied his pockets and put the muffins in a bowl on the kitchen counter. They were all gone by the morning.

  I wondered what all this consumption really meant; if there was some deep psychological need to nurture themselves with food, if they were overcompensating for something. But they didn’t horde food, they didn’t eat in secret; they just ate a lot. They worked out three or more hours every day. Sometimes I swore they each consumed up to five thousand calories a day.

  There is a primal relationship between a mother and her children’s nutritional intake. Without exaggeration, my sons’ lives depended on the food I provided.

  When each boy was an infant, I worried at first about where I would breast-feed him every hour and forty-five minutes. Then when they were toddlers, I packed enough formula and crackers, Ritz Bits, or Teddy Grahams in plastic sandwich bags in the diaper bag to get through a few hours. Then I graduated to making sure they each had a good lunch packed for school—sandwich, fruit, pretzels—which I made the night before to avoid the morning chaos.

  I aimed to give them a balanced dinner when they came home each night. Working every day, the healthy sit-down dinner was a challenge. A few of the sitters would cook dinner—chicken soup, broiled vegetables, and whatever meat I defrosted in the morning. But most of the sitters over the years refused to cook. I prepared enormous amounts of food on the weekends—meatloaf, turkey burgers, chicken breasts—to last through the week. My sister Madeleine invited us for dinner most Sundays and gave me the leftovers. If family parties were at Maureen or Paul’s house, they sent me home with enough ham, bread, cheese, and coleslaw for a few meals. It was understood my sons ate a lot.

  I offered my boys soup, crackers, and Jell-O when they were sick, and cake on their birthdays. I limited fast food, pizza, and the boxed mac and cheese with the bright yellow-orange powder. I did my best to make sure what I put in them was good for them. It’s what I called a mother’s high; I literally watched them bloom. They grew taller, they stayed healthy; it was simple cause and effect. Good diet plus multivitamins and you were on your way to the good mothers’ hall of fame. Well, that was the hope.

  Every other part of parenting seemed less straightforward, more fraught with emotion. But this? Feed them good food and they are happy? That seemed a no-brainer.

  So it was unsettling as a mother of wrestlers who loved to eat to continually witness the finite wedge of time—before and after matches, season after season, from November to March (longer if they wrestled off-season)—when they deliberately and pointedly restricted their intake and disciplined themselves ounce-for-ounce to make weight, to be the exact number of pounds in a weight class in which they would be certified to wrestle. It was a loaded issue for me as a mother who had basically been on a diet for thirty-five years. Give or take twenty pounds, I have been the same size since my late twenties—I won’t say since college, because I was about twenty-five pounds lighter at that time than I am now. I didn’t know whether I was impressed or terrified to hear a son say he dropped five pounds during a three-hour practice, when it would take me forty days and nights on a treadmill, eating only ice chips, to do the same thing.

  When I lived through the sixteen or so weeks of limited consumption that constituted Weldon, Brendan, or Colin making weight, I admired them for their intense discipline, especially when I could not walk past a bowl of onion dip made from the soup mix without sampling. But it also was frightening; I did not have control over what they did. I had to let them go, I could not care for them in this basic way and none of them would listen to me about it anyway. They were going to make weight no matter what I said or did. And I could not stop them. It was for wrestling, it was what they needed to do.

  A vegetarian, Coach Powell told the wrestlers how to identify what food was good for their bodies. Work out more, be smart, run a mile or two, he told them. He gave them printouts of diets and a booklet on healthy eating.

  “Skip the cheeseburgers,” he said.

  I told the boys my brother Paul’s simple rule: don’t eat anything you can’t wash. That would eliminate desserts and include pretty much just meat, vegetables, and fruit. I tried to do the same.

  Though he started wrestling in high school at 119 pounds, Weldon wrestled at 140 pounds in his junior and senior years, a weight he maintained in season through daily workouts (weight lifting and running), eating protein bars, and having the discipline it took to excuse himself from eating most everything at Thanksgiving meals—no dressing, no mashed potatoes, no gravy, just PowerBars and lean turkey. That’s right, not even pumpkin pie.

  During season Weldon said he was never completely full; he would go to sleep hungry, wake up hungry, and stay just a little hungry for weeks on end. At five feet ten, his weight was less than what I weighed at five feet six. Whenever I said I was worried about him or suggested he could at least eat something—a small piece of chicken, a banana, something other than a Clif Bar—he was irritated and reminded me yet again that I didn’t understand because I was not a wrestler.

  Brendan started high school at 165 pounds at five feet four, got down to 135 his sophomore year at about five feet seven, then voluntarily catapulted into the practice of gaining thirty or more pounds after season and losing that much before the next season. The summer before he was a senior, Brendan was up to 195 at close to six feet. By November he wrestled at 171, where he stayed throughout that summer.

  Colin weighed 123 at the beginning of his freshman year, having started in youth wrestling at 80 pounds. He wrestled his freshm
an year at 119 and sometimes bumped up to 125 depending on what holes the team had at what weight. A few times he wrestled at 112. Almost immediately after his sophomore varsity season, Colin weighed 140 pounds. His junior year on varsity, he wrestled at 130, sometimes 135. Before wrestling season began, he weighed 142. At times he would drop up to eight pounds in one week.

  This severe yo-yoing was not something I could do quickly or chronically. I spent several months in Weight Watchers a few years ago and lost seventeen pounds. I have kept most of it off, but with enormous effort. My boys could lose seventeen pounds in a week to ten days. Every season. During wrestling season weight was a daily conversation centerpiece in our house, as was the protein and caloric measure of every morsel of food. It was an odd contrast from the abundance of food they required the rest of the year. After season, they could each eat a pint of Ben & Jerry’s with a spoon while standing.

  “Don’t eat that, man,” Brendan would say to Colin.

  “What? A grapefruit doesn’t weigh much.”

  “The water in it is heavy. Have a grape. Tuna.”

  And on and on the arguments went. Over almonds and ice cream and pasta, the virtues of protein shakes and the evils of chips.

  The boys each said they could tell how much anyone weighed by looking at him or her. Feeling unusually confident, I asked the boys once how much they thought I weighed. They were excruciatingly right, but I did not let them know that; some numbers a mother prefers to keep from her sons.

  For years I believed my sons went through all of this as a vainglorious attempt to prove something to other people, to show them they each earned their victories without nepotism or favoritism. But I have come to believe they did it all for nobody else; not for me, not for the coaches or the crowds in the stands. I believe they did it not to exorcise anger or frustration or to prove their worth as athletes. I believe it was to prove to themselves that they could maintain self-control and perform alone without anyone else’s intervention—on a treadmill, in the weight room, on the mat against one opponent, or at the dinner table facing a steaming Thanksgiving buffet.