It was the North Carolina State Wrestling Championship and my son was there for a second year in a row. He had had a killer season, winning every match at every school in his weight class and he’d become a calculated and efficient wrestler. He watched his opponents with tactical precision, reviewing every match at its end to refine his technique. He was, as the kids say, A Baller. When I’d see him wrestle, a feeling of ease had finally come over me after years of watching him with clenched fists and a hope that was wrapped in what I can only call a grimace. In the past, bracing for failure or injury, I was now able to relax; in my mind I would think with confidence, “He’s going to win.”
But yesterday, at the North Carolina State Wrestling Championship, he lost, and he lost big. He first lost to someone he had beat to get there. Then he lost to a kid he’d never wrestled before and he was out. What I’d learned before the match was that, after that first loss, my son had woken up at 3am and given himself a thorough beating about it. “You’re a piece of shit,” he told me he’d told himself, “You’re a fat fucking loser.” I can say with absolute certainty that the only person in my son’s life who has ever spoken to him that way is him. In divorce we love to blame the dysfunctions of the other family—the borderline grandma or the long line of alcoholics—for the sins of our offspring. But sometimes our children create these patterns out of thin air, based on some sort of decision they’ve made about their own traumas. Sure, it has everything to do with us, and, at the same time, nothing to do with us at all.
After his final match, he stood in the halls of the colluseum surrounded by his family. This meant me, his sister, my boyfriend and my family, and his dad and his dad’s family. We are a rag-tag bunch. My parents, married now 53 years, my boyfriend of 6 years, my ex’s mom and her third husband, my ex’s dad from whom he is hatefully estranged, and his wife, my ex’s step-mom. There was my son’s sister, who was, as usual, visibly unhappy to be there. There was his uncle, my ex’s youngest brother, and his wife, who seem determined to bring joy to both sides of the family no matter how much we all despise each other. And there is my ex’s newest girlfriend, who, upon meeting me yesterday for the first time had only to say that she’d never dated anyone who’d been married before, or had kids. “It’s very interesting,” she said, to which I’d had no idea how to respond. Circled around my son in that moment, in his deepest misery, it was like we all wanted to support him while having to protect ourselves from each other at the same time. There was so much bad blood between us it was hard to get past, even when none of that mattered now.
Let it be known that my ex-mother in law is kind of my sworn enemy. Perhaps I have subconsciously chosen her as the scapegoat; perhaps I am only hurting myself by holding so tightly to my negative feelings about her. But if I were to catalogue for you her offenses over the 25 years that I’ve known her, I’m sure you’d absolve me of my resentment. As of now, I feel completely justified in not letting it go. Nonetheless, I have given her a hug in recent times, smiled with her and, in my heart, appreciated how she cares about her grandkids. I know we’re to be grateful for our enemies, who unknowingly serve as vehicles to our enlightenment. I’m trying. I figure I’ll clean it up spiritually before I’m dead.
Let it also be known that I still can’t stand to be in the same room as my ex husband. I write a lot about being accountable for our own feelings when it comes to divorce. And I am being fully accountable when I say that my ex seriously grinds my gears. And every time I think I’ve got the formula for coping with being in his presence, I go into overwhelm, then shutdown, and then the rest of the day I’m wishing I’d had a cloak of invisibility instead of years of therapy.
My boyfriend, who is a gem, kept annoying me, too. In public sometimes, when surrounded by people he’s not totally socially comfortable with, touches me too much (too much for me and the meter changes based on my level of personal irritability). He obsessively rubs the back of my neck, or incessantly tries to dig his thumb into the pocket of my jeans. Over and over and over. We’ve had several conversations, gentle ones, about it, but he persists because he’s nervous, or picking up on tension that he can’t discharge all by his big self. I understand, and yet, it drives me bonkers. And when, after offering to drive us home, and my kids had totally had it with this day, he told me we had to stop by an auto parts store to pick up a car battery, I was quietly up-to-here with him.
In hindsight, after hours on the couch with my son and our cats and a good night’s sleep, I see how the stress of the day, or the prolonged stress of many days, had led to my deep and profound intolerance. I had no bandwidth anymore for the things that I can normally brush aside or accept as part of my life, hold with some modicum of gentleness. In the personal hell of my mind, my son was a self-hating tragedy, my ex was revolting, my ex mother in law was a toxic witch, my ex’s girlfriend was an alien, my daughter was a brooding menace, and my boyfriend was annoying af.
Yet I was the common denominator.
And while yesterday was a terrible day, in my mind it was made worse only by how I was relating to it. In times like this there’s a part of me that wished I could just move far away, the distance of another continent obliterating the hurts of the past, blurring my feelings about them and the people who’ve wronged me so. Sometimes, I have the qi to withsdtand that bad energy, a result of all the hard shit this group of people I’ll call my family has been through together, and sometimes I simply don’t.
In truth, I had to go back and edit this post. On its first writing I let myself be as mean and hateful as I wanted, my vocabulary shameful; my choice of words precise but really, really unkind. Sometimes we have to vent; sometimes we have to hold our hatred because, try as we might to move past it, it still rears its terrible head. It is only ours to hold, after all.
But at the end of the day, as I talked with my son about his loss, I realized that the only thing we can offer these parts of ourselves is kindness. If I see those parts like the circle of people who stood around my son yesterday, I see how we are all living with our own shame, our own lack of forgiveness, our own demons. Maybe sometimes we’re not so skillful at keeping those demons to ourselves. But maybe, at other times, we are masters of our own shit, Ballers, as it were, with our precision and our clarity about who we are and what we’ve come from and where we need to be in relation to everyone else.
I can forgive this day, Saturday. I can forgive myself for where I missed the mark in it, too. And I can see that we were all just being human, flawed, broken and trying so hard to demonstrate love for the kid who needed it most. And I can accept that, as it was written so perfectly at the end of the beloved children’s book, “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day,” as poor Alexander longed to move to Australia to get away from the pain of his anguished day: Some days are like that, even in Australia.
