Wrestling Mom author Michele Weldon videotapes her son.
I am the mother in the stands dressed in the school colors who has been screaming her three sons’ names at shrill, glass-shattering pitch, so loud at times that two years ago some of the junior varsity wrestlers took to imitating my cheers—in good fun, Brendan reassured me. I order all the photos of my boys on Kodak.com placed on the shared albums by fathers diligently capturing the moves of each teammate. I have dozens of framed snapshots of the boys in my office. I am one of those moms you just might hate.
I spent eight years as a wrestling mom, and likely have at least three more seasons to go. During my oldest son’s last high school varsity wrestling season in 2007, he placed fourth at the Illinois state championship while I recovered from breast cancer. Two years later, my middle son, Brendan, won the Junior Varsity championship for 171 pounds. My youngest son Colin is wrestling varsity as a sophomore at 125 pounds for the 2009 top high school team in Illinois.
This website is built around a forthcoming book about community and family surrounding a sport that is widely misunderstood. Tell someone your son wrestles and he or she either understands instantly or equates it with the platinum-blond barbarism of the WWF. Others think all the boys have eating disorders. Many say it is just plain gross.
But I know better. For my boys, wrestling has filled the vacuous black hole of hurt their father left with his slow evaporation, then his complete absence and now denial of them. Wrestling is more to them than practices and matches, singlets and warm-up suits. It is a way for my sons to form an identity, to become better people, to channel their emotions. It gave them another family. It gave them good men to imitate in the coaches and strong friends to lean on in victories as well as challenges. Wrestling filled the father void with something good, something they achieved, something they were proud of, something they owned, even if what they owned at times were losses. And there through all of it, for all of them, was an is an amazing coach, Mike Powell.
I won’t brag on this site about their wrestling, because my sons beg me not to, but I will tell the truth about what wrestling has done for my sons, and how it has shaped their lives, and mine. I wouldn’t dream of missing a match to say, go to the movies, take a nap or meet a friend for lunch. I always figured I would not be proud of the epitaph, “She always had a recent pedicure.” So I go and sit in the stands. And scream.
In all of this sweaty confusion, five years ago I managed to fall deeply, madly in love like a college junior on study abroad in Rome. And he is a swimmer. So this site is about that too.
And it is about trying to move ahead with challenging work as a tenure-track assistant professor at Northwestern University. Like all of us, I am trying to manage it all, do it all and still laugh at the end of day. I welcome your advice, your stories and your support, as I lend mine to you. We all have a lot to wrestle in our lives; we just hope most days we don't get pinned.