I am proud to be a Wrestling Mom. An All In Wrestling Mom. My two sons have always been active in sports. Each sport has value and teaches its own lessons. Unlike other sports, wrestling lessons, both physical and mental benefit every sport and benefit life in general. What the t-shirts say is true, “Once you have been a wrestler, everything else is easy.”
It’s Friday night and I am in a Coralville, Iowa hotel room, a little weary from the four-hour drive from Chicago west on 88 and then even west-er on 80, past texting truck drivers and horizontal snow winds, miles of empty ice-dusted fields and about 1,000 signs for Subway. I just finished putting six turkey, cheese and spinach sandwiches I made this morning and about a gallon of Vitamin Water in the small humming refrigerator for Colin to eat tomorrow after the weigh-ins for the Iowa City West quad against Apple Valley and Marmion.
I know we are all supposed to be above this kind of thing. We are not gloat. We are in it for the challenge and the discipline of the sport. But oh my, it is one of the 10 best feelings in the world when your son has his hand raised in victory in a […]
You know you’re a wrestling parent when: Beyonce sings about all the “single ladies” and you hear “all the single legs” and wonder why Beyonce has a song out about wrestling?…The smell of wrestling shoes brings back memories of matches rather than makes you sick to your stomach (ok, it might make you sick to your stomach as well)…You know more about rashes than your doctor.
In the stands every wrestling season since 2004 I have had plenty of anxiety attacks about what work I needed to do once I got home, what I needed to get accomplished for the house or for life, how to keep all the pins juggling in the air. But it was always worth it to go, spend most of the day in a gym wearing the orange and the blue just to see what splendor my sons could create. And it was splendid, even if the gym smelled bad and the other parents were sometimes hostile and some kids cried when they lost.
The truth is many men need to step up to their responsibilities. It is not a class issue, a race issue or even a generational issue. It is a human rights issue.
Today my oldest son forwarded me an email from the head of a much bigger household. Barack Obama, himself raised by a single mother in the absence of a father, writing from the White House.
It’s Saturday night and I have the rare opportunity to do whatever I want. My three sons are all young adults and elsewhere at this point in their lives. You might think I’d pull out that romance novel I’ve been looking forward to (yes, I know they are trashy, but I love them) or put on a chick flick I haven’t been able to watch.
But no, I have a better guilty pleasure in mind, wrestling.
For a few years when the boys were small I went out to eat on Mother’s Day with them, paid the hefty brunch prices and basked in the boys’ adoration, even if they did keep asking the waiter to refill the bread basket so many times he was deeply annoyed. I felt as a single […]
It’s all fine and dandy and true-feeling from the bad coaches and kids who are horrible in practice to the skinny kid, Stemler, who is terrified of wrestling, to the entire team on the bus en route to their own pinning crucifixions. We also loved the brief scene with all the wrestlers piling up the stairs and out of the Flaherty basement in a blur of muscular adolescence. And Kyle’s tatoos. A lot of wrestlers have tattoos.
I have read a lot of comments about the new book, “Battle Hymn of The Tiger Mother.” And this is what I think. It takes a big parent to admit her reach is limited. It takes a realistic mother to understand that it is not optimal to have your influence over your child be so enormous that it shapes everything the child does or hopes to become. I do my best. I strongly suggest. I mandate. I insist. But I do not believe parenting is meant to be a battle. And the battle hymn we sing as parents should be a song that is inspirational, uplifting and not just noise in the background.
Do you know how much your child weighs down to the ounce? Do you avoid making eye contact with your child after he or she loses a match until your child approaches you? Do you find yourself wearing the school colors every day whether or not you are attending a meet or tournament?
Then you're a WMD. A Wrestling Mom or Dad.
And we'd love to hear your stories. Submit a guest column, a few photos, videos, or comments and we will publish them on the site.
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