The boy in red is on top. The boy underneath him, in blue, struggles, lifting and turning them both. They flip and flip again, locked together. Now the red boy is again on top, his arms and legs churning tirelessly, as if trying to row a boat across the mat. At the referee’s whistle the boys untangle and trot to separate corners. They cannot be more than eight years old, small boys, dressed in wrestler unitards, zippered footies, and headgear that covers their ears and straps under their chins. One moves into the arms of his coaches, while the other stands apart from his, nodding his head quickly in response to instructions, his eyes alert but expressionless, like an animal’s.
Only one can win. I can’t help feeling for the boy in blue, whose tenderness and frustration are plain on his face. But the boy in red is compelling—he seems propelled by impossible and infinite energy. I watch from above, from a walkway circling the top of the Petoskey High School gym. The din is tremendous; the stands are filled with shouting adults, and the gym floor is sheathed in eight sections of mat, in each of which move an adult referee and two wrestling kids. This is the state of Michigan’s championship meet for wrestlers ages five to fourteen. I’m here, like most everyone else, to cheer on a particular child: my nephew Luke. I am also here to demonstrate that my side of the family loves him. There are about 300 kids competing here, in a series of matchups that will last all day. Kids roam in wrestler gear, ranging in size from five-year-olds to teenage heavyweights. A thirty-seven-pound girl, blond curls reaching to her tiny bottom, runs around happily with her bigger pals. Girls wrestle with the boys, wearing little black knit caps to keep their long hair out of harm’s way. Boys sport shaved heads or modest mohawks. Kids and adults alike wear team T-shirts emblazoned with fighting words: “Champions aren’t born, they’re made,” or “Wrestlers, beware!” or “Don’t be a crybaby. Wrestle hard!”
Across the hall is a break room where people sit talking quietly in team and family groups; long tables are piled with coolers and snacks, clothing spills onto the floor. Between matches, kids run around in packs, hovering like two-legged bees around the slushie vendor. This break room is a welcome respite from the arena. “It’s quite a scene, isn’t it?” asks my sister, Kay. “The first time I came . . .” and she shakes her head. Meaning, “Wow.”
It’s true. Walk across the hall to the gym and the roar greets you with a physical punch.
Eleven-year-old Luke is our focus today, and he is a steely-eyed competitor. In his first year of wrestling he’s made it to the state championships. Luke is a beautiful boy, slender, with a sharp and appraising gaze. His eight-year-old brother, Simon, also wrestled this year, but lost in the semi-finals. Simon is here, playing video games, filming himself on his mother’s tablet, or running up and down the bleachers with friends. He tells me he can no longer wrestle. Ever Again. He doesn’t seem upset. The concept of Next Year evidently hasn’t yet registered.
Kay, the boys’ mother and my sister, has driven up from downstate to see the matches and collect her boys for the rest of the weekend. Rick, Kay’s ex-husband and the boys’ father, has brought them here and is staying to watch along with his mother, Tina. I’m here as supporting cast. This may look like an idyllic family gathering in support of a child. But it isn’t easy for us adults to be together. The bitter divorce that capped off Kay and Rick’s troubled marriage left scars—deep trenches around which we maneuver, and which we hope won’t trip up the kids.
From what I could tell, the work of the marriage—the six years it lasted—was largely shouldered by Kay. She worked full-time, took classes, took care of the kids and the house and the meals and the laundry and the garden and practically everything else. My parents helped them buy a house and a car. Rick worked as a welder, used the better car, and when he was home, retreated to his computer in a corner of the living room, to play online games. His young family surged around him while he sat there, insensible. Garbage piled up in the garage. The bathroom rotted in black mold. Rick was one of those guys, said my brother, who expects women to do the work. When I visited, Rick could hardly be called away from his screen to come to the dinner table. When our father lay dying, Kay could not get Rick to leave his game until it was almost too late.
When Kay finally told Rick she was divorcing him, he told her he’d burn down the house with her and the kids in it before he’d let that happen. Then he and his mother tried to wrest custody from Kay, arguing that she was an unfit mother. Rick quit his job so he would appear to have no income, and moved in with his parents so he would appear to have a good support structure. They hired a nasty lawyer. The war was on. A war over children.
My family was shocked and sickened—and caught off guard by this aggression. We paid for Kay’s lawyer. The little boys loved their father, I testified in Family Court, and that is as it should be. But Rick was not an involved father or husband. He did not take care of anything. He did not do anything. Rick gazed quietly at me from across the courtroom while I spoke.
But that quiet gaze belied the man. Given to regularly sniffing Kay’s laundry for evidence of an affair, Rick was a suspicious man who expected the worst. His mother, a nurse, convinced a fellow nurse to claim she’d witnessed Kay hitting one of the boys during a health visit. They were willing to do whatever it took to get their way.
Rick and Tina, in large part, prevailed. No matter that Kay was a caring mother. No matter that Rick’s father had made inappropriate advances to an underage foster child. No matter that Rick himself was unemployed, could not provide a home. No matter that he was willing to tear a four and five-year-old from their mommy. Rick and Tina dug in. They wrestled. They won.
Kay was ordered to pay alimony and child support, and because she worked second shift at her nurse’s aide job, she was considered unable to provide evening care for her children. The boys moved in with Rick and his parents, and Kay saw her boys only every other weekend and selected holidays.
And that was the beginning of what would be a long standoff. A continuous quiet and heart-breaking grapple. We urged Kay to protest, to document Rick’s many abuses of the agreements. But Kay is a peacemaker, an indulgent sister, mother, friend. And she was overwhelmed with the load of providing income and driving long distances to pick up and deliver her boys. She did what she could. When she wasn’t working, her kids came first. And we, our family, saw less and less of Luke and Simon. We travel from around the state when they are available; we plan our holiday gatherings around their schedule. When Kay needs help, we step up. It is not enough. Every year the kids are bigger, angrier, more prone to acting out. You’re stupid, they tell Kay. You ruin everything. You don’t know anything. You’re a failure. You didn’t want us.
Now, five years after the divorce, I stand at the gym railing next to Rick, watching kids wrestle. We are trapped together for the day, for Luke’s sake. To his credit, Rick doesn’t pick fights in public. He wrestled himself as a youngster and he fills me in on what I’m seeing. In each of the eight rings, kids are wrestling, the adult referees circling and lying down on the mat to get a good look at holds. At the edge of each match are a small table with a timekeeper, and several adults—coaches and parents shouting instructions or kneeling with cameras.
My attention keeps returning to the boy in red, who keeps after the boy in blue with undiminished energy. The boy in blue is getting upset. I can see his face contort with anger or tears, while his opponent just keeps moving above him, trying to loop arms and legs and shoulders into a hold long enough to win.
“See that one in red,” says Rick. “Aggressive kids like that do well when they’re young.” But the finer points of the sport, the technical holds, are what they need when they get older. I come to understand that wrestling is about mastering certain emotional skills: working through fear, thinking in the moment, never ever giving up.
“See,” says Rick. “Most kids, get them flat on their back, and they just give up. You can see it on their faces. It’s all over. They could still win it. But they think it’s over once they’re on their backs.” He points to the boy in red, who is still on top. He is trying to execute a particular hold, Rick says, but from the wrong side. He knows how to execute the hold from the right side of the body but not the left side, so he is reaching across his opponent’s body. Even though it looks like he is winning, it isn’t ever going to work. There is no way for him to learn that except to fail, and the failing is going to take a while.
The day wears on, and around the gym, it seems pretty typical for kids to get upset. In each match, someone wins, someone loses, and the losing party often breaks into tears. They move off the mat, an adult briefly hugs them, leans down to say a few words, and that’s that. Later, I’ll see the same kid running around with friends, mouth full of sugar. They move on. In the break room, one of Luke’s friends runs up, excited. He’s found some coins, and now a few boys bend their heads to a problem that is equal parts math and honor: how to divide the find among themselves. The answer, they report, is forty-seven cents each.
I don’t often see raw physical aggression. Here, it demands my full attention; it wears me out. I can only take so much before moving to the break room for a rest. I tell this to Kay. She sees raw aggression all the time. She works as an aide in a state hospital for the criminally insane. One patient has singled her out and has announced plans to kill her. Already he’s attacked her twice. His modus operandi is to pound on the top of her head. She’s suffered at least one concussion that she’s told us about. If an inmate of the hospital goes berserk, her instructions are to get a hold on his head and neck from behind and hang on, flopping on his back like a fish, until help arrives. She doesn’t like it, but she keeps going in to work, tries to keep her guard up. She has to support her kids, she says.
I consider Kay. She’s tough. She’s looking relaxed, chatting with me, keeping one eye on her boys, waiting for Luke’s matches and her time to take the boys home with her after the meet. Rick and Tina mostly stay in the main arena across the hall. This circling, this careful positioning, is part of how we make it work.
I’m here, I’m committed to being here for the kids, but I don’t expect much from them. Luke is focused on the match, then on his parents and the looming transition for the weekend. I’m just part of the background for the kids, and that’s okay. This is not a story of the kids and I connecting in some illuminating interaction, an epiphany which transforms everything. This is the story of me watching kids wrestle with what’s coming their way. They are just trying to hold on to the parents they love. This is about learning that one cannot always intervene. I figure my job is to hold the world as steady as best I can from the sidelines. The boys may not remember that I’m here, today or any day. But I hope they gather that there are adults who love them. And more than hope, I somehow believe, deeply, that love outlives aggression. Time will tell.
Back in the bleachers, I wonder how children even hear or make sense of what we tell them. The noise in the arena, the collective cloud of shout and excitement, stops the ears, muffles everything. Parents and coaches, who aren’t allowed on the mats, kneel at the edge and lean in, yelling. “That’s it, Justin! Keep going, Justin! Justin!” Encouragement. Or advice. “Get his arm! Arm!”
Two rows in front of me sits a big man, a coach, bellowing at the kids on the mat. I can’t make out his words, just the force of his voice. A ref and another man step in front of him, lean forward, speak urgently to him. Later we learn that the refs have barred the coach from the floor because he is too aggressive. He has to move higher in the stands, forced to give his charges advice from a distance. This interests me. Not just anything goes, apparently. Underlying the bedlam is order, intention. There’s a general adult agreement on right behaviors, on what’s good for kids. This is part of raising each other, I think. Pushing each other gently into line.
Luke’s match begins, and my nephew becomes a wrestler. The two opponents are called out to the center of the mat, where they face each other under the gaze of the referee. They shake hands, position themselves with one foot forward, and the ref blows the whistle, beginning the match. The wrestlers circle each other warily, reaching out for a quick paw, maybe dancing a little, all a precursor to getting down on the mat. They trip or drag or strong-arm each other to get down there. The real action is on the ground, with all of the body engaged and vulnerable. Every crook, bend, and appendage is useful.
Luke looks so small yet so capable. At one point, his opponent is stretched over Luke’s back, trying to flatten him out. Luke curls into a ball, his knees tucked under him, his head turned to one side. He looks calm, collected, moving deliberately, his face a study of sober concentration.
He has always been like this—a fierce, silent, exacting little soul. Once, when he was three or four, I sat drawing pictures with him at the kitchen table. Suddenly, he broke off what he was doing and shoved his drawing away from him in disgust. He’d been imitating a painting of flowers that hung on the wall and found his efforts not up to snuff. “That doesn’t look like a flower,” he said angrily, pointing to his drawing. I tried to tell him that it takes a while to perfect one’s drawing, but he wasn’t having it.
He measures his efforts accurately against his surroundings, and today is no exception. Partway through the day, he loses a match, which takes him out of the running for a medal. He handles this turn of events with a stony face. Yes, he acknowledges, he has done well enough to get to the state championships. But then he lost, and in his mind, he has failed. He keeps his suffering to himself, but it’s clear how he feels about it. I wonder what he must think of us—we who have failed him so utterly?
Who gets to decide how a child’s life will be shaped? We all have our ideas of how children should be raised—strictly or loosely, with clear boundaries or with an abundance of choice. In this faith or that one. In this school or in that neighborhood. Isn’t this an old, old story—families fighting over children? Something about kids makes our judgments sharpen, flushes our prejudices into the open, clashes one code of honor against another. My parents came up from nothing. By virtue of luck and hard work, they made a successful life. They valued education and would do anything to provide it. They steered us towards the continuous project of bettering ourselves. This is how we see it. Rick seems to see it differently. He drops comments about my parents’ money. When he delivers the kids for visits, they often have nothing with them—no clothes, no boots, no pajamas. He figures we will just keep buying more.
There was conflict in my own childhood, too, of course. My parents each had a different approach. My mother’s was a relentless push— something in her awoke to, thrived on conflict. My father said little, just received each parry with great patience. It was decades before I recognized his style as a response.
Childhood, I suppose, must inevitably take place on the larger human landscape of conflict. We are creatures who, at the very least, argue. And at our worst we inflict what we call the “unspeakable” or the “unthinkable”—on children.
At one point, I am sitting in the bleachers next to Tina, Rick’s mother. She indicates the wrestlers on the mat, says, “This is what it’s like every night in my living room.” I think, can she really be so oblivious to the trouble she worked so hard to create? These boys have a mother. They should be wrestling in Kay’s living room. But I am silent.
And this, I think, is part of the problem. I’m not sure if it’s my fight. I’m just the sister. I know Rick’s family reacts badly to perceived challenges, and I don’t want to cause trouble for Kay. My whole family has tried to be cooperative, while Rick’s family saw it as a fight and never stopped grappling. They were willing to do anything to win. And we, afraid of hurting the children, thinking we were doing the right thing, stopped fighting.
But that’s not it either. My family has been hanging on, filling the times we have with these boys with music, travel, education, camping. If Kay can’t take them because of a work conflict, one of us will drive across the state to pick them up. We offer them what we can; they are ours, too. It’s a different code, a different response. We might look like we’re losing, but it’s not over yet.
Luke curled on the mat is a metaphor for every child in a storm—make yourself small, keep yourself together, turn your head, wait it out, wait for your chance to make a move. He and his brother are caught between two family cultures. Call it class, call it education, call it whatever you want. The two families approach the world in radically different ways. The kids have to navigate it all and along the way learn how to be men. I’ve watched my nephews struggle to express anger. They bottle it up. They lash out. They have trouble with potty, with sleeping, with school. Kay sets up counselors; Rick refuses to take them to the appointments. They are growing at an impossible rate. They will have to find ways to direct their growing strength. Now, it seems, they will be wrestlers. No, that’s not it. Now, I realize they have been wrestling for some time.
In the break room, I watch Luke climb over his dad, who bows his head when Luke presses him into a hold. Rick is a big man, 6’2” or 6’3”, quiet-voiced, long-limbed, who smells of cigarette smoke and has taken to wearing a suede coat with long fringe. An outdoorsman, he hunts, raises rabbits, teaches his boys to respect animals. I have to hand it to him for that at least. Having learned a bit about wrestling, I see its value. He’s giving his boys access to growth, to skills they can use. I understand him a little better, too. He just doesn’t give up. And still I object. The skills are not enough. The ends to which you direct those skills also matter.
After the last match, there’s a break in the action. The officials disappear offstage to finalize statistics. The mats fill with wrestling
kids—wrestling for fun this time. Coaches are out there wrestling with their charges. One man has three kids on top of him, all trying to get the best of him, grinning and laughing. Pure play. In one corner of the mat, a young referee is taking a nap. Finally, the closing ceremonies begin. The coaches form two lines, a tunnel snaking along one side of the gym floor. The gym rocks to two Queen songs played over and over: “We Will Rock You,” and “We Are the Champions.” The message is antidote to the day’s drama: everyone’s a winner. Groups of kids enter the tunnel; the coaches reward them with victorious hand slaps as they move down the line. An announcer plays up the drama, with a big booming voice and plenty of style.
“And. Now. The five-year-old . . . Cham-pi-ons!” A clutch of spindly five-year-olds wander down the tunnel, coaxed along by the coaches, who bend at the waist to greet them. The high school wrestlers move through with a self-conscious gait. They stand at the end of the tunnel to extend it, reaching down to slap hands with the youngsters. Then everyone sits on the mat. Now come endless awards of first-, second-, and third-place medals for each weight class in each age group.
We watch for a while, and then pack to go. The transition is hard. The kids will go with Kay, and Rick will go home alone. At the moment of handoff, minds scatter. We can’t find Simon, who disappears briefly. Someone can’t find his jacket. Luke won’t let go of Rick; we know that in a couple of days he won’t let go of Kay. Finally, Rick leaves and Kay has the kids. I tag along with them for supper at Bob Evans. Luke, who’s been sullen after his loss, perks up at the restaurant. The two boys, as if on cue, get giddy fast. Luke burps loudly, and Simon laughs uproariously. Nothing we say improves their manners. Eleven and burping in a restaurant, for heaven’s sake.
But here we are. Together and tired. We’re playing the long game here and it’s going to take a while. All of us are grappling; all of us are looking for a hold.
Maria Shannon lives, teaches, and writes in Michigan.