Turning Tides

So the son came to me yesterday morning just before I left for work and told me that his coach asked him if wanted to start competing in amateur boxing bouts. It would mean that he would have to join the amateur boxing association and did I think he should do it? I gave him the Oprah/Dr. Phil answer. I told him that it is a decision that I could not make for him as I am not the one getting into the ring.

Bollocks. I have never in my life uttered such crap to any of my children in their entire lives. I have never been one to give my children a myriad of choices. Usually just two; do it or live in a new level of hell I shall create for what passes as your life on earth. Truth be told that has pretty much worked out well for me. I did have a slight problem one year with Isaiah Sender when he was younger and his godfather promised his son a Game Cube for a good report card. The child got B’s and a Game Cube. Isaiah Sender figured if he got his usual A’s he should strike the mother lobe and pestered me for weeks to define the mother lobe. One night I had enough of the pestering and I told him that getting A’s was his personal duty owed to G-d. The Last Amazon quibbled up that it was that, and more importantly, I would let him live for another year. That settled that.

Until this boxing thing I kind of envisioned myself as a modern Spartan mother - the ‘give the sons their shield and tell them to come home with it or on it as I send them out into the world’ kind of mother. I forgot one of the important rules concerning Murphy’s Law of Childrearing: they will destroy all your illusions.

I am not the one who is getting into the ring. I am not the one who has to stand firm and take whatever blows someone meters out to me. I am not the one who has to have his eyes blacked or his nose broken. I am not the one who has to risk having my teeth chipped or knocked out or brain damage - or death. I love that face, his eyes and nose. I am marveled and delighted by the way his mind works. I have devoted much time and energy in making sure he never had a cavity let alone a chipped tooth or worse. I have never let another child hit him, and for that matter, I have never let anyone else’s child beat on another child when I was around. Now I am suppose to stand down and let him get into a ring with the intention on beating up another woman’s son and whose son intends to hurt mine? It's all madness.

The Last Amazon thinks its all good; sibling rivalry and all that. She has already committed herself to going to all the fights. She thinks it’s a win-win situation. She will get to enjoy watching any blows he receives as he has had the utter gall to have grown more stronger and taller then her. She cannot push him around any longer and already pines for the old days when she could. If he wins; she gains a worthy ally to watch her back. He may be her younger geekie brother but he will be the fighting geekie brother. She is already going around calling him the Mountain - playing on his name.

The irony of this situation is not lost on me and I feel it insufferably. I know Montana only asked me what I thought out of courtesy and respect. He has found a love in boxing that I cannot begin to understand, or more importantly, compete with. There were only two possible choices for his situation. Let him fight competitively with grace or he will create a living hell for what passes as life on earth. I love all my children and never saw them as an extension of myself. They are much too grand and fine to be taken as another younger version of myself. I have never thought that I was anything more than a steward for the great gifts the Lord saw fit to bestow upon me. I knew one day it would end but I just hadn’t realized how much pain would come when they took up their own lives from my hands.

I don’t know if I can find the courage to watch him fight or even cheer him on. I am trying to console myself that modern boxing is no longer practiced like it was in Ancient Greece where the Spartans fought all comers to the death. I am reminded of a conservation I had with Montana’s father’s mother when he was just a newborn in my arms. She was busy telling me that I was going to ruin him by holding him so much. I told her that I had to get all my hugs in now, for there would come a day when it would not be my arms he'd longed for but that of some other woman. She looked me directly in the eye and what startled me was the venomousness of her tone when she replied, “Katie, I know exactly what you mean.” I had prepared myself for another woman but not a sport.