Escape Points by Michele Weldon Read Free Book Online Page A

breasts—to last through the week. My sister Madeleine invited us for dinner most Sundays and gave me the leftovers. If family parties were at Maureen or Paul’s house, they sent me home with enough ham, bread, cheese, and coleslaw for a few meals. It was understood my sons ate a lot.
     
    I offered my boys soup, crackers, and Jell-O when they were sick, and cake on their birthdays. I limited fast food, pizza, and the boxed mac and cheese with the bright yellow-orange powder. I did my best to make sure what I put in them was good for them. It’s what I called a mother’s high; I literally watched them bloom. They grew taller, they stayed healthy; it was simple cause and effect. Good diet plus multivitamins and you were on your way to the good mothers’ hall of fame. Well, that was the hope.
    Every other part of parenting seemed less straightforward, more fraught with emotion. But this? Feed them good food and they are happy? That seemed a no-brainer.
    So it was unsettling as a mother of wrestlers who loved to eat to continually witness the finite wedge of time—before and after matches, season after season, from November to March (longer if they wrestled off-season)—when they deliberately and pointedly restricted their intake and disciplined themselves ounce-for-ounceto make weight, to be the exact number of pounds in a weight class in which they would be certified to wrestle. It was a loaded issue for me as a mother who had basically been on a diet for thirty-five years. Give or take twenty pounds, I have been the same size since my late twenties—I won’t say since college, because I was about twenty-five pounds lighter at that time than I am now. I didn’t know whether I was impressed or terrified to hear a son say he dropped five pounds during a three-hour practice, when it would take me forty days and nights on a treadmill, eating only ice chips, to do the same thing.
    When I lived through the sixteen or so weeks of limited consumption that constituted Weldon, Brendan, or Colin making weight, I admired them for their intense discipline, especially when I could not walk past a bowl of onion dip made from the soup mix without sampling. But it also was frightening; I did not have control over what they did. I had to let them go, I could not care for them in this basic way and none of them would listen to me about it anyway. They were going to make weight no matter what I said or did. And I could not stop them. It was for wrestling, it was what they needed to do.
    A vegetarian, Coach Powell told the wrestlers how to identify what food was good for their bodies. Work out more, be smart, run a mile or two, he told them. He gave them printouts of diets and a booklet on healthy eating.
    “Skip the cheeseburgers,” he said.
    I told the boys my brother Paul’s simple rule: don’t eat anything you can’t wash. That would eliminate desserts and include pretty much just meat, vegetables, and fruit. I tried to do the same.
    Though he started wrestling in high school at 119 pounds, Weldon wrestled at 140 pounds in his junior and senior years, a weight he maintained in season through daily workouts (weight lifting and running), eating protein bars, and having the discipline it took to excuse himself from eating most everything at Thanksgiving meals—no dressing, no mashed potatoes, no gravy, just PowerBars and lean turkey. That’s right, not even pumpkin pie.
    During season Weldon said he was never completely full; he would go to sleep hungry, wake up hungry, and stay just a littlehungry for weeks on end. At five feet ten, his weight was less than what I weighed at five feet six. Whenever I said I was worried about him or suggested he could at least eat something—a small piece of chicken, a banana, something other than a Clif Bar—he was irritated and reminded me yet again that I didn’t understand because I was not a wrestler.
    Brendan started high school at 165 pounds at five feet four, got down to 135 his