Free Escape Points by Michele Weldon Page A

peanut butter on his ear for his cat to lick off. Sometimes the cat nipped, he said. All of the girls recoiled.
    Wrestler ear, boxing ear, or rugby ear were emblematic of all I found counterintuitive and all that I knew instinctively about trying to keep my boys from harm. Weldon earned the ear in his junior year. Brendan earned the ear the next year, his sophomore year. Weldon’s right ear and Brendan’s left, with shifting lumps and swollen tissue, were visible reminders of all that was startlingly different about us: their maleness and impulsivity, their determination, lack of vanity, and a burning dedication to a goal regardless of price.
    The ear meant I failed. Their disfigurement was all my fault; both those ears were my fault.
    To a wrestler the ear was a sign not that you were less than perfect, but that you were committed to the sport. It was about manhood and drive, an outward sign that you were someone who suffered for greatness. This was the exacted cost, and it was small compared to the monumental high of having a striped-shirted referee thrust your hand in the air in victory over your most fierce opponent. It was a sign. You were good and you wrestled for a very long time. Or you had soft ears susceptible to this injury, Weldon told me. Some people just have soft ears.
    The second day of his engorged ear, I took Weldon to the emergency care center near our house. It was the spot I called the drive-through doctor or Doc in the Box—where I took the boys before or after work in emergencies and upon suspicions of bronchitis or infections. It was open from 7 AM to 11 PM and was able to do X-rays and stitches, a much better option than my pediatrician’s office, which was open only from 10 AM to 4 PM , timing that was after I left for work and long before I got home.
    “This is stupid,” he said on the ride to the immediate care site.
    Weldon was clearly annoyed and I was surely a pathetic, overprotective mother for making him go to the doctor in the first place. Heck, he could just stab himself with a needle and puncture it, drain it, and be done. Weldon continued with his usual you-wouldn’t-understand-you-are-not-an-athlete diatribe. His coach told me all it needed was a draining. Weldon at first said the trainer would drain it in the wrestling room that afternoon, and I cringed. He came home from school with it undrained. Then he asked me to please just get a needle and drain the blood from his engorged right ear. I almost puked. As if I would take a needle and poke him.
    The doctor on call was a beautiful African American woman, about ten years younger than me and clearly disapproving of the sport.
    “He needs to wear headgear,” the doctor said.
    I know. I tell him all the time.
    She had Weldon lie down on the table, and the nurse who always talked to me kindly when I came in with each of the boys spread paper toweling across his chest and neck and attached it to his T-shirt with a metal clip. She cleaned and then sponged the ear with iodine, injected anesthetic, and took a scalpel to the part of the inner cartilage swollen with blood, the hematoma that had developed under the skin. She was deliberate and calm, not speaking. Weldon sighed heavily. I was sure it really hurt. I was amazed at how much blood and fluid spilled onto the paper towels—it seemed like several ounces but was likely only one or two. All I could think was these poor, beautiful baby ears of his. Look what wrestling has done.
    The only time he was ever in the hospital before was for these ears. At three, he had small plastic tubes surgically inserted in his Eustachian tubes to help avert his recurring ear infections. We were living in South Bend, Indiana, in a small rented ranch house I called the trailer home without the wheels. I remember how terrified I was as the attendants wheeled his small body into the operating room. He was all arms and legs then. Slender, with blonde hair and an energy that was unnerving; he was only gone