My Snoopy

That's one of my Nolan's nicknames. Snoopy. That came about from his newly-found Billy Badass attitude. I started calling him Snoop-No (like Snoop-Dog) and that evolved into Snoopy. Somehow it fits him.

He just turned twelve. He's in the brain-dead phase boys go through. I've heard of it from other moms. I've been able to identify the phase for a while, so I guess it is pretty concrete.Even so, brain-dead or not, he's stlll got so much laying right in front of him.

It is so hard for me to know all that he's been through in twelve years and still fathom that he isn't all that big of a whack job. He's been without his father for more than five years of his life because of our being an Army family. He has had to deal with my illness, which he was too young to grasp at the time, but has felt the ripples of on a regular basis since, to include September's week of ugly testing on me when Travis was gone (and that was ROUGH on him). When he was little he had incredible oozing ears and had to be on daily antibiotics for a year and a half to prevent the ooze and that STILL didn't work. He's had his struggles and he is getting OK. Now.

In November, our folkstyle wrestling season began. I say "our" because I sit through the stupid (not stupid) practices too. Nolan was used to being the athlete of the family, while Amanda was our musician. Well, this was the year the tables turned. She made the cheer squad and then became a wrestler. She dared to tread into his territory. I knew from the start he didn't like it, but he dealt with it. It was hard for him to go from being the team clown to being the team sweetheart's big little brother.

Teachers and coaches have often had a hard time working with Nolan. He isn't the easiest kid with whom to work. It took me a while to figure that out, but basically, he doesn't know what he can do. He doesn't see his own abilities and when coaches see his size and talent, they assume he will perform as they expect. Kids who don't have that confidence in themselves and don't believe they are the winners they really are, will be hard to work with. Thusly, we have Nolan.

Mix with that being the big white kid in a town of small brown people (who we don't mind, even though a lot of them don't like us), and we've got a complex growing.

This really was his year to prove to himself that which he is able to accomplish. I've talked about it before, but tonight was one of those nights that really gets me going.After Nolan broke his foot at nationals a month ago, we took time off for him to heal and for spring break and anther week for attitude adjustment and rest (for me). We went to one practice before for freestyle/Greco during our month of rest, but tonight was really our big return. Nolan's been kind of wishy washy about wrestling or not. He really pushed to do freestyle, even though Coach usually doesn't allow kids under 13 to wrestle freestyle because of the danger in the throws they use. He made an exception for Nolan because he knows Nolan can handle it. He KNOWS that.

Tonight, Nolan was pretty intimidated about going to practice, but I finally figured that if we didn't go tonight, we wouldn't wind up going back. So, go we did. We got there and both kids got their shoes on and headgears out and were getting ready to hit the mats. Nolan talked for a few minutes to Coach and did let on a bit about his fears and reservations. He was genuinely scared about this. He didn't fully want to practice, but he got out there anyway.

He went through the warm-ups and drills and got a kick out of the fact that he is pretty good at the rolls they had to do and his sister can't do them. When man-on-man drills started things got a little hairy. Nolan is the baby of the team now. We had a three year-old on the team for folkstyle all the way up to the fifteen year-olds. Now, Nolan is the youngest, and the next-youngest is Amanda, who had been the oldest during the folk season. Everyone else is older and has more experience. Everyone else has speed and skills. And then, there's my Snoopy.

Nolan, being a big boy, has a hard time sometimes with agility and coordination, so he tends to joke his way through stuff he has difficulties doing. When he cranked that up tonight, the older boys started to gig him on it. They started going at him pretty hard. I didn't mind, I get that he needs people to help drive him on and help him focus. He also needs to be around guys.

He wound up leaving the mats for a bathroom break (which is frowned upon) in the middle of the action. When he came back, he looked me right in the eyes with his hopeless look and on the verge of tears, he told me how hard freestyle was. This practice was so much more intense than folkstyle practice. The kids are going at it really hard and they all take it so seriously. I told him I knew but that the team was waiting on him and he got his mat shoes back on and went back to it.

There's a move I call the Death Spin, which I am sure has a proper name. I don't know much about wrestling other than the wrestlers wear markers which the refs use in scoring, there is a table of people who track scoring, that when the ref holds up two fingers and shifts his hand a certain way he means that that person scored two points, and that when the ref hits the mat with an open hand a pin has occurred. That's it. So, the Death Spin- eek. Basically, the Death Spin is a choke hold thing where when the dominant person gets the submissive in that hold, they crank over to one direction and then force their momentum in the other direction to twist the other person into the Death Spin in order to score and gain more dominance (I think). Nolan was apprehensive and didn't want to do it and I could hear Zack dogging him out for not pushing hard enough. He stuck with it and I think he surprised himself when he finally got it.

Next were a series of takedowns. They were kind of rough, but he managed to get them all. Finally, it happened. I heard him wail. I was only half paying attention because I was listening to songs which matched my crappy mood on my iPod while playing Tetris on my phone. During a takedown, he hit his face on the mat and split his lip open. It isn't actually the pink part of his lip. It is the area just above the actual lips and it was ugly. I knew it might be a problem when I saw him grab his shirt and put it on his lip. Yup, blood. The coach and the big kids got the blood cleany stuff and wiped up the mats where he bled and then Coach got it all under control. Once he was back on the mats Coach reassured me that we did not need to visit "our" room at the E.R. and he confirmed with me that Nolan was indeed scared.

Not long after that, Zack came over and asked me if Nolan was OK. He also asked if I thought he was going too hard on Nolan. I told him that I thought it was OK but that Nolan was intimidated because they were all so much older. Then he asked me how old he was. When I told him he almost dropped his teeth. He thought Nolan and Amanda were the same age. He knew they were siblings but thought they were either twins or less than a year apart, which would make Nolan around 14 in his mind. Then he said it. He told me, "If Nolan is only twelve, then in a year or two, he's going to be a beast. He's gonna be a big, bad, total beast. I'm glad you told me." Our buddy Terry, the Tomster's younger brother, who is fourteen and a beast, said that he thought Nolan would be a beast by the time he was in high school too. I think Nolan didn't take that very seriously.

As we were leaving tonight, two of the other older boys found out Nolan is only twelve. Again, they used the B word in reference to Nolan. They told me they wished they had begun wrestling as young as Nolan and that now it made sense why he handles things on the mat the way he does. They told me how awesome he is for his age, and Nolan heard it.

Instantly he lifted his shoulders a bit. When they boys found out we are trying to get to South Carolina, they told him how big wrestling is there and how awesome he was going to be if he could stick with it. Then his chin lifted a little.

I try really hard to help Nolan in his journey to becoming a man. I'm a girl. Sure, there are thousands of women who raise strong, good men. Travis' mother did, and thank God she did. When Travis is here I feel like Nolan has someone to identify with and model himself after. When he isn't the responsibility is mine. I try not to baby him. I try to hold him responsible for his own actions. I try to teach him about what it means to be a man. I don't know if I always meet the standard in that department, but I will always try.

Tonight, I saw our son take a step in the right direction. He was pretty scared of what might happen on the mat with the older guys. Then, he busted his face. And, scary as that was, he got back on the mat and practiced again. Then, he had the chance to hear from those same older guys that he has real potential for greatness, or beastness, as they put it. He stood up to a real fear, got busted down, got back up and faced it again with a bloody lip. That's the kind of man I want him to be; the kind who stands up to his fears even when they kick his ass and takes them on after they take a piece of him.

It took two hours of sweat, some blood, a pair of rubber gloves, some bleach in a squirt bottle and three sixteen year-olds, but my Snoopy took one more step toward being the kind of man I hope he becomes. He grew in his self-confidence, had to face his fears and I think he learned a little about how hard work will get you further down the road to where you want to be.