It has been one of those periods where life has been especially challenging. The details don’t really matter, because everyone has their own version of this same predicament. Too much to do to keep up, too many things in the mind, to rest well for more than a few minutes at any give time, too few things going correctly, too many people working against you, and just too much of too much.
The mental state has taken a battering and it is that moment in the fight where you’re have to decide whether or not it makes more sense to get up, just to be punched in the face a few more times or just stay on the mat, let the referee just count to ten and end it.
Your body is screaming for the latter option, but your heart can’t bear the thought of being a quitter. So your mind is trying to coach yourself back into the fight. And just as you have dragged your sorry ass back into the standing position and the ref has looked into your eyes to see if you can really continue–right at the very moment that you are pretty sure he will wave his arms and the voice of the late Howard Cosell will scream from ringside “It’s Over…It’s All Over!”…
You focus.
You realize the bell that is ringing is not the one signaling that the fight is over–but instead is actually your cell phone.
And you are not in a boxing ring, drunk punching your way through a match with Mike Tyson, who is there for the sole purpose of knocking your ass out–but rather it appears that you are in the car driving to work on a Friday morning.
When your mind returns enough to reality to start functioning, you fumble for the button to answer the call (using the bluetooth handsfree system of course–because this is Connecticut and we’ve taken the Oprah pledge to never call and drive at the same time, and made it part of state law.)
The familiar voice of your child at the other end responds to your groggy “Hello?” with an excited “I got into to grad school!”
And there it is. As Cosell would’ve said “Right There!”
Redemption.
Images of Mike Tyson pummeling you into submission are washed away in a fraction of a second, as your senses are filled with an immediate warmth. Optimism replaces that dark place in your soul, that had just a moment before only known despair and dread.
Of course the rest of your life didn’t just get fixed, just one thing had gone right. Not even for you really, but for one of your children–and yes, at 21 years old, one could argue that this really isn’t still a child we’re talking about–but as a parent, age doesn’t mean a damn thing and your child is always your child.
So the details follow and there is much excitement and relief, and congratulations and general euphoria.
And you say the obligatory words of how proud you are of this person, about whom all you can think of right now is a high-speed photo montage of random images: from being a newborn, to taking first steps, to speaking, to going to school, to going on a first date, to having a first heartbreak, to learning to drive, to graduating from high school, to starting college, to not being there at home everyday, to being drunk and hysterical because they’ve dropped their new cell phone into a port-o-john, to swiftly turning the corner from the teenage years to being an adult.
It’s all a blur where that whole “time-space continuum” thing has been fast forwarded into something resembling the wild visual sequence at the end of the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey”, where the astronaut is floating through space. Or something.
And then you snap back to reality. Like any parent knows, you are more than anything else–just proud. Proud that your living legacy is going on to the greatness that you have always hoped for them. For each of your offspring. That their life will ultimately mean more than your own and they will achieve what you only dreamed of. That whatever the sacrifice, their impact on this world will eclipse your own by a grand magnitude.
The excited conversation will end when you say that they really have to call the other parent who needs to share in this joy. In what will have only been a matter of moments, everything will have changed.
As it does so many times in the bizarre journey of being a parental unit.
You’ll drive along for a bit, not noticing that the radio isn’t on and the only sound you are really hearing is the noise of the road rolling by under the wheels of the car.
This is because the only sound you are hearing in your mind is the huge crowd going crazy, and someone is holding your hand up in the air in victorious celebration. Somehow Howard Cosell is asking you the greatest all time question, asked of any athlete after they win – “So, how do you feel?”
And this one time, you decide to forego the standard response of thanking God, your teammates, your family and whomever the hell else is supposed to get acknowledged at this moment–and you just say what you (and every other winner) have always wanted to say right then…
“It feels pretty Goddamn good, Howard.”
Oddly enough though, you appear to speaking to the late Mr. Cosell in the distinct voice of Mike Tyson.
And much like when the Champ has his great scenes in the movie “The Hangover”, there really is just one word to describe all of what just really happened.
Nice!
