Hysteria

I lift heavy weights because I can no longer lift my son. I’ve grown stronger over the past year: my quads have a stone-like quality under the skin and fat. I think of myself as an ice cream cake. Hard center, soft exterior. I enjoy the bulge in my bicep. I like to flex and find the crease between bicep and deltoid. But I still cannot lift him. I work at the gym for a month or more and I injure myself. Elbow, wrist, knee, back, and have to pull back my training for awhile until that injured part of my body heals, and then it’s up the hill again. But I still can’t lift him. He is now 100 pounds which is a lot but still little, and yet like the proverbial sack of potatoes, N doesn’t know how to use his own body to help me. I think of figure skating pairs, the man lifts the woman, but it is the woman’s core, the woman’s complimentary tensity, that assists in the lift and lightens the man’s load. N just hangs, an armful of wet towels. There isn’t one moment of hysteria; it’s a slow drip of hand-numbing anxiety: this could be it. No matter how hard I train, how strong I become, I might never be able to lift him again.

And again I can see her on the distant shore, the maybe other me who might decide not to feed her son in order to keep him small, in order to deny him a growing body because his mind does not keep apace. She thinks of him as a baby, she thinks of him as a toddler, she thinks of him even last year when he was eleven, when she could still lift him. No, that’s not right: she wishes for him to be again eleven. Is this empathy for the woman who tosses her child off a bridge, or the man who engages a shotgun to keep the future from ever arriving for his child and then himself? Is my fear of the future and my inability to keep lifting my spirits, my hope, just hysteria? There was a time when it was still ok for him to go and play on the playground, because he was small. There was a time when it was still ok for him to climb into a shopping cart and ride instead of walk. He is small for his age, but it is only a matter of time until he is taller, thicker than she is, stronger, and she fears that’s when the hyena she hides will burst from behind her hyoid and devour all hope. She is certain that when he is 14 and 17 and 22, he will still want to play on the playground, ride in a shopping cart: it makes her sick how his world will get smaller as he grows, it makes her pulse with a keening need to keep him to stay small. For there to be symbiosis between his mind and his body. She is a mother who might do whatever it takes to stop time.

So instead I try to grow. The longer I can lift him, the longer he can stay little, and there is little chance I will become her.