Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Wrestling

This is something that I wrote a couple of weeks ago during one of my creative writing classes. Our professor wanted us to write a scene from the point of view of a young, immature child who was witnessing something that adults do that he might not totally understand. I hope you like it.

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I wanted some milk because I couldn’t sleep and it always helps me sleep so I had to get mom ‘cause she still doesn’t let me pour my own even though I’m seven and a half and will be eight in November. She’s always worried that I’ll spill it because she says I’m a messy eater and sometimes spill my drinks at the table. It gets all over the floor and we have to pick it up, and she doesn’t like doing that because it makes her mad and she has bad knees so she can’t be kneeling all over the floor all the time. I walked into the living room and her and dad weren’t in there but there were a few empty bottles on the table where I sometimes kneel and color pictures of dinosaurs and Captain Planet in front of the TV. I don’t think there was any milk in the bottles though and it was weird that they left them out because mom and dad always get mad at me when I don’t clean up and I didn’t really think that was too fair but they’re grown-ups and I guess that means they can do just about anything they want. I can’t wait to be a grown-up. I was confused at first because when I woke up I saw that the little alarm clock I set sometimes on the weekends so I can get up and eat doughnuts with dad while he reads the paper and I read the funnies said it was only 11:30 at night and whenever I wake up during that time they’re almost always out in the living room watching TV or reading, but then I remembered that mom and dad had gone out to eat that night at some place special or something (if it was Golden Corral I would be mad because I loved eating there and their dessert is so good and you can have as much as you want), and that the babysitter had put me to sleep. Mom and dad didn’t go places without me too often but when they did the nights were always different and now that I knew that I wasn’t so confused anymore and decided to just go find mom.

I walked to their bedroom and opened the door pretty quiet so I wouldn’t wake up dad. Mom says he is a bear when he doesn’t get his sleep, and I think she’s joking but still I didn’t want to find out. As soon as the little big of light from the hallway night light came into the room though I could see that both of them were already awake and were grunting and making all kinds of weird noises. Mom actually sounded kind of like one of the ghosts in Casper when they’re trying to haunt people and it doesn’t really even work. I think they were wrestling and dad must’ve been about to win because he had mom pinned and she was almost screaming. It didn’t look like he was pinning her that tough or anything but I guess ladies aren’t too good at wrestling and she might’ve been just playing along to make him happy. I thought if I was as big as mom I could’ve easily gotten out of that pin and maybe turned it back around on dad and unless he turned into a bear like mom said he sometimes does I could probably end up winning the match.

I thought about how my mom was being pinned and making noises like she was a ghost and that made me laugh and then they both looked over at me at the same time and stopped wrestling. Dad rolled off of mom and gave up his pin and I felt bad for bugging them in the first place because nobody likes a pest. I told mom that I wanted some milk and she told me to go to the kitchen and she would meet me there in just a second so I did. When I walked out of the room I heard dad sigh and I realized he must’ve been mad that he couldn’t finish mom off and win and I felt bad again because I’d interrupted their play time and they don’t get to play too much because dad works a lot. I got my milk and kissed mom goodnight and went back to bed.

I still felt bad the next day about interrupting playtime because mom said I should never interrupt and so I told dad that I was sorry for doing that. He said it was okay because his birthday was coming soon and him and mom always had a big wrestling match—a royal rumble even, he said—on that day and then he started laughing I think because he was already thinking about the moves he was going to use to pin mom again on his birthday which makes sense because nobody wants to ever lose on their birthday. He said she makes him steak on that day too which will probably help him get strong for the rumble.

I told my older brother—he’s thirteen—about how cool it was that mom and dad wrestle even though I thought it wasn’t really fair because I wasn’t allowed to roughhouse with my friends in my bed but I also didn’t work all the time and got to play most of the day and I was small and I guess I could get hurt if I did too much wrestling even though I made sure I drank a lot of milk so I could get strong bones. I don’t know why but he started to act weird and said that my parents were getting it on which makes sense because the announcer always says that before the big fights my dad sometimes watches on TV with some of his friends from work and Uncle Joe. I still don’t understand why my brother acted so weird when I told him though. Maybe because girls have cooties and wrestling with them is almost always pretty much out of the question even though my mom and dad have lived together since they were only still old kids. Maybe he just doesn’t like wrestling and I think that must be it because he always tells me that the wrestling on TV is fake.

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