Last night was the official start of Eli’s wrestling season. He did amazing. The team brought home second place and E made the all tournament team, picking up three pins to start the season.

As I sat at the top of the bleachers, filming each match, I had to fight back tears a few times. No, not because of the pain I was feeling for the poor boys Eli wrestled, as he placed their arms behind his head and slowly turned them to their backs, one painful second at a time. That was more me cringing than crying.

The tears came because in the dozen or so years that I’ve been a wrestling mom, Vance was also a wrestling dad. He didn’t miss many matches. Every once in a while, his work schedule just wouldn’t allow him to be there or we had to split duty between two or more kids, and he wouldn’t be there. On those rare occasions, we would constantly text each other updates and videos. More than once we FaceTimed live matches so he wouldn’t miss.

Tonight, as I recorded our son, it came to me that there was no one to send the videos to. No Vance to text.

It’s one of those little realities that just hasn’t gotten easier. It was hard during baseball. It was still hard during soccer. It sucked at cross country. Here we are at wrestling, and it’s still so stinking hard.

Sometimes I just text him anyway. I send him updates and scores and times.

Someday someone new will be assigned his number and it’ll be really weird for them to get random updates along with the occasional, “I just really miss you today.” Hopefully that will be a while, because for now, I just still need to send those texts.