Oh, Tiger. What Have You Done To Your Mother?!

I was on the treadmill at the gym when the live “confession/apology” of the decade took place.  I didn’t have headphones so I read Tiger’s entire script, just as he read it.  (Closed captioning is fantastic!)  Even without the inflection and cadence of his voice, I cried as he read it.  The words were good, and contrite, and seemingly honest.  Only he knows how it will go from here.  I wish him the absolute best, and if Elin wants to keep their marriage viable, I hope that works out for them.

The part that made me weep was when he hugged his mother after his written statement.  She sat, arms crossed, eyes mostly downcast, during his entire essay.  How humiliating and difficult and anguished and exhausted she must feel.  He is her SON.  He will always be her son.  She obviously adores him.  I thought of mothers across time–mothers of presidents and prisoners–if we have any emotional health to us at all, we love our sons.  And when it comes down to it, you can’t protect them from so many things, and you most definitely cannot protect them from themselves.

Do you suppose she has been questioning herself?  “If I just hadn’t let Earl give him that car at 16.”  “If we had insisted he…”  I don’t know, fill in the blanks for yourself.

Hopefully she isn’t, because he is a full-grown, though obviously stunted in some ways, adult.  He made his choices.

And then it happened, and I had suspected it would, so I had my answer ready.

The children and I were sitting together in the cafe in the gym.  They had a great time in the Kids play area while I had a wonderful workout.  They were sharing smoothies, and the big screen tv was blasting away on the wall behind us.

Zoe asks, “What did he do?”

As I said, I was ready…as long as she didn’t ask too many follow up questions…”He’s married and has children, and he was spending time with other women that he should have been spending with his wife.”

“And his children.” Zoe added.

And most definitely his children.

“What’s his name?”  she asked.

“Tiger Woods.  Isn’t that a great name?” I said.

And that led us down the path of discussing names, which was much more fun than the previous discussion.

To answer one of the children’s questions, much to my surprise, Tiger does have a middle name, and his real name is:  Eldrick Tont.

I’d probably stick with “Tiger” as well.