[Found bird’s nest, Berkeley, CA]
The moments collect, each unremarkable on its own. But together they add up to something remarkable: things are different now. The natural-sounding quiet around the house. The realization, as the time approaches that we normally would have started making dinner, that we very well could have popcorn and smoothies if we wanted, and it wouldn’t even matter. For, like, weeks on end it wouldn’t. We could neglect to stock the fridge and cupboard with the usual array of healthy food and snacks, and we’d be the only ones who’d suffer!
It’s the absence of wet towels on the floor, our toothpaste tube no longer left uncapped, squoze in the middle, lounging there, again, on the counter next to the bathroom sink. Except now the toothpaste is exactly where it should be, night after night, in the old tea tin next to the toothbrushes. It’s finding the phone cord, regularly, right where I left it last. The first few times I opened the drawer, I was surprised to find it there, so accustomed was I to its having been purloined by our unrepentant cord-thief son. It’s the do-ability of the laundry, rather than its dauntingness. And it’s moments like the one I just had.
I was cleaning off the dining table, tidying last Sunday’s New York Times, and read the title on the cover of the magazine section: “Is the World Giving Up on Climate Change?” As I would have any day over the past 17 years that we had reading children in the house, I began to place the magazine and its grim title discretely underneath a less frontal, less pessimistic fold of the paper: Arts & Leisure, say, or better yet the Business section, which could just as easily be named the “table protection under art or repair project” section.
Then I stopped. I realized: there’s no more need now, to hide this blaring announcement of one person’s view of an armageddon–my kids’ armageddon–that certainly is possible, may well be likely, but it sure as shit isn’t inevitable, and the more you forget it isn’t inevitable, the more inevitable you help it become. I no longer have to titrate exposure to older generations’ framing of the world and its hopelessness, not inside this house anymore, because they no longer live here, these people with a developing conception of this world and an increasing engagement with it, this impossible world, with its truths and constraints and (to me, absolutely crucially) its possibilities–these people whose capacity to sustain hope has been, for me, like a Fabergé egg in a storm. Breakable. Priceless.
I can’t count the number of newspaper headlines and magazine covers I’ve casually tucked under something else less harsh. But it would be reasonable to say it’s been at least a quarter to a third of the newspaper headlines and newsmagazine covers laying on this or that table, week in and week out, over the course of the previous 17 years of my kids’ literate lives. I didn’t out-and-out toss the newspapers and newsmagazines–after all, I’ve subscribed to them; they’ve contained, if not multitudes, then at least useful information, offering points of view worth considering, in a unique analog quietude. I just didn’t want my generation’s complacency or lack of vision or solipsistic pessimism to compound countless other similar messages broadcast to my kids about the world and the hope that can–or can’t–be found in it. At least not in their own home.
To the extent we could–an extent that we saw diminish more and more as they got older and the world trickled in with fewer and fewer filters, and as they likewise flowed out into it in directions more and more of their choosing–to the extent we could manage, this home at least would be as much a haven as possible. It would offer reprieve, would reflect them back to themselves–literally, with pictures of them or art by them hanging in nearly every room. It would offer them safe space and succor.
I wanted the words they saw, as our kids passed through a room, to be not sensational headlines designed to hail the reliable negativity magnet of the lizard brain, but instead, casually affixed to the fridge, a chipper, out-of-context quote from Becket: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No Matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Or, from Viktor Frankl: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
Or this yellowing clip from a June 2020 newspaper interview, ACLU Georgia’s Executive Director Andrea Young, responding to a reporter’s question about her hope for the possibility of change: “Nobody has believed more in the promise and mythology of America than Blacks. We have believed all people were created equal, fought over generations for the truth of the statement. The fact I am here means I am descended from people who, even enslaved, did not give up hope. To do so now would be a betrayal.”
Or this concise sticker: “You are beautiful.”
During the pitch-dark COVID days of “at-home school,” I cleared a space in an area near their bedrooms and filled it with school-ish things they could clap their eyes onto each day, among them a large clock and a calendar noting which damn day of the anonymous, monotonous week it was. I got an app that would play an alarm at hourly intervals, and then paid for the custom alarm sound that clanged like a classic school bell. I set an old unused iPhone on the shelf, and set its volume loud enough but not too loud, just enough that they’d hear a school bell rattle off behind their closed bedroom doors, every hour on the hour.
It might have been meaningless (their time was actually marked by the hourly changing of the Zoom screens, and the rearrangement of a few dozen tiny squares representing what had been their community, their world outside our home). But it was something, this feeble microcosm of schoolish things, a tiny gesture in the face of enormity, telling them that even in this floating, timeless void, something–time, if nothing else–was in motion. And so they’d be again, too, one day.
They would be challenged in this home, to be sure; sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. Sometimes by forces outside the home that we couldn’t abate, sometimes by forces in us that we couldn’t. One of the truisms about parenthood is that you’re a perfect parent right up until the moment you become one. Another is, you finally have the insights and skills to be a pretty decent one right about when it ceases to be a full-time job. Better or worse, home is among the most reliable places to learn, experientially, that on the other side of challenge is resilience. And resilience is crucial, it’s the Holy Grail, the magic precondition for confident independence, that ineffable force these people have been drawn to, instinctively growing toward, building painstakingly and earning with each step, each milestone, year after year.
For most of the previous 7,665 of my days, each of those steps, especially any mis-step, effortlessly rose to the top of that day’s list of what matters most. For any of those days, I’d have stopped what I was doing instantly if their well-being was threatened. Any activity other than seeing to it that they were okay would have been not just insignificant, but irrelevant.
Seven thousand, six hundred and sixty-five is the number of days that it has taken to go from the arrival of our first child to the departure of our second-and-last. At the beginning of it all, we were overwhelmed with unfamiliar, yet life-or-death activities every minute of every day: namely, All the Things We Must Do to Keep This Infant Alive. Many if not most of these activities were utterly foreign to us until, eventually, they weren’t.
For starters, we were shocked that they even let us leave the hospital with our first child, only a few days after her birth. As we neared the hospital exit, we slowed down at the doors, half-expecting the security guard to stop us and ask where the hell did we think we were going with this infant that we obviously barely had a clue how to care for? We’d have stopped in our tracks and wheeled around and said, I KNOW, RIGHT? We don’t just barely have a clue, WE’VE GOT ABSOLUTELY NO CLUE WHATSOEVER!
But out of the hospital we were permitted to stroll, one of us holding this moist, mind-bending miracle of an infant, the other toting a concatenation of things we were given or had read about or were told we would need. A little hospital-issued cap for her wee head, which would be cold because next to NO HAIR. A baby car seat which we had only the semblance of an understanding how to affix into a car that had been hastily parked in the parking lot only a few days and a universe earlier. Various sheets of paper from the hospital, the most important of which was our copy of the birth certificate, which, for Kid 1, had a blank where it said “Father,” accompanied by notation indicating that we didn’t know who the “father” was, though of course we knew everything we needed to know, and claiming “unknown” on this line was just the least legally risky option to put down at the time; we’d been planning everything for years and years as it happened; sure, there was no “father” per se, but there was a very kind and generous friend who gave us extra of the wherewithal to get this baby started.
I myself had been present and accounted for every single damn minute of this baby, from our lesbian “maybe baby” classes, to the moment I bear-hugged our friend my thanks for the wherewithal, to the careful delivery of the wherewithal, both at its ingress and, nine months and countless miracles of human development later, its egress. By the time we were exiting the hospital with Kid 2, nearly three years later, the state of California offered me the dignity of actually being named on the damn birth certificate right there and then: Parent 2. And so I’ve remained, lo these 21 years.
At the other end of this gargantuan journey of long days and short years, our parting was as sudden and unremarkable as the beginning was long-anticipated and life-altering. My departure from our eldest took place three years ago, and a few days earlier than my partner’s departure. We had a younger brother to return to school on Monday, and my partner wanted to and could stay behind a little bit longer.
There we all stood, assembled on a busy New York City sidewalk a few blocks from Union Square, awaiting the ride to the airport. The ride arrived; I heaved my son’s and my suitcases into the trunk. I hugged my daughter, and as I recall, she hugged me back (a generous parting gift, given the awkwardness of doing so on a busy city street). I may have said something like “Love you, sweetie. Take good care of yourself.” I’m sure she hugged her brother. Then we disappeared into the back seat of the car, and she receded into the blur of the city as we made our way down 2nd Avenue toward the plane ride home. On my phone was a photograph I returned to often, on that ride and weeks afterward: it was a view of her dorm from across the street, and what (if I counted carefully) I could make out as her window way way up in that super-tall building, through which she had a partial view of the Williamsburg Bridge.
Just a few weeks ago her younger brother left home, for a place in a time zone he could call his own: not ours, not his sister’s, but his. His college had masterfully curated the new students’ family orientation programming so as to give us droppers-off a short run of “we’re nearby but not together” time. An amuse-bouche in advance of the feast of distance to come. Parents were kept busy and kept out of their kids’ hair, for two days. In a webinar before we even arrived, we were informed there’d be a two-hour opening at the end of the day Wednesday that would make the best time to say good-bye. After that we’d be done: done with the orientation programming, sure, but more to the point, done with our direct day-to-day significance in his life.
We begin as conjurer, then progenitor, sustainer of life, legally responsible physical and emotional health determinant, teacher, guide, cheerleader, chauffeur, coach, advisor, consultant, and now… founders and most senior members of the fan club, I suppose, on tap from afar for come what may, should anything present itself. Though it most likely won’t, at least not much. This evolution might have taken place over the course of two decades, but to us those 21 years have been a dizzying sprint. So dizzying that we can barely remember who we were before this whole thing started. Even though figuring that out is our main job now. That, and considering who we each of us might become, now we are (mostly) two again.
The end of the day Wednesday came. The three of us had dinner at a restaurant a few blocks from campus, then walked back to his dorm. I thought about all the pearls of wisdom I wanted to have conveyed, and now doubted whether I’d gotten across. Does he know he can just reach out, if he needs anything? Probably. As does his sister. We’ll just have to trust. That’s our other main job now: trust. In them, in the world, in the people around them. We arrived at his dorm altogether too soon, and paused in front of the entryway doors, realizing each of us more or less simultaneously that it would be best, for a host of reasons both practical and emotional, to part ways outside. The day before he had given us the gift of unpacking his things into his dorm room with him; we knew enough now to understand: that was enough.
First his mother hugged him, then I did. I said, to my own surprise as much as anyone else’s: “I love ya, you big palooka.” Which of course I had never called him before; in fact I can’t even remember using the phrase “you big palooka” in this century . He asked, as anyone would, “What’s a palooka?” And I replied that (to me at least) it was a term of endearment that you’d mostly hear in a 1930s movie (or in a vintage Disney cartoon). Later I thought I might actually look it up and send him a note clarifying that I meant it in its lesser-known, complimentary variant–as a synonym to “ya big lug”–though he’s far more graceful than a lug, so even that clarification wouldn’t have made sense. It was really the breezy vibe of mid-20th century patter I was after. Some spritz of humor, as if to say: Fret not. I won’t be treacly and lugubrious, even though every minute of the last eighteen years has surely led you to believe otherwise.
I never did follow up with an etymology of “palooka” and the lesser-used connotation I’d intended. Before we’d even walked out of sight of his dorm, I knew that from here on out I would be governed by a new imperative: Grant him space.
I asked my partner to pause, though, once we’d walked long enough to know he’d have gone inside. We could still see his dorm, and I wanted to have a photograph I could look at that included what I knew to be his window. The evening was beautiful; the sun had finally set, more or less directly behind his dorm. It was quieter now, the air dotted with chatter and bursts of laughter from lingering groups of fresh college students, all underscored by the ever-buzzing drone of cicadas.
I took the picture, pocketed my phone, and we turned and silently walked, hand in hand, through the warm, elongated twilight. We wound up on a little stretch of sandy beach not many blocks away, at the south end of the campus. A silvery-blue Lake Michigan stretched out to the horizon, underneath a Maxfield Parrish-tinted sky. The tide gently brushed the beach in modest little waves of suggestion, a marvel of stillness to me, weaned as I was on the harsh crash of the Pacific. There we sat for minutes on end, wordlessly, watching the sky and the great lake change color, until it became dark enough that we knew it was time to walk back to our hotel, and the next chapter of our lives.