Family

Some­how while grow­ing up, I missed the part about the struc­ture of the fam­ily, how it works together. Things like loy­alty and sac­ri­fice were lost to me. I knew I should feel those things but I only knew it. I couldn’t feel them inside me. I am now under­stand­ing that my par­ents worked tire­lessly to keep the thing cob­bled together, but we were spread so far apart on the prairie of the sev­en­ties: ten years between me and my eldest sis­ter. She was gone as I was com­ing into know­ing I was on the planet. We have tried at var­i­ous times to all come together over the past decade or two. One of us four kids (usu­ally me) has got­ten the idea that we really are mag­nets and should be try­ing to get closer together, but it doesn’t work. Even though we are polar oppo­sites of one another, our polar­ity lines up when we get close to each and we move away from each other again, smooth as air hockey pucks. I no longer expect that we are meant to be too close geographically.

Like almost every other lem­ming on the planet, I am now a part of a new fam­ily. My son has the use of me for as long as he needs me or, rather, can tol­er­ate me. It’s a blis­ter­ing hot path between fathers and sons. The mile mark­ers are often named “injury 1, injury 2…injury x”. My friend Ran­dall, (with whom I trav­elled across the south eat­ing fried chicken, with whom I ram­bled through NYC mul­ti­ple times, with whom I smoked a pipe and waxed weird about Elvis Costello in col­lege, for whom NYC stuck, he’s a writer, wan­derer, lit­er­ary con­jurer, pho­tog­ra­pher) con­grat­u­lated me as well and as hon­estly as I have heard:

Con­grats on accept­ing — and I’m sure doing well with — the chal­lenge of father­hood. You nec­es­sary evil, you…

I had to laugh. I look at this smil­ing lit­tle won­der and I can’t imag­ine con­flict, but I do remem­ber it for myself and I recall it is the plot of 90% of the books I have read and loved. The con­flict between us will come and I will have to face the evil that I am to him and that hurts even now. But…I am not asleep. I am awake. I have hope that con­scious­ness of the pain that will come in to our fam­ily will help me to accept it. Maybe the rifts in fam­i­lies arises because we believe that the smil­ing coo­ing baby must remain for­ever, that our job as par­ents is to keep them from pain. I don’t buy it. The pain comes like the buf­falo mov­ing across the boil­ing prairies. It just is not stop­pable. I believe my job is to let him know that he won’t feel the pain alone, but he will feel it. I won’t stop it, because I can’t. I’ll hold him then and I will tell him what I am telling you: I won’t leave now or ever. And, because that too will fail (some­where I will leave him and I will let him down, break­ing this, my most solemn promise), we have Rose. She will hold us both, mother to him, lover and part­ner to me, end­lessly able, the keeper of the deeper wis­doms of love, and the mor­tar in the struc­ture of our family.