Raising Blaze (4 page)

“You’re on your own, aren’t you?” the nurse asked me and I told her that I was.

“Well, honey, you can put down anything you want there. The state of Oregon doesn’t require any information on the father for the birth certificate. You can list the president of the United States on there if you want. It makes no difference.”

I drew a thick line through the offensive spaces. Blaze’s birth certificate arrived some weeks later with his name, my name, and a row of asterisks where his father was supposed to be. I was unprepared for the grief I felt at the sight of these little stars. The shame of not providing Blaze with a father hit me for the first time. I wanted desperately to share this gift with the other person responsible for creating him. When Blaze was born he looked a great deal like John. They shared the same olive skin and there was a bit of play around their mouths that was identical. I had an almost physical tug of sadness when I saw the father reflected in the son.

I had no idea what I wanted from John or what I would say to him. I was angry that he’d left me, but so proud of our beautiful baby. I had spent months hating him, but I loved what we had made together. When I saw him standing at my door, holding a bottle of red wine and a small stuffed toy, I just started to cry.

John looked at Blaze but didn’t want to hold him, citing that he felt too awkward. We drank a toast and talked about the pattern of our days. I told him about Blaze’s rocky birth and he said he was sorry that it had been so difficult for me. He said that he’d been hurt that I didn’t call him to tell him when Blaze was born and that he’d had to hear it from the Justice Department, which was looking for him to start paying child support. Because I was living more or less on the poverty line, I’d had to take advantage of state-sponsored medical aid. The Justice Department knew where and who John was because I’d told them as part of my application for aid. I told John that he hadn’t exactly shown a great deal of interest in Blaze’s existence, never mind
the date of his birth. Still, I added, “I’m sorry you had to hear about it that way.”

We talked some more and John drank more wine. The room grew a little warmer. I gushed on about Blaze, what an amazing baby he was, how completely besotted I was with him.

“I have no doubt that you’re an excellent mother,” he said. “I’ve always thought you would be.”

I was drawn to him again, not now as the man I had originally met, but as the father of our child, a child I loved beyond words. In the heat of this glow, I moved toward John and kissed him. After a moment, he pushed me away.

“What’s the matter with you?” he said angrily. “How can you think I’d ever do
this
again? You disgust me.”

I watched his wine-stained lips move around these words and had to blink back sharp, painful tears. If he’d punched me with his fist it wouldn’t have hurt as much. His rejection was fundamental and complete. I felt savaged.

We had a vicious argument then, filled with recriminations, threats, and accusations. He told me I was an evil manipulator who had used him as a stud and he would never support my wicked plan to rope him in. I called him the sorriest son of a bitch who ever walked the face of the earth and that my biggest regret was that
he
was the father of my child. For good measure, I threw in that he hadn’t exactly excelled in his duties as stud, if that was what he felt he was.

John left in a rage. For the first time in my life, I threw things at the wall in frustration—the first item being the empty wine bottle he’d left behind. It took several hours for me to calm down enough to stop shaking.

A few months after this episode, I learned through the Justice Department that John had requested a paternity test. For me, this was the final insult. John knew that he was Blaze’s biological father beyond
the shadow of a doubt. Demanding a paternity test was just an ill-conceived attempt to avoid paying child support.

To make matters infinitely worse, I was forced to take Blaze to a lab where an inept phlebotomist stabbed him mercilessly for two hours before getting enough blood for the test. Blaze contracted a terrible fever afterward and started vomiting. He was very ill for one terrible week. Even his normally stoic pediatrician seemed alarmed when I brought him in with a spiking temperature of 104.

I really resented John after that but, as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t bring myself to hate him. It was impossible to hate a man who was present, in whatever form, within my son. I knew I couldn’t bear another scene like the one we’d had when he’d come to visit, but some part of me still believed that, eventually, John would play some part in Blaze’s life.

Mostly, though, I avoided thinking too much about that part of the future. Blaze and I had already weathered the storm of his birth and I was sure that we could get through anything else that was thrown our way. If it were just the two of us, that would be all right as well. Blaze’s presence gave me strength. His total dependence on me never made me feel helpless or alone; it invigorated me. Mothering Blaze, for me, was turning out to be a joint effort and it was Blaze who was helping me. Every time he smiled at me, I saw the echo of his first look at birth and felt the same joy. Here I am, that look said, and each time I saw it, I responded in kind. Yes, I told him, I know you.

M
any of my childhood memories involve my father telling me, my sisters, and my brother that we were unusual. Not just run-of-the-mill bright, artistic, or beautiful, mind you, although he believed we were all of those. We were, he said, different from any other family. He never articulated exactly what this quality was; it came merely from being part of the seven-member team that was our nuclear group. When we went “out there” (meaning any place that wasn’t home), he said, we had to play by the rules set up by the world, even if those rules weren’t necessarily the same ones that governed our household. For a long time, my sense of what my father was saying was that we were a little island of alien beings masquerading as regular humans and, to my mind, he wasn’t that far off the mark.

“Figure out what your teachers want,” was his advice for performing at school, “and give it to them.” In his opinion, school was where we learned how the rest of the world behaved; as for academics, it was just a given that we would all excel. His advice on most schoolwork began with the statement: “Any idiot can do this.” Any idiot could do long division, for example, or tell time, or write a paper, or, later, drive a car. The things we learned at home were things that “any idiot” would never have access to, like the weekend nights we spent playing board
games as a group. My parents often changed the parameters of the games to include some different concepts. We played “Clue” as a psychic exercise, for example. We would take turns selecting cards from the deck and psychically transmitting the images (be they Dining Room, Wrench, or Professor Plum) to another player. Masterpiece, a game where famous artworks are auctioned off, also got a few modifications. Nobody was allowed to play until they could identify, by artist and title, every one of the eighteen paintings in the game box.

Of course, this wasn’t the only thing that made us different. None of my classmates had mothers who busted out a deck of Tarot cards or threw the
I-Ching
on a regular basis. For that matter, none of my peers had mothers who wore miniskirts and snakeskin platform shoes but who were also fluent in Yiddish and enjoyed a nice jar of pickled herring from time to time. None of the other dads knew how to cast horoscopes or listened to the Doors. And none of the other families moved around as often as we did.

We moved regularly, sometimes as often as yearly, and not just across town. My parents moved across continents. We went from England, where I was born, to Brooklyn, New York, and back again a couple of times. We moved to South Africa for a year and then to Los Angeles. We ended up in the Catskill Mountains for a few years, but even then, we moved from town to town several times. By the time I graduated from high school, I had attended thirteen different schools in three different countries. My parents weren’t moving because of their jobs, because of schools, or to be closer to their own parents. When my classmates asked me if I was an army brat, I was baffled. I didn’t have any idea what the term meant. No, my young, freethinking, nomadic parents were looking for the perfect place to raise their own tribe. Every time we relocated, my mother would sew together several Indian-print bedspreads and stuff them with colored foam. Bits of green-and-pink foam flecks dotted our carpets for at least a decade. “The big pillows,” as we called them, functioned as couches.
My father bought a giant redwood picnic table and benches while we were living in Los Angeles and that traveled with us for years as our dining-room set. There was never a feeling of permanence in the places we lived and we owned nothing that couldn’t be packed up quickly and shipped off to the next location.

Friends were equally transient. There was never time to form long-term friendships with schoolmates and not much of an inclination to bring anybody home. When friends came for dinner or for rare sleepovers, they would inevitably be grilled, their eating habits criticized, their value systems judged. None of this was done in an overt, mean way. No, it was subtle enough to be missed by the guests but we would squirm under the light of that scrutiny on their behalf.

Above all else, my parents stressed our connectedness to each other and reinforced our need to support each other in every possible way. This too set us apart from the other families I knew growing up. The results of my parents’ efforts can be seen in the terms we now use to classify anyone who is not a member of our immediate family:

1. Not one of us.

2. Could, maybe, with some work, be
like
one of us.

It seems as separatist now as it did then, but this philosophy has resulted in an extraordinary closeness and affection among all the members of my family. I have lived with my sister Maya for over a dozen years. We share almost everything. Although the rest of my siblings live in other houses, we all eat dinner together at least once a week. We speak to each other daily in a sort of shorthand relay. There is always somebody to talk to if need be and there is always a burgeoning story of interest to share. Of course, there are a few odd little anomalies and we do have our idiosyncrasies. One of us doesn’t drive. One has a secret passion for the romance novels she keeps stashed under the bed. One only feels comfortable working the graveyard shift when nobody else is awake. One of us hides chocolate all over the house (actually, a couple of us do this). But we are comfortable in our
peculiarities because, in my house, to be average was to be disappointing. To be different was good. We are products of our differences and this is what we have always known. If any of us felt as if we never quite fit in (as I did for most of my life), it was all right, because there was always home to retreat to. Home, where the rest of our kind resided.

I was in no way alarmed, then, when my own child exhibited some very specific differences early in his life. For example, Blaze never crawled. He preferred to slide backwards on his head to get where he was going. At twelve months he just got up and walked.

He had an acute sensitivity to loud noises and an extraordinary appreciation for all kinds of music by the time he was four years old. Although Maya is the only bona fide musician, music has always played a large role in my family. I listened to all kinds of music with Blaze, wanting to expose him to everything. By the time he approached his fifth birthday, he could single out the styles and voices of specific artists and showed a definite preference for jazz. I could never get Blaze to initiate dressing himself and it was very difficult for him to put his own shoes on, but when it came to picking out and playing music, he was adept with tapes and CDs and was more or less in control of the playlist in our house.

Unlike me, he never showed any kind of interest in drawing pictures. I bought him colored pens and markers just as my mother had for me, but he was much more interested in making up his own names for the different shades and gradations of color and then playing with the pens as if they were building blocks.

He toilet trained himself in the space of a week when he was two years old but preferred to sit backwards on the toilet until he was seven. Of course, this position necessitated taking off a fair amount of clothing, but I wasn’t about to complain. I’d heard horror stories of parents who couldn’t get their kids potty trained even after a year of trying so I considered myself lucky.

I read to Blaze daily and, by five, he knew the alphabet and the numbers to ten. I bought a map puzzle of the United States and before long he’d learned the names of all fifty states but he refused to put the puzzle together. He started speaking late, around the age of three, but early on he was able to replicate various sounds such as trains, bells, air brakes, and sirens.

None of these oddities seemed disturbing to me when Blaze was younger. He was beautiful, luminous, and receptive. He was special, yes, undoubtedly. I expected this. He was, after all, one of us.

When I enrolled Blaze in kindergarten in the fall of 1992, I expected that he would be a star in his class. He seemed ready, willing, and even happy to start. Although I had never minded the constant moving of my childhood, I planned to stay in one place and let Blaze put down his own roots in what I considered a safe, pleasant neighborhood. Four years before, my family left Portland and moved to California. Maya and I followed a few months later.

Now, she and I had just moved into a rapidly developing upper-middle-class neighborhood near the Pacific Ocean. We didn’t exactly fit the community profile. We were a couple of waitresses among white-collar families with SUVs and mortgages and, according to the school directory, I was the only single mother with a child in kindergarten that year.

It was the elementary school itself that had attracted me to the area. The year before, Blaze and I had watched it being built as we rounded the neighborhood on our daily walks. I loved the look of it and the fact that it was so new and fresh. I met Blaze’s teacher at the orientation for parents. She was very cool, very pretty, and very young. The school day for kindergartners was short, she told us, only three hours. I had no idea what I would do to fill the time. Aside from my time working, Blaze had been with me all five years of his life. I was thrilled for him and couldn’t wait to see what adventures he’d have “out there.”

As I took Blaze to his first day of kindergarten, we were both in
high spirits. It was the first bridge to his life as an independent individual and we were happy to cross it. Just like everybody else.

Blaze and I arrive in front of his classroom fifteen minutes before school is due to start. The parking lot is jammed with Ford Explorers and Chevy Suburbans. Outside his classroom, the scene resembles a press briefing before an Academy Awards ceremony. Parents swarm the playground with video cameras and flashbulbs, photographing their children from every possible angle.

“Smile, Ashlyn, look at Daddy!”

“Honey, go stand by your teacher so Mommy can get a picture.”

Blaze lets go of my hand as soon as we arrive and starts darting around, taking in the bustle of color and movement. Although I feel like the panorama in front of me is a little ridiculous, I have a twinge of regret that I haven’t thought to bring a camera of my own. It looks bad, I think, showing up without some kind of recording device, like I don’t care as much as the other parents, even though I’m convinced I probably care more. And I’ve shown up without a husband, either. Every other kindergartner here is represented by two parents. This is definitely not the first time I’ve felt different, but it
is
the first time I’ve ever felt guilty about it.

Some children are crying, unwilling to leave their parents but most—scrubbed, coiffed, and wearing their best designer duds—just appear vaguely stunned. There is not a single man, woman, or child of color in this entire panoply. This observation flits through my consciousness and settles somewhere in the back of my brain. Blaze’s teacher emerges from her room like a movie star making her first entrance on the red carpet and directs the children to form a line.

“Go on, honey,” I tell Blaze, “get in line.” My voice is choked and there’s a lump in my throat. I struggle to control myself because I don’t want Blaze to think that I’m sad to see him go off to school. It turns
out I’ve got nothing to worry about; Blaze gives me a perfunctory “Bye, Mom,” and marches off into the classroom without a moment’s hesitation. I watch him disappear and stand outside for a few minutes, sentimental tears rolling down my cheeks, listening to the click and whir of thirty cameras.

When I get back home, I haul out my own video camera. I may not have had one at the beginning of the day, but I’ll be there to record the moment when he gets off the bus. Yessir, just like everybody else. My mother comes over to help me welcome Blaze home after his first day. I have tea with her and Maya and we talk about how exciting it is that Blaze is in school and he’s already five, can you believe it, seems like it was just yesterday he was a newborn wrapped up in his bunny suit all snug in a front pack. When the time comes, all three of us walk to the corner, tape rolling, to wait for the bus. When it pulls up, we squeal with delight and start clapping.

The bus grunts to a halt in front of us and a couple of kids disembark. After a moment, Blaze bounces off too but his teacher appears at the top of the steps right behind him and she looks mighty concerned.

“Turn the camera off,” my mother orders.

“What’s wrong?” I ask the teacher.

“Hi, there,” she offers by way of answering me. “Blaze is fine, but there’s a little problem. We’re wondering if you could come down to the school this afternoon for a meeting.”

“What kind of problem?” I ask, a cold sweep of panic racing through my body. “Hi, Mom,” Blaze says, “I like the bus.” He turns around and starts to reboard, but my mother grabs his hand and walks off with him and Maya, leaving me with the teacher.

“What is it?” I ask her again.

“It would really be easier to explain at the meeting. Will it be possible for you to come at about four o’clock this afternoon?”

“No, I can’t, I’ve got to go to work at four. Can you just give me an
idea what this is about?” I ask her a third time. I can read nothing in the expressionless oval of her face and nothing from the well-modulated tone of her voice.

“Blaze seems to be having some problems adjusting to the classroom environment,” she concedes finally. “He’s kind of all over the place. We have a special day class right on site and we think that maybe that would be a better placement for him.”

“What does that mean?”

“Look,” she says, a little desperation of her own creeping into that tightly controlled tone, “it will really be easier to explain at the meeting and I’ve got to get back to the school right now. Will you be able to come earlier? Maybe around three o’clock?”

“Yes, yes, of course I’ll come,” I tell her. “Three o’clock. Fine.”

Stunned, I walk back to the house. I have a very bad feeling about this and it’s growing larger and blacker by the minute. I feed Blaze lunch and attempt to grill him on his first day of kindergarten, but I get less information from him than I did from his teacher. There is a slide, he tells me, and a sandbox. After that, he remains mute. I ask him if anything went wrong and he says no. He reiterates that he likes the bus. I am left to fill in the rest of the blanks myself.