Some Assembly Required (10 page)

Dear Jax: Yesterday was your first Thanksgiving, and it is time for me to impart to you the secret of life. You will go through your life thinking there was a day in second grade that you must have missed, when the grown-ups came in and explained
everything
important to the other kids. They said: “Look, you’re human, you’re going to feel isolated and afraid a lot of the time, and have bad self-esteem, and feel uniquely ruined, but here is the magic phrase that will take this feeling away. It will be like a feather that will lift you out of that fear and self-consciousness every single time, all through your life.” And then they told the children who were there that day the magic phrase that everyone else in the world knows about and uses when feeling blue, which only you don’t know, because you were home sick the day the grown-ups told the children the way the whole world works.

But there was not such a day in school. No one got the instructions. That is the secret of life. Everyone is flailing
around, winging it most of the time, trying to find the way out, or through, or up, without a map. This lack of instruction manual is how most people develop compassion, and how they figure out to show up, care, help and serve, as the only way of filling up and being free. Otherwise, you grow up to be someone who needs to dominate and shame others, so no one will know that you weren’t there the day the instructions were passed out.

I know exactly one other thing that I hope will be useful: that when electrical things stop working properly, ninety percent of the time you can fix them by unplugging the cord for two or three minutes. I’m sure there is a useful metaphor here.

Today there was a tick from the dogs on Jax’s foot, or rather, on the feet of his jammies. I hate ticks. They represent all that is wrong with the world, all that is nasty, disgusting, random, and vicious. It looked like an innocent black spot, a tiny black sesame seed, at first, and I moved forward to get it, and it moved. It carried so much dread for me that it may as well have been a snake. You try to be so vigilant, and where does it get you? You can’t be vigilant enough. Now it feels like “The Masque of the Red Death” around here.

I suppose, though, since Jax is always getting dressed and undressed and patted and bathed and dressed again, at the very worst a tick would be discovered quickly.

Neshama once told me about a friend of hers who had to be treated for parasites after visiting a foreign country, and the doctors also had to give her meds to kill the ticks that came with the parasites,
on
the parasites.

I ask you.

I felt upon remembering this that I could not go on. How do any of our kids live? I know lots of people with Lyme disease now. They get a tick bite, or they don’t even notice it until the ticks become swollen and spongy, or eventually, and most horribly, like the teeny balls of mercury from broken thermometers we used to roll around in our hands that would pill back together into one ball.

In the old days, when I was a kid, we always tried using matches to make the ticks back out, or nail polish or petroleum, which I think they secretly love: they huffed it and burst into song—“I feel pretty! Oh, so pretty!”—and didn’t budge.

It feels awful not to be able to protect Jax from so much, but you can’t bog down in that, because then you’d be frozen, and of no hope or help to anyone. And that frozen hopelessness is the welcome mat for the Red Death. Come on in! Put your feet up.

Right before bed, Amy called full of excitement to say that Jax can now roll over whenever he wants. We laughed and were joyful together about what a strong little champion he is, and how hilarious. I said I couldn’t wait to see this for myself.

But what I thought was: Now he can roll right over onto those ticks.

Yesterday was the first Sunday of Advent, so in the afternoon after church, I e-mailed my dear friend Bill Rankin, the Episcopal priest who helped fish me out of the waters of alcoholism almost twenty-four years ago. Now he is one of my best friends. I wrote, “Tell me your understanding of Advent.”

He wrote back, “Dearest Annie: To the best of my knowledge Advent was a season cooked up by the church to add drama and, as it were, spiritual foreplay before Xmas. Since it had to have an outwardly holy purpose, it was advertised as a season of self-examination and repentance in preparation for the incarnation of the deity, so in the ‘liturgical’ churches, like the Romans and the Episcopalians, the clergy wear purple albs around their shoulders—a supposedly somber (serious) color—as opposed to the red they wear for saints’ days and the white they wear for Christmas, Easter, weddings and funerals.

“Implicit in Advent is the no-fun-at-all searching of the self in order to repent of all the sins, shortcomings, errors, screw-ups, and omissions that the childish think should be taken care of before coming face-to-face with The Holy.

“My own view, since you asked, is that the church strives in Advent to make a large deal out of a fairly small idea. I
remember that years ago a professor in seminary said that the hardest sermons to preach are the Advent ones. I wasn’t with it enough to ask him why, but all these decades later I think his meaning was something like this: The church says we should engage in serious self-examination for four long weeks, since Jesus is coming. It’s hard for a preacher to make that message interesting or consequential, especially for four weeks. So typically the churches have shrunk the object of these words to sex, have done so for millennia: it sure helps keep people’s attention. Micro-ethics, micro-spirituality. What a bore.

“The churches have no desire or courage to take on the evils that matter—greed, poverty, racism, militarism—so the experience of Advent ends up being bland, tedious, and, I frequently think, empty.

“That’s my sinful two cents’ worth. You owe me lunch. When might I expect it? Love, Bill.”

Sam was talking over the phone about how powerfully connected he still feels to his grandmother Gertrud, who died a year ago, so I decided to turn this into an interview:

“Our connection could never be severed,” he said, “even by her dying, and even though we weren’t pumping family blood—because the connection was never physical. And
sever means physical. But I was just a boy who needed a grandma. I miss her like a child would, not a man, and every day.

“With Jax’s birth, Samland has been permanently breached. The entire time I was a teenager, I lived there, in my mind, but now there’s no longer such a place. Now it’s Sam-and-Jaxland. I’m still so close to being a teenager that I can remember how independent of you my choices were—and that’s a scary epiphany: how completely independent of
my
needs and fears Jax’s choices will be one day.

“We as parents have the illusion that we make our kids stronger, but they make us stronger.

“When he came into my life, it’s like everything got intensely amplified—now school is lit by the force field of Jax, like having a new lighting system in your life.

“The illusion of control in your life is smashed. Sometimes when you’re a parent you’re just hanging on by a pinkie finger, and you say to God, ‘Trusting you, Dude—I trust you have a plan for us.’

“I thought I could help Jax grow as strong as possible as a person, but he’s in charge of how he decides to grow, or not. Like I was. I have three main ideas here I want to tell you about:

“It used to be kind of an accident that he could get his feet to his mouth, but now it’s a tool in his movements. He grabs his feet to shift his weight forward, and to sit or roll. Now it’s a lever, to use. He’ll use his feet as a lever, as handles.
He’s discovered, ‘Wow, they’re attached to me. They have weight to them.’ It’s evolutionary, and it caught me by surprise because the foot phone seemed like a phase, but it was evolution—him starting the movement process, of rolling over, and rocking forward inch by inch, like someone with no arms. Now you can’t take your eyes off him for a second. He’ll go from being on his back to being on his stomach, with an arm trapped beneath him, and hurt himself. Now if you look away, he can get hurt.

“Another thing is that I see now that all Jax needs is loving care, and diaper changes. All he needs to grow are opportunities to figure things out. He needs us to spend enough time with him on his back so he can learn to arch it. He gets bigger and stronger every day regardless of us, instead of because of us. He
is
life, he’s life learning to seize itself. He’s like a snowball at the top of a hill, gathering himself as he rolls. He’s his own snowball, made of the same snow as us, and life. Like, look at me, even with a dad, it shows you that you need God to be breathing into you—that your parents just need to be guardians and protectors, because you’re your own snowball.

“And third, he makes me stronger, because you have to balance so much now—you have to reschedule everything you have to do—homework and him. It forces you to tap into more of you than you knew was there—parts that you didn’t even know you had.

“With him in the equation, everything is a small victory,
just getting homework done is a small miracle, because part of my mind has to be on him, lying on the ground playing, even as I try to study. Before, it was like I was trying to keep four plates spinning in the air, with just Amy and regular homework and life—now it’s four plates,
and
something precious and priceless and fragile in the air, in the mix,
and
at the same time a Ming dynasty monkey that is able to animate itself and try to escape from the air where you are trying to keep it in the juggling lineup.

“Now I get my laundry done, and it’s WOW. Or I finish my homework, and I can hear the sound track from
Chariots of Fire
playing.

“I’m getting more resilient as a father, about doing things I don’t want to do—the self-centered person is still totally there, even though I’m a father figure. There used to be a list of stuff I hoped to get done, homework or exercise or whatever, and now if I want to make a schedule for myself, it’s like, ‘Thanks for sharing,’ because instead, I know I’m going to need to stare at my son for a long time. Or I might have to call Amy and find out exactly what he’s doing, if they are at home and I am at school.

“When I can put a picture of him in my head, it’s in real time—I’m not relying on memories to see him inside myself. I can be a fly on the wall watching right as it happens, even if we are miles apart, like I’m watching a live feed, because he and I are connected in my bones. It’s completely like with Gertrud, because with that deep a connection, that transcends
death, it’s like wireless Internet versus one of those old coiled-up phone cords. There’s not a physical cord that connects you—it’s in the soul and your body. Gertrud can be there for me in a second flat if I need her. If Jax and I didn’t see each other for twenty years, we’d recognize each other instantly. It’s like
Namaste
or
Namaskar
—like, I recognize divinity in you, but actually more like, I recognize our each-otherness; instantly.

“I love my dad. But he couldn’t invest in me when I was little, when I was a young company. He could have a strong young man who was seriously there in his life, and on his side now, as he’s older, seventy, but he didn’t invest. I think about him and care for him, but he’s there, and I’m here. With Jax.”

“I got no sleep the last couple of nights, and I feel so fucked up. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. I got no sleep and I have tons of homework, and I cannot believe God has a plan. It’s so bad today—not manic bad, just hopeless and weighted, and I’m exhausted, and it’s all over. I feel there is NO plan for me and Amy. Is there
any
way to make this work? We fight, and it gets so supercharged because of this kid. It’s about nothing at all, but we get so emotional and we’re each afraid the other is going to do something drastic.

“Sometimes I want the looseness of what life used to be
like. When I could have just gone to Mexico and lived in a shack on nothing.

“Now I’d have to take Jax or leave him, and I couldn’t leave him—and I can’t take him from his mom. I feel trapped and powerless and out of control and insane, but I’ve lost my mind to the point where I can just look at all the bad things and laugh like a maniac, like when a homework assignment gets destroyed in the computer and I laugh because it’s so pathetic and hopeless and absurd.

“And I have no choice of plans but to keep moving forward.”

It blew my mind to hear Sam express himself at this level of self-awareness and humility. It made me feel like I must have done something right. What recurred to me all day were his three words, “We as parents.” I needed to make room inside myself for this equating, the way I would make room on a crowded shelf for a new book.

I woke up with the idea that Sam’s thoughts are like reading very plain modern versions of the psalms: “I love this! It’s great! My heart soars! I will try to be worthy of this gift. Wait. Now I am doomed. I can’t believe this is the way it’s supposed to be. I hate everything and don’t have a shred of faith. Oh, wait, yes I do—now I remember. Thank you, God. Back in the saddle.”

Amy and Jax came over, and Amy and I watched a vampire movie. Awake or asleep, Jax is a work of art. I think he is very advanced for four months and two weeks: he laughs, squeals, bubbles away, recognizes his name, turns toward sounds—the phone ringing, the kitty screaming with outrage that Bodhi has licked her, Bodhi’s yelp when the kitty claws him, Lily in the role of martyred wife; why can’t we all just get along? Jax can track the animals. He laughs, and he lifts his arms to be picked up. Maybe he thinks the mood at the petting zoo has soured. Better get out while you can.

So between the vampires and the bubbling and the pets milling around like extras, our dance card was already pretty full when the mailman arrived. He delivered the Christmas ornaments Amy had ordered online. I remembered giving her my credit card number a couple of months ago, so that she could buy them and therefore wouldn’t want to take Jax and move away. I had a pang when I saw the online bill, though—if you don’t have money, why not make popcorn or cranberry necklaces, and paper snowflakes, like the March girls would have done?