Far From the Tree

by Solomon, Andrew

  George had come out at just the right time. If the labor had gone on longer or we had waited a few more days to induce, the knot might have tightened, depriving him of oxygen, destroying his brain, and giving Laura a potentially fatal placental hemorrhage. I looked at that knot the way one often looks at fate—as a thing so nearly missed—and I cut the umbilical cord below the knot, so that danger could be kept far away from our miraculous baby. All I wanted was to hold him and look at him, to try to take from his small and squirming body the transient illusion that he would bring nothing but euphoria into the rest of our lives.

  We went through all the semimedicalized and personal rituals that follow a healthy birth. Many photos were taken, and we took off our shirts so he could be on our skin, and we watched him be weighed and measured, and we saw ointments put on his eyes, and we introduced him to Oliver and Lucy. I handed around a box of champagne truffles that Blaine’s brother had sent me from London (you can’t bring actual champagne into a delivery room), and we called my father and stepmother, my brother, Blaine, and a few others who matter deeply to us. John was instantly enraptured, as I knew he would be, because birth is so mysterious and so much weirder than sorcery or intergalactic warfare that it humbles you instantly. I had felt it with little Blaine and I felt it again here. This person hadn’t existed before, and now he did, and I remember thinking what everyone had always thought, that his coming into the world made up for all the previous losses.

  By the time John and I had settled in our hospital room and the nurse had given George his first bath, it was two thirty in the morning, and we all fell blissfully into our beds. I am the heavy sleeper in the family, so I slumbered peacefully while John got up every few hours to check on George and feed him. When I woke up, John had taken George into Laura’s room down the hall; Tammy and the kids were there, eating cinnamon rolls, and the air was festive. John said he was going to lie down for a bit and that I should talk to the pediatrician. I’m the one in the family who deals with everything medical, and I thought this was the predictable stuff of day one in George’s life—a hearing test, what to do about the hepatitis-B vaccine, and so on. Blithely I sat there eating, helping Oliver and Lucy hold the baby safely, and then the pediatrician came in and said she was concerned.

  George had not been drawing his legs up the way that babies are supposed to and was instead holding them out stiff and straight for up to three minutes at a time. She referred to this as “inappropriately high muscle tone” and said that it might reflect brain damage, and that she wanted to order a CAT scan. I asked whether this was unusual, and she said, simply, that it didn’t frequently occur at this stage. Laura brightly volunteered that George was going to be fine, and everyone else went on with the cinnamon rolls, and I felt the inside parts of my body that are usually warm go cold, while the parts exposed to the air suddenly seemed to be on fire. The pediatrician calmly explained that the baby’s unusual behavior could signal bleeding in the brain, and that such bleeding might resolve itself or might need to be alleviated surgically. She mentioned the knot in the cord and said we needed to be certain that it hadn’t had an impact. She noted that his head was unusually large, which could be related to hydrocephalus or the presence of tumors. She added that he was stiffening one leg more than the other, which might mean that he had asymmetrical brain development or a mass in his brain. She was young, and I could tell that this was the steady, competent manner she had learned for the purpose of being honest with people.

  From the time George was conceived until that day, I had kept thinking how ironic it would be if, in the midst of writing about exceptional children, I were to produce such a child. I knew, though, that nature is no stranger to irony. Now, I asked how soon the CAT scan could be done, and the pediatrician said she’d set it up as soon as possible, and in her brisk and pleasant way she left the room. I looked at George and knew I loved him by how hard I suddenly tried not to love him. I remembered all the parents who had described spreading the news about their thriving baby and then picking up the phone a day or two later to report a different tale. A rational piece of me was trying to decide under what circumstances I would support whatever heroic measures might be called for. A terrified piece of me was contemplating giving him up into care. My strongest impulse was to hold him tight and not let him go for the tests at all. I wanted him to be well, but I wanted me to be well, too, and even as I formulated that divide, it collapsed, and I saw that one thing could not be true without the other.

  I called my father and spoke to my brother and e-mailed a few friends. My brother immediately checked with pediatric neurologists in New York; my father got a physician who is a family friend on the line, and we talked the whole thing through. So many parents had told me how the need to deal with such situations upstages the emotions of them, and I was relieved to settle into problem-solving mode. I would do everything right, which would postpone anguish. I remembered parents saying that they don’t tell you at the beginning that your child will need thirty major interventions; they tell you he will need one, and then a little later that he will need one more, and then another—that the gradualism deprives you of volition. I was determined to be awake at each choice to what might come next.

  I called the nurses’ station to find out when we were having the scan and found out that because of a computer glitch the request had been lost. The pediatric nurse explained that she had to do an arterial blood draw; she drove a needle deep into his wrist. An arterial blood draw? Had any of the five hundred parents I had met mentioned an arterial blood draw? Finally, the news came that we were set for the CAT scan. Alas, our nurse had cycled off, and we were now assigned a pretty young woman with the bedside manner of a flight attendant, her banal friendliness not quite masking an irritable boredom. I asked if she’d assisted at such a procedure before. “A CAT scan on a newborn?” she said. “No, I’ve never even heard of anyone doing one before.” I felt two conflicting guilts: first that I had produced a child who might suffer, and second that despite all the stories I’d heard from parents who found deep meaning in bringing up exceptional children, I didn’t want to join their number. Of course, most of those other parents had not opted into their circumstances; I also remembered that valor cannot be achieved on a schedule.

  The imaging room was grim, despite touches intended to make it cheerful and friendly; indeed, its cheerful friendliness was part of what made it grim, as though the festive decor would have been unnecessary in less gruesome circumstances. We watched helplessly as George was positioned in the machine. He was more or less asleep and did not stir as his head was locked into place with several blankets wedged next to it and straps fastened across his forehead. They let us stay, wearing big lead aprons, and we tried to comfort George, and I was suddenly aware of how uncomforting I was to someone who had not yet learned to turn to me for comfort.

  Back in our room, so recently cozy, we waited. A new nurse came on shift, and I begged her to get the results. The on-call pediatrician phoned radiology. The results weren’t in, so we waited some more. Finally, I fought my way past the nurses’ station and cornered a newly arrived on-call pediatrician, who told me that the results had been there for an hour. “I think we should talk about this with your husband,” he said gravely. We walked back to the room where John was waiting, and I blurted out sweatily, “Is there bleeding in his brain?” and the pediatrician said there was not. Then he launched into what they had been testing for and what each image showed, and he eventually revealed that the scan was completely clear. George was fine. The whole thing was over.

  I think all love is one-third projection and one-third acceptance and never more than one-third knowledge and insight. With my children’s births, I had projected and accepted so much, so fast. I remembered Sara Hadden’s wanting to baptize her son after she found out how severely disabled he was, as a way of formalizing her belief that he was nonetheless a person. I realized that George, who had done nothing more admirable than cry and feed, was rich
ly and permanently human to me, possessed of a soul, and no alteration could change that. The tree doesn’t grow far from the apple.

  John and I became fathers when gay parenting was a thrillingly new advance. I understood the day George was declared well that hope is not a thing with feathers, but a squalling, pink thing newly arrived, that no other optimism is so great as having a child. Our love for our children is almost entirely situational, yet it is nearly the strongest emotion we know. This book’s stories were to my love for my children much as parables are to faith, the concrete narratives that make the greatest abstractions true. I am the parent I am in the wake of this book’s epic narratives of resilience.

  When I was born, the common view was that nurture decided almost everything. In the decades that followed, the emphasis shifted to nature. In the last twenty years, people have talked more broadly about the intricate ways that nature and nurture propel each other. I was intellectually persuaded by this nuanced integration, but the experience of having my own children has made me wonder if a third element is involved, some unknowable inflection of spirit or divinity. One’s children are so specific, and the notion that they wouldn’t exist if one hadn’t conceived them at the moment one did feels impossible. Most of the parents I interviewed for this book said they would never want other children than the ones they had, which at first seemed surprising given the challenges their children embody. But why does any of us prefer our own children, all of them defective in some regard, to others real or imagined? If some glorious angel descended into my living room and offered to exchange my children for other, better children—brighter, kinder, funnier, more loving, more disciplined, more accomplished—I would clutch the ones I have and, like most parents, pray away the atrocious specter.

  Roger Penrose, a British mathematical physicist, asked whether our physical world and the Platonic realm of ideas might be one and the same. He has suggested that the anthropic principle may demonstrate that the universe has a structural need for consciousness—effectively, that the existence of anything proves its inevitability. Counter to the Copernican revolution, the anthropic principle suggests that human beings are not incidental; that our existence is evidence that we had to be; that the comprehensibility of anything is a function of our comprehension as much as the other way around. Subjectivity may be truer than objectivity. The idea has some resonance with parenting. Most of us believe that our children are the children we had to have; we could have had no others. They will never seem to us to be happenstance; we love them because they are our destiny. Even when they are flawed, do wrong, hurt us, die—even then, they are part of the rightness by which we measure our own lives. Indeed, they are the rightness by which we measure life itself, and they bring us to life as profoundly as we do them.

  • • •

  After George arrived, the question arose of how all these relationships might constellate. John and I have complete charge of George; Blaine and I had agreed in advance that we would make the major decisions about little Blaine together; Laura and Tammy have separate parental authority, and we do not set the course for Oliver and Lucy, nor Laura and Tammy for George. The three arrangements are different, and in the same ways most parents try to suppress sibling rivalry, we struggle to avoid situational comparisons. Occasional frictions are sparked by conflicting priorities and boundaries, disparate resources, myriad parenting styles—but they are dwarfed by the reality that it all somehow functions. We have fought hard for the familial relationships into which others stumble, and there is a veteran’s peace in our mutual devotion.

  It must be easier to lead a life in which you are not constantly inventing all the roles, in which there is a script to follow. We have often felt like Christopher Columbus landing for the first time on the wilder shores of love, and while being a pioneer can be thrilling, sometimes one would prefer a place where the roads have already been built and the Internet access is wireless. Most people expect to have children, and certain susceptibilities are attached to that; I had expected not to have children, and the reversal contains stranger ones. We have made many careful, thoughtful decisions, but so much of how we’ve worked it out wasn’t actually rooted in choice. Like other parents, I simply lived my life from day to day, until the unusual became quotidian. I have said that parents do not reproduce, but create. In fact, we also discover. I sometimes think of my life as forty years of toil up some steep hill, and then I joined hands with John, and then with Blaine, and then with Tammy and Laura, and in a different way with everyone else chronicled in this volume. Somehow the lot of us made it to the crest, and when I looked out, I saw all creation spread at my feet. I had no idea, when I was hiking, that this was what I was climbing toward; forty years in the wilderness has never prepared anyone for this view.

  John and I sent out birth announcements that included a picture of us with George. One of John’s cousins returned her copy with a terse note that began, “Your lifestyle is against our Christian values,” and ended, “We wish to have no further contact.” Some people scorn the idea of calling five primary parents and four children in three states a family, or fear that the existence of our family somehow undermines theirs. An old friend said to me over lunch one day, “Isn’t it wonderful how your father accepts your children?” I pointed out that my children were his grandchildren, and she said, “Yes, but even so.” That presumptive caul of negativity is onerous. Some people are trapped by the belief that love comes in finite quantities, and that our kind of love exhausts the supply upon which they need to draw. I do not accept competitive models of love, only additive ones. My journeys toward a family and this book have taught me that love is a magnifying phenomenon—that every increase in love strengthens all the other love in the world, that much as loving one’s family can be a means of loving God, so the love that exists within any family can fortify the love of all families. I espouse reproductive libertarianism, because when everyone has the broadest choice, love itself expands. The affection my family have found in one another is not a better love, but it is another love, and just as species diversity is crucial to sustain the planet, this diversity strengthens the ecosphere of kindness. The road less traveled by, as it turns out, leads to pretty much the same place.

  One resolves cognitive dissonance by assimilating what it is too late to change, and in that spirit I wonder whether I would have found as much joy in marriage and children if they had come easily—if I had been straight or had grown up thirty years later in a somewhat more welcoming society. Perhaps I would; perhaps all the complex imagining I’ve had to do could have been applied to broader endeavors. I believe, however, that the struggle has given me a vision as a parent that I would not have had without it. So much of me had been consecrated to loneliness, and now I am not lonely anymore. Now, children make me happy. A generation ago, this love would have stayed dormant and unrealized. But so, too, would much of the love described in this book, the love of all these parents for children who would once have died young or been put away or lived unacknowledged as fully human. My family is radical for a different reason from most of the others I have chronicled, but all of us are exponents of revolutionary love against the odds.

  Pain is the threshold of intimacy, and catastrophe burnishes devotion. I know this, yet I am routinely surprised to discover it. One may be infuriated and depressed by vulnerability and still be drawn to its seductions. While I mostly fell for the friends I adore because they are wise, kind, generous, and fun, I have loved them most acutely when they or I have been most sad, because there is a psychic proximity in desolate times that happiness does not match. My depression hatched an intimacy with my father that I’d never have known if he hadn’t helped me through that struggle. As a parent, for all that I relish glee, I know that attachment happens when things turn dark. Parenting is an exercise in safety, and the perpetual menace of danger is what exalts parental love above affection; without the night terrors, the spiking fevers, the litany of bruises and woes, it would be a second-rate ent
ertainment. It took me some time to understand that attention to one’s children’s needs is the essence of gratification. From that perspective, it made sense that the difficult loves of these pages are so deep. I want more than anything for my children to be happy, and I love them because they are sad, and the erratic project of kneading that sadness into joy is the engine of my life as a father, as a son, as a friend—and as a writer.

  For many years, my primary identity was as a historian of sadness. Pictures of despair are widely admired, and perfect bleakness is generally thought to reflect the integrity of the author. But when I’ve tried to write about happiness, I’ve had an inverse revelation, which is that you cannot write about it without seeming shallow. Even when one emphasizes the sorrowful or the joyful, one is being honest, just as one is honest when one says that the sky above is blue without getting into the brownness of the earth below. The families I met mostly emphasize the craning art of looking up, but they do so with integrity. I am unabashed by this book’s occasional whiff of rapture and reject the idea that beauty is the enemy of truth, or that pain can’t be the hare to joy’s tortoise.