by Amy Seek
The kids brought out a cake with two candles on it. They set it directly in front of Paula. All this thinking about my role, but there was really no doubt about it.
“Should I blow them out?” she asked. But before anyone answered, she did so quickly, as if to eradicate the implications of that question. Why two candles? I wondered. If there were two mothers, there were four mothers to remember at this table. I wondered if Sarah and Andrew were thinking about their own. Paula announced that we were all too full to eat cake, but I thought I would have liked a piece of cake, having not had much breakfast.
I was now older than Paula was when she’d already adopted one baby and was e-mailing me in the evenings to talk about adopting mine. Ten years ago, they were the adults, and I was as much in need of parenting as my son. Our distance had given me a certain security in the decision, but now I’d caught up. I was old enough to parent my son. I’d traveled and finished school and explored enough to know there wasn’t really anything out there better than loving a child. And so even as I was accustomed to adoption, it seemed my regret grew more, not less. And every day they knew more than I did what I lost and how deep that regret should be.
“Screen time is up, Jon. No more videos on the computer.” Jonathan and Andrew had slipped away to the laptop that sat on the kitchen island. Paula parented casually, as if to remind me that the decision was already made.
* * *
Erik began to clear dishes, and I could tell Jonathan was bored waiting for our eternal breakfast conversation to end. I asked him if he wanted to go for a walk. He nodded and sat down in the foyer to put his shoes on.
“You can’t come, Andrew,” he said, seeing his brother getting ready, too. “You’re too young. You’ll get in the way.” Andrew began to cry, and Erik took him upstairs to talk. I imagined he said something about letting Jonathan spend time alone with me. We knew early on that Jevn and I would likely visit more than the other birth parents, but Paula had assured me they would never deprive Jonathan of time with me just to preserve an illusion of fairness for the other kids. Still, I felt guilty for the pain my visits may have caused the other two. I thought I should pay more attention to them, but I knew that wouldn’t solve the problem. And I’d recently decided to stop pretending my son wasn’t special to me.
I slipped out, myself, wanting to escape the whole exchange. As I did, I passed Sarah, who was speaking to Jonathan.
“Jonathan, you saw Jevn last month,” Sarah scolded him. “Andrew hasn’t seen his birth mother in a long time. You’re being selfish.”
Jonathan ignored her, and when we got out the door, I asked him about how often Sarah and Andrew got to see their birth parents.
“Not very much,” he said, and he didn’t seem interested in the question. David, who lived next door, joined us, and we walked across the street to the campus. They leapt over rails, walked along the tops of walls, jumped onto picnic tables. I watched every move. I responded to every trick. And I could see that Jonathan was watching to see that I was watching. I made sure not to disappoint him.
“You sure take a lot of video!” David stopped and looked at me suspiciously. I was taking videos so they could see their stunts, but I was also secretly hoping stills would give me pictures my son would never pose for.
“You guys aren’t all that good at parkour, so it takes a lot of footage to get any decent content.” I held my ground.
They both laughed and we moved on.
We continued, finding challenges and surmounting them, all across the campus. When we encountered a wall they couldn’t climb up, I suggested they visualize the feat first. Think hard about it, see it in your mind, and then—do it!
“I think I should think easy,” Jonathan contended. He stared the wall down and then ran up it, leaping to the lawn above.
David asked if I thought he could jump down a long set of stairs. I could see he wanted to, and I wanted him to. I said I thought he probably could. He backed up to get a running start and I prayed, Pleasedon’tkillyourself, pleasedon’tkillyourself. It was only when we passed other people that I thought perhaps I should tell them not to climb on this or that, or maybe say something like, “Be careful.” But it wasn’t in my heart. I wasn’t afraid for them; I was happy to see them taking over the world. I wasn’t sure if that made me more of a mother or less.
“Do you think we look like we could be brothers?” Jonathan put his arm around David and looked up at me as we walked. I thought about the Norwegian ancestry that distinguished Jonathan from his olive friend.
“No … not really.”
“Well, we’re making our own family, a parkour family!” Jonathan said, and they both laughed. He must have naturally felt empowered to do such things, having learned family to be an inclusive and self-determined thing. Compelled to self-create, to take back his choice.
* * *
I asked David if he had any thoughts about philosophy. He was also the son of theologians, surrounded by arguments. “I have thoughts about philosophy,” he said. “My first thought is, Why’s that a job?”
Jonathan was the ancient voice that values the pursuit of the unanswerable question, but he listened without concern as David maintained his position, that there was no use in asking. “My cousin is a philosopher and once he asked me, ‘What does it mean to be?’ I said, ‘What does it mean to be what?’”
“HEY! What does it mean to be?” Jon yelled to someone passing by. “No answer?—Let’s go!” He leapt off the wall and David followed him.
* * *
We passed a group of college students going through Dumpsters to salvage things thrown out at the end of the semester, and Jonathan and David joined them. I stood by and tried to balance chaperone and kindred spirit. They found a perfectly good wire mesh garbage can, a swim pillow that went between your legs to help you focus energy on your arms, a baseball cap, two highlighters, an unopened Valentine’s box of Snickers, which they sampled, packs of Pez, a desk lamp, a leather purse Jon would give Sarah, and a table fan. The college boys occasionally smiled at me. I wondered who they thought I was.
We went home to drop off our first round of things and to equip ourselves for deeper digging. Jon was telling Erik about all our finds just as Paula walked in.
“Jonathan was just telling me how much fun he’s having Dumpster diving!” Erik said it to Paula, in part, it seemed, to ask Paula whether Dumpster diving was a thing to let the boys do.
“Good!” she said, unsurprised. “It’s not like it’s the first time they’ve done it. What did you find?”
I was so glad she didn’t mind. That she approved of my lax parenting. I was glad that she didn’t rain on the parade of his childhood with worries about germs or rules. And I couldn’t help but think she didn’t want me to feel I had increased any dimension of his life, today. That I would have to search harder to find something she had not already provided for him. Even among criminal pleasures.
Jonathan had outfitted himself in a winter coat and gloves, and we returned to the campus. On our way, he gave one of the college students a double take, and the student noticed and glanced back at him.
“Nice sunglasses,” Jonathan said, oh, so coolly.
The student smiled in thanks. I could tell he was genuinely flattered, but he didn’t break his stride. I wondered how my son came to be so comfortable in the world.
Before we made it back to the Dumpster, we happened upon a group of boys and their parents wheeling an enormous television out of the dorm. Jonathan approached them boldly.
“Are you getting rid of that?”
“Yeah, and you’re welcome to it!” They looked at me to find out if that was okay, and I’d forgotten I was there.
“You’re not—his mom?” the mother stammered. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to say yes. It’s complicated, but yes. I wondered what he would think if I said yes? Or if I said no? If I waited long enough, I thought, maybe he would respond and I would find out who he thinks I am.
; “Um, his mother lives there.” I pointed to their house across the street. Then I asserted a little parental authority, telling him I wasn’t sure about the TV, as if to say, Never mind what I just said about his mother, watch this and see if it’s not obvious to you who I am.
“It works,” they assured Jonathan. “We were watching a hockey game up until a few minutes ago. There’s just always two pucks.”
It was a horrendously large and heavy object. It looked like a giant Atari. I called Paula on my phone. She astounded me by saying she would come over to see it. From a long distance we saw her see the TV, and she bent over in laughter. Jonathan smiled and laughed, thinking it was a good sign. But as she got closer, Paula was circumspect. She turned soberly to Jonathan.
“If we take the television now, do you understand it’s not a decision to keep the television? It’s only a decision to start a conversation about keeping the television?”
“I’ll only use it for video games, and I’ll spend more time outside! I promise! I need a television because—”
“Jonathan, it seems like you’re trying to talk about keeping the television now. I don’t want to have that conversation now. We can take the television, but we’ll have a conversation later about whether we’re going to keep it.”
“Okay!”
Paula asked me to call Erik to bring the car over, and he pulled up a few minutes later.
“What do you think?” he asked me as he stood and assessed Jon’s find.
“I don’t really like TV, but I think for the sake of how happy it would make Jonathan…”
“I’m just concerned about how disappointed he’ll be if it doesn’t work. Or if we decide not to keep it.” This was how parents were supposed to think. He out-parented me.
They loaded the television into the trunk and secured it, hanging halfway out the back, with bungee cords. One of the neighbors walked across the yard to join us and asked, “Did you buy a television?”
“We don’t even know if it will work, but we’ve bought an adventure.” Paula laughed. I laughed, too. That was how they thought about everything, and that was exactly what made it work.
Jonathan leaned out the car window, like a proud hunter coming home with his kill. Erik walked behind the car to secure the television in the trunk, and Paula was at the wheel, taking direction from him.
“Slow down!” Erik called to Paula. “Actually, go as fast as you can, I don’t want the neighbors to witness this!”
But soon there was a crowd of neighbors and kids, guiding and advising and laughing and loading the enormous television into the basement, where it was never so much as plugged in.
* * *
Charles arrived to pick me up. Jonathan greeted him, eager to show him where I was, and Charles joined us in the living room. He greeted everyone and wished Paula a happy Mother’s Day. Paula said her evening plans were to go out to eat with her three girlfriends; it had become a Mother’s Day tradition to be left alone to do something extravagant without the kids. She made a gesture of shoving them away and laughed. Entitlement achieved; her motherhood was now a thing she could take for granted. In fact, she had to fend them off.
I hugged Andrew, who was always so sweetly sad to see me go.
“Amy, what should I call you?” he asked, pensively. “My birth aunt? Or … my stepmom?”
“I’m sort of like those things, I guess, but I don’t really know, Andrew!”
Jonathan and Charles talked a little, and I wished they could talk more. But we were leaving, and Jonathan was going over to David’s. It had been such a short day, but I felt the exhaustion coming. Then Paula said it had occurred to her that if the whole family went to Andrew’s birth mother’s wedding, they wouldn’t be more than eight hours’ drive from Tennessee. And maybe they could visit my father then, if that timing worked. I said that sounded good to me. Please let it work.
We hugged goodbye, and I embraced Jonathan, letting go too soon, and he ran out the door. I was still feeling the urgency of that thing I’d come so determined to do; I just didn’t have any energy left. I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to get him back. But I knew they’d keep giving him—in weekend visits, in long walks alone, in time with my family—until I figured it out. I made Charles drive by David’s, to see if we could see Jonathan again before we left. I wanted to say goodbye again. I wanted to be brave and hug him twice. Charles pulled over and asked if I wanted to jump out, but it was too strange. No, I just wanted to see him. Maybe they’re playing basketball. Can you back up a little?
“Go see him if you want to see him,” Charles told me.
“No, no, no. It would be weird.”
We returned to his house, and exhaustion overtook me.
THIRTY-FIVE
When the earthquake happened in Haiti, Paula posted a warning on her blog against adopting hastily from there. She wrote that really helping a child orphaned by the storm means not just loving it and lifting it out of disaster, but being willing to embrace its original family and community and to “shake your fists at the heaving ground and crashing buildings that took those people away.” In precious moments alone with the child, when it’s most possible to forget everything that came before, she said, it’s an adoptive parent’s obligation not just to love the child but to “love it more for all the people who couldn’t be there.”
* * *
My dad’s weight was down to 147. Mom said he was as thin as he’d been when he was all legs in his ski pants in the Alps, fifty years ago. He had shingles on his back, and his whisper was getting weaker. His hands were bruised, and he patched his skin together with painter’s tape; it was so thin and delicate it would rip under the slightest stretch. But he always remembered his Mardi Gras beads when he returned for chemo. And as weak as he was, he couldn’t stop building things. That spring, lightning had struck one of the trees that supported the zip line in my sister’s yard, and a giant branch had fallen, crushing the railing of the launch deck and detaching the cable. He had to fix it. Building things was a kind of compulsion for him, as it had been for his father, as it was for Jevn. Building was like a first language for these silent men, comprised of saws and hammers and drills and rope, communicating the fundamentalest things.
* * *
When I found out he was heading to Baltimore, I told Paula and Erik that this would be the best opportunity to spend time with him. I didn’t want to wait until he was dying. I wanted Jonathan to witness him alive and in his element, and perhaps to feel in his own blood the early resonance of something that had always meant so much to my father. I had asked Jonathan once if he was interested in learning how to build things. Jevn had built a playhouse in Paula and Erik’s backyard in North Carolina and designed the renovation for their house in Boston. I wondered if it had sparked his curiosity about construction.
“Yeah, but nobody really has to teach me,” he responded. “I’ve known how to build things since before I was born.”
I laughed at his so casually taking ownership of a period of time when he was very much within me. He was all mine then! Mine to feed, mine to float in the water, mine to bake in the sun. It must be how mothers feel, I thought; as soon as you teach a child to speak, it will tell you it never needed you.
“Well, that’s probably because you went to architecture school with me every day for nine months!” I fought back, playfully, happy to have him push me away and give me an excuse to pull him back.
I knew it would be difficult to coordinate, and I knew what I wanted was excessive and impractical: for my son to have a memory of my father with a hammer in his hand. But I told Paula what my mother had told me, that my father had been refusing to eat. She said she’d make seeing him a priority. Everyone except Sarah would be able to come.
* * *
When Jonathan got out of the car, he walked right up to my sister’s son, standing by the tire swing. Both still blond and skinny, they stood for a moment before the mirror of each other. Jacob was nervous and shy; he battled
a stutter, and he looked up at Jonathan warily, but Jon wrapped his arm around his shoulder like they were old friends, and they walked into the yard together. Paula and I said hello and stood side by side as we watched them.
“A little too sweet, isn’t it?” She laughed. “Jon is drawn to kids younger than he is; he’s really protective of them. It’s so funny to me!” But she was positioned to be surprised by her children. She had no particular expectations, she said, because as an adoptive mother she never saw her children as miniature versions of herself. She said she was always aware that her kids were on a “completely new adventure called themselves.” We were both, all the time, between hugging and holding on to him—perpetually, reluctantly, letting him go.
* * *
“Jonathan,” my dad whispered, emerging from the house. He’d been taking a nap, trying to build up energy for the work ahead: rebuilding the zip line launch deck and its railing.
Jonathan walked, stiff-shouldered, up to my dad, who appeared pained as he stood in the driveway, one hand clasping the threshold of the garage. There were two-by-fours propped up on plastic kids’ stools on top of the asphalt, prepared to be cut at an angle drawn in Sharpie. My father handed Jonathan the Skilsaw. He knelt down and showed him how to align the blade with the mark, instructing him to err to the left if at all. Then he stood and caught his breath, and Jonathan looked up at him. My father pointed to the mark and smiled wearily.
“Yeah. G-go ahead. Cut there,” he whispered, resting immediately after the exertion. My son seemed to understand that there was good reason he wouldn’t get more instruction than this. Erik passed by carrying suitcases into the house and took a casual interest in Jonathan’s work.
“Danger-parents, I think that’s what we should be called, right, Jonathan? I think I’m supposed to be discouraging this kind of behavior!” He laughed.
