I said, “Um, excuse me, my husband’s dying, I’m a little busy right now. But yeah, maybe I’ll get around to it.”
He said, “Look…”
I said, “No. No,” and I got up, and I stomped out of the room and headed for the other end of the house.
And he’s calling down the hall, “Consider it my dying wish!”
Somehow, by some grace of God—because by the time I got to the other end of the hall, I was fuming—I started to form this idea in my mind of what it would be.
I started writing it down. I was all like, I’ll show that guy.
I stomped back into the room, sat down on the edge of the bed, and got really still.
I sang,
So let ’em turn my soul
Seven shades of blue.
And with the ocean’s roll, baby,
I will wave to you.
And the birds will sing my laughter,
And the whales will steal my song.
But I’ll be happy ever after,
And the world will get along.
He had tears in his eyes, and he said, “That’s perfect.”
And I said, “Oh, thank God.”
But then he goes, “Except for one word.”
And I’m like, Seriously? You’re going to critique my song now?
He said, “It’s just this one word that’s not quite accurate. See, I don’t really know that I’m going to be happy ever after. But I’m pretty sure I can promise you that I’ll be okay. So you can say, ‘I’ll be okay forever after, and the world will get along.’ How about that, honey? What do you think?”
I said, “Fine.”
I was just glad to be done with it.
So the year following Ernest’s death was a big blur. I was more the “frozen widow” than the “grieving widow,” pressing ahead feeling no need to cry, in a kind of standoff with grief, while my son was very much grieving and turning thirteen. I had too much to do to possibly do anything about this giant boulder of grief that I was carting around with me like a ball and chain.
People would ask, “How are you doing?”
And I’d say, “I’m fine.”
I definitely wasn’t falling apart enough for them. But I was just putting one foot in front of the other.
I finished a lot of songs, and I was getting ready to go into the studio with Rodney Crowell, who’s one of my heroes—a great songwriter, great artist, great producer, and a great friend. He was a great friend of my husband as well. So I was in good hands.
We go into the studio. Day one I get behind the microphone, everything’s great. I start singing the song. The Dylan song. That was the first one to get down.
By then it was called “Seven Shades of Blue.” I started singing it, and I was fine. But when I got to the line “ ‘In the hollow of your shoulder, there’s a tide pool of my tears, where the waves came crashing over, and the shoreline disappears,’ ” and I just stopped.
All of a sudden, the tumblers fell into place and I realized that I had written those lines two years ago, a year before he was diagnosed. And the day he was diagnosed, I actually lived those lines. I mean, when we came home from the doctor’s office and we held each other, I felt like I had literally cried a tide pool of tears into the hollow of his shoulder.
It just stunned me, and it cracked me open completely, releasing all the sorrow and sadness that I’d been holding back, and at the same time I had this feeling of wonder and grace.
Who does that? Who writes for themselves ahead of time?
Unfortunately, that opened the floodgates, and I started sobbing, and I could not stop sobbing for the rest of the day. And all these really expensive musicians—first-class musicians—standing around waiting for me to pull it together.
And the studio’s two thousand dollars a day, and I said, “Rodney, we’ve got to cancel. We’ve got to cancel, and I’ll come back in a week.”
And he says, “Oh, no. We’re going to wait this out. I don’t care how long it takes. Take your time. I’m going to wait for the performance that’s on the other side of that wall of tears.”
And that’s the performance that’s on the record today.
I can hear in my voice, even now when I listen to it, the sound of the calm after the storm.
The sound of somebody who has been through the worst and finds themselves in a place where they can sing, “ ‘I’ll be okay forever after, and the world will get along.’ ”
* * *
BETH NIELSEN CHAPMAN, a twice Grammy-nominated, Nashville-based singer/songwriter, has released thirteen solo albums and written seven number-one hits and had songs recorded by Bonnie Raitt, Willie Nelson, Bette Midler, Elton John, Neil Diamond, Michael McDonald, Keb’ Mo’, Roberta Flack, Waylon Jennings, and Indigo Girls, including Faith Hill’s megahit “This Kiss,” ASCAP’s 1999 Song of the Year. Beth’s songs have been featured in film and TV, and her work has been diverse, from singing in nine different languages on Prism (2007) to The Mighty Sky (2012), a Grammy-nominated astronomy album for kids of all ages. BBC Radio’s Bob Harris titled her 2014 release UnCovered, in which she reclaims her hits, and features legendary guests from Vince Gill to Duane Eddy. Sand & Water, written in the wake of her husband’s death, was performed by Elton John to honor the memory of Princess Diana. Her latest album, Hearts of Glass, has been named one of the top 10 Best Roots Records of 2018. A breast-cancer survivor and environmentalist, Beth also teaches workshops internationally and considers herself a “creativity midwife” with a passion to inspire others to blossom fully into their creative lives. In 2016 Beth was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
This story was told on September 14, 2016, at The Great Hall of The Cooper Union in New York City. The theme of the evening was Knocked Out. Director: Meg Bowles.
When I was a small child, my mother used to say sometimes, “The love you have for your children is unlike any other feeling in the world, and people who don’t have children never get to know what it’s like.”
I took it as the greatest compliment that she so loved my brother and me, and loved being our mother, that she thought so highly of that emotional experience.
When I was growing up, there was an article in Time magazine about homosexuality which said, “It is a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality, a pitiable flight from life. As such, it deserves no glamorization, no rationalization, and, above all, no pretense that it is anything but a pernicious sickness.”
Living in that world, I was sad as I began to think that I might be gay.
When I was a teenager, my mother would say, “The love you have for your children is unlike any other feeling in the world, and people who don’t have children never get to know what it’s like.”
And that made me intensely anxious.
I thought, I think I’m gay, but I want to have children. But I think I’m gay, but I want to have children.
I felt myself banging back and forth. At some point I decided that children were the primary thing and that I was going to change. I read an ad in the back of New York magazine for sexual-surrogacy therapy, and I went for a kind of training to transform myself into somebody else.
It was a very peculiar experience. It involved doing so-called exercises with women who were not exactly prostitutes but who were also not exactly anything else. My particular favorite was a buxom, blond southern woman, who eventually admitted to me that she was really a necrophiliac and had taken this job after she got into trouble down at the morgue. I made progress; I got over my fear of sex with women.
But when I was in my early twenties, I decided that this was not all going as planned and that I really was gay.
I told people that I was.
And my mother said, “The love you have for your children is unlike any other feeling in the world. And if you don’t have children, you’ll never get to know what it’s like.”
Years afterwards, in 2001, I met John, who is the love of my life. And shortly after we met, he told me that he had been a sperm donor for some lesbian friends.
I said, “You have children?”
And he said, “No. They have children, and I was the donor for them.”
A few weeks later, we were out at the Minnesota State Fair, and we ran into Tammy and Laura and their toddler, Oliver. I looked at them with fascination, and I thought, How amazing that Tammy and Laura are gay and they have a child, and that John is gay and in some sense at least has a child.
Oliver had been told that he should call John “Donor Dad.” Having a rough time pronouncing that, he came up with “Doughnut Dad.”
So I looked at them all, and I thought, There’s Doughnut Dad. There’s his moms. There’s me. Who are we all to one another?
A year later John told me that Tammy and Laura had asked him to be a donor again, and they produced Lucy.
So now there were two of these children, and we knew them a little bit and saw them from time to time and were warmly disposed toward them. And John said he’d promised to be in their lives when they were grown up if they particularly wanted him to be.
The idea of having children in some unusual arrangement was not entirely novel to me. I had some years earlier been at a dinner with my closest friend from college, Blaine, who lived in Texas and had recently separated from her husband.
When I asked if she had any regrets, she said, “Only about not being a mother.”
I said, and meant it, “You’d be the best mother in the world. And if you ever decided that you wanted to have a child, I’d be so honored to be the father.”
I assumed that it was just a statement in passing, since she was beautiful and beloved and had lines of men eager to court her. But on my fortieth birthday she appeared in New York for a surprise party that John and my father and stepmother had organized. We went out to dinner the next day and realized that we really did want to follow through with this plan.
I wasn’t ready to tell John right away. When I did tell him, he was angry about it.
I said, “John, how can you be angry at me? You have Oliver and Lucy, and now there’ll be this other arrangement.”
He said, “I was a donor for Oliver and Lucy, and you’re setting out to have a child of whom you will be the acknowledged father and who will have your last name.”
We struggled with it for quite a while.
And then John, whose kindness usually carries the day, said, “If this is what you really need to do, then go ahead and do it.”
Soon thereafter he asked me to marry him.
It was 2006, and gay marriage was pretty new. I had never been a big fan of gay marriage. I thought everyone should have the right to marry, though it didn’t particularly preoccupy me. But after he proposed, we began planning a wedding. I thought he had gone along with what I wanted to do and I would go along with what he wanted to do.
We ended up getting married in the English countryside, and we had a beautiful wedding. I found that though our commitment had seemed to me to be permanent and declared and established before that, the experience of having hundreds of friends gathered together, witnessing our love, shored it up and strengthened it and gave it a new depth and resonance I had never imagined nor anticipated.
I found the fact that we were celebrating our love in a ceremony that echoed, in some sense, the one my parents had had, and the ones my grandparents had had, and the ones that presumably went back generation upon generation, exalted the feeling between us, and it was very joyful.
Blaine was there, three months pregnant with our child, and John ventured that we had had the first gay shotgun wedding.
So six months later, our daughter, Little Blaine, was born. I was in the room when she was delivered, and I was the first person to hold her. Blaine by now had a partner, Richard, who was also to be a significant part of the picture.
I had such a disorienting feeling of suddenly being changed.
I thought, I’m a father now. I’m a father.
It was as though someone had told me that I was still myself and also a shooting star.
I held her. And I then had to go down into the basement of the hospital to sign the certificate for her birth, where, given that Blaine and I were not married, I was advised to get a paternity test before I signed for any love child.
I said, “You have no idea the planning that was behind this.”
John held her, and we all were enraptured, as one is by the birth of children, because it’s so much stranger than even intergalactic travel that someone wasn’t there and now all of a sudden she is.
But when John and I got back to New York, I kept feeling as though I was being highly supportive of something Blaine had done, rather than as though it were something I had done. And yet I found myself thinking of this child all the time.
John fell in love with Little Blaine. He fell in love with Big Blaine. We were all in love with one another. We were trying to understand how everything fit together.
Sometime later I said to John, “Don’t you think it would be nice for us to have a child also, a sibling for Little Blaine, whom she might love to have in her life and who might grow up in our house all the time?”
John did not think that would be lovely. And so we had a year in which I kept saying how wonderful it would be and acting as the cheerleader for the cause. And through that year John kept resisting and being unsure.
Finally my birthday rolled around again, and he said, “Your present is upstairs.”
We went upstairs, and there was an antique cradle tied up with a bow.
He said, “If it’s a boy, can we name him George, after my grandpa?”
We then had to figure out how we were going to produce such a child.
So we found an egg donor, and we began the process of trying to find a surrogate.
We got together with Tammy and Laura and Oliver and Lucy one night, and Laura said to John, “You gave us our children, and I’ll never be able to thank you enough for that. But I could show you how much you mean to us by being your surrogate.”
She offered to carry our child.
She got pregnant on the second IVF protocol. And nine months after that, George was born. We called Big Blaine and Little Blaine and everyone else in our circle. And we held him and we wondered at him.
Then we came home, and we sent out birth announcements. The announcement included a picture of John and me holding George.
Many friends said, “I loved that picture. I hung it on my refrigerator.”
But one of John’s cousins wrote back and said, “Your lifestyle is against our Christian values. We wish to have no further contact.”
I thought that world, the Time magazine world of my childhood, was still there and still going strong. And it made me very sad.
But meanwhile we had spent many, many hours with Tammy and Laura and Oliver and Lucy through that whole pregnancy, and we had all fallen in love—I think again, anew, more deeply—with one another.
And when Oliver and Lucy learned that Little Blaine called us “Daddy and Papa John,” they said they’d like to call us Daddy and Papa, too.
I suddenly found that in contemplating two children we seemed to have four.
In the period that followed that, I kept thinking about the angry cousin and what she’d said.
I thought, It’s not really a question of our kind of love being as good as, or better than, or less good than anyone else’s love. It’s simply another kind of love that we found as six parents of four children in three states.
And I thought that just as species diversity is essential to keep the planet
functional, so there’s a need for a diversity of love to sustain the ecosphere of kindness, and that anyone who rejected any bit of the love in the world was acting from a position of folly.
About six months ago, we went to a game park, and I climbed up with George on a stand, from which you could view some animals below.
I held his hand, and I said, “We’re going to go back down the steps now. Go very carefully.”
I took one step, and I slipped, and I fell all the way down the flight of stairs, pulling him along behind me.
I remember when it happened thinking that I really didn’t care whether I had broken my arm or my leg, as long as I hadn’t injured my child. It turned out that I hadn’t.
When I realized it, I suddenly thought, The love you have for your children is like no other feeling. And until you have children, you’ll never know.
I thought how even in the periods when my mother’s saying that made me anxious or made me angry, that it was her saying it so persistently that had caused me to pursue a family, even under such complicated and difficult and elaborate circumstances. And it had led me finally to the greatest joys of my life.
* * *
ANDREW SOLOMON is a professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University Medical Center and writes and lectures on politics, psychology, and the arts. He is the author of Far and Away: How Travel Can Change the World, the New York Times bestseller Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and myriad other awards), and The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression (a Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of many awards, including the 2001 National Book Award). His TED Talks have garnered over 20 million views. Solomon’s work is published in twenty-four languages. He lives in New York and London with his husband and son but also has a larger post-nuclear family.
This story was told on November 14, 2012, at The Great Hall of The Cooper Union in New York City. The theme of the evening was Around the Bend: Stories of Coming Home. Director: Catherine Burns.
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