The car, the other car, the car, the tree, he lost control of the car… trying to pass on a hill… a high-speed chase ending in disaster… The car, by now full of dents, scrapes, hardly recognizable from just six months ago.
“Is that the same car?” a friend asked me recently. “Christ, it's taken a beating.”
“What are you waiting for?” I ask myself. “What?”
“I hadn't figured on the car,” I answer. “It hadn't occurred to me. I don't know why. I should have been more prepared. I should have anticipated this better …”
Looking out over the yard, the first green dusting the woods beyond the fence, I'm numb at the center. There are mothers rising this Saturday morning to fix breakfast for their children, or packing the car for some outing with them—a game, a hike, a shopping trip. These mothers do not jump every time they hear a siren.
And there are mothers who are preparing to drive to some prison or other to visit their sons, sons who have committed crimes that have landed them behind bars for a year, for five, for life.
There are mothers, too, who wake to a day that includes the knowledge of the death of one of their children, the knowledge simply of one of them gone, pictures around the house, memories, but the child—that one there—dead and gone. Was there any rescue possible, any postponement that might have derailed tragedy? No doubt they ask themselves this from time to time. And what advice might they have for me this morning? What would they tell me?
Moving through the kitchen, I head down the basement steps and open the storage room door. By the light of a weak bulb, among old mops and brooms, boxes of childhood toys and baby clothes saved through our many moves, I survey a steamer trunk I have secretly packed with new clothes for Stephen, soap, toothpaste, toothbrush, one pair of dress pants, one white shirt, and tie, the kind of trunk we might have packed once for summer camp.
Stephen's father has found a residential treatment center to which we plan, at last, to send Stephen. Of course, he would never agree to this solution. But the center we have in mind will actually send people, heavies, as I think of them, who come to town, then wait for the best opportunity to take him away—late at night or early in the morning. They spirit him away to the center where under close supervision he will go to school, work, attend therapy sessions, play mandatory team sports, etc.
If, after a year, he is fit to reenter the community—he'll be sent home. If not, he is detained another year… It's up to me to make the call.
Summer, 1994
Baba Yaga's house sits on chicken legs, walks by itself, and twirls around from time to time like a dancer. Baba Yaga does not welcome the initiate who has come to ask her help: The fire has gone out at home. Could she please borrow some fire? No, answers Baba Yaga, not until Vasalisa has completed a number of difficult tasks.
The story I read to Stephen many times when he was small comes back to me. Now, like Vasalisa, I'm at work in the first initiations, coming to grips with the fact that I must not look to Stephen to change, but to myself. The fire has gone out at home. Much is in question, here at the eleventh hour. I find myself relearning things. Under siege I forgot them.
Along with Stephen's troubles, my sense of failure at the prospect of a second divorce undid me for a while. I lost the way. Through last winter, as the dog and I maneuvered filthy, ice-crusted snow, I wept at the idea of myself as “a woman alone,” as my own mother called it; a woman without a man in her life. Though I understood the irony the fact that both of my marriages were to men who were for the most part absent, I hadn't grasped how tied I was to the idea of a husband. Moreover, the idea of myself as a married woman.
I suspect that I felt sanctified by culture. My grief at the end of my marriage to Stan translated as well as grief over the loss of that sense of sanctification.
By way of attempting now to drop this pretense, there are new things to consider. What are they? They are hard to name. They begin without language. Or they are imbibed with a privacy that refuses words. They seem to come from the same place my poetry does, as if all these years I'd sought to house each in different chambers in an attempt to keep my mothering separate from my art. Did I believe that one was more pure than another, that their morals were at odds? Was my work my wildness and my mothering its antidote?
What is Vasalisa learning? The first task demands that she let the memory of her own good mother die. She must stop looking for her mother's blessing. She is cleaning Baba Yaga's house, separating mildewed corn from good corn, poppy seed from dirt, dusting the bolts on the doors and shutters made of human fingers.
The steamer trunk so carefully packed for Stephen pending the event of his abduction to the residential treatment center sits gathering dust in the basement. Of his own accord Stephen has set the car keys aside and turned in his license. At a recent court appearance the judge told him unequivocally that were he caught again in the car, he would be arrested, charged, and sent to juvenile detention for no less than a year.
Coming in from Boston one evening, I find Stephen amidst bike parts in our garage. “I'm fixing it up,” he says. “If I get caught driving I'm fucked.” Without looking up at me he asks, “Do you want my keys?” He laughs. “I've got about six or seven sets hidden around here …”
“I've got keys,” I answer. “But hey, it's good to know there are extra ones around.”
As for the gun incident at school, he is excused of any crime, the dilemma of whether holding a gun constitutes possession decided in his favor. The grace of these two resolutions stuns us. We seem to want to hold on to the feeling, which renders us terribly polite to each other.
And now it's summer. We are relieved that school is out. We sleep in, we are lazy Stephen stays up each night working in the darkroom we've created in the basement, or mixing music on his synthesizer. Friends come and go. I've taken to gardening. I like to work after the sun goes down, carrying candles and a thermos of iced tea into the dirt. I, too, work past midnight.
I'm thinking, digging, planting. If study is a kind of prayer, then I am praying. I begin to understand that there is no rescue after which we are returned to our old lives. Of all the expectations I've entertained, perhaps that one has been the most destructive. I'm thinking of Vasalisa's name. It sounds to me like vacillation.
One night I leave my gardening to go look up the word in the OED. Dirt smears the page where I read, “from the Latin, to sway, totter …” “I accept that,” I say, returning to the garden, musing on the moment of the word, the slide and now of it. Vasalisa, vacillation. From the basement windows I can hear Stephen mix and remix phrases of music as he carefully dubs in each transition, backs up again and again to smooth out and resurface voice to instrument, voice to voice, instrument to voice.
Sometimes I'm invited down to Stephen's darkroom to watch by cave light the faces of friends and strangers, now and then my own, float to the surface of the page, take on definition, light and shadow.
“Wait till you see this one.” Stephen stirs the water in the pan. “The bike's turned out to be a good thing for my pictures. I'm closer, I notice stuff …”
“Who's this one?”
“Watch …”
I begin to make out shapes, gray on gray rising, a pile of stones, tombstones? A rubble pile, I see now, behind a barn or shed. A rubble pile of tombstones shining in the watery residue. On each stone comes clear the word Father.
Things sway and totter. Much we simply let slide, much sits unfinished waiting for later or never—the gardens, the stone walks. There will be no man coming home at the end of the week, or at the end of two to point out all that should have been done, or redirect the doing—no one, in an attempt to father, to sneer at Stephen's hair or tell him to pull up his pants.
I know there are good marriages out there, good men and fathers, stepfathers. I know that Stephen's father and Stan had good intentions. But I begin to see how destructive the dynamic was and the expectations and disappointments it created. In this regard I consider my
responsibilities and my complicity, my earnestness in trying to make it work.
I vacillate, finding my way into rapt relief that I don't have to be that woman anymore, no one's long-distance wife and lover attempting to make up for lost time, covering up flaws to make the weekend or the holiday appear as if all were well. Stephen and I no longer have this distraction.
There are dishes on the roof—Blue Willow—where we have taken our dinner, tools in the kitchen, birds’ nests in the dining room, books waterlogged and swollen but not unreadable on the patio, half-finished drawings, wallpapering, remixes, half-swept floors, half-finished poems.
The house becomes roomy. It blurs with the outside. At night we prop the doors open for the breeze and fireflies float in. We switch off the lights and watch them. By morning there are many various and colorful moths clinging to our ceilings.
Father stones / Photo by Stephen Digges
One day on his bike Stephen finds a stray cat, tucks her in his jacket and brings her home to live with us. He names her Mugsie. A few weeks later she gives birth to a litter of kittens, four in all, which we end up keeping, every one. And when Charles goes to live and work in Russia, we agree to look after his San Francisco—born basset hound, one-year-old Rufus. And we adopt another bulldog, this one, as we know, with epilepsy.
A neighbor who has seen me walking G.Q. has told me about Buster. The dog was her brother's, but her brother has moved into Boston and cannot have pets where he lives.
Her brother gave Buster over to the care of a family in New Hampshire, but now that family can't cope with his epilepsy. About once a month, my neighbor explains, he has cluster seizures—one, two, three, as many as twelve over a twenty-four-hour period.
The family keeping the dog in New Hampshire has notified my neighbor's brother that it can't keep up with the dog's problems. The family has taken Buster to a veterinarian who recommends that he be put down. His epilepsy is severe, says the vet. Unless the family is willing to put in a great deal of time and effort, it might be better for the dog to be put out of his misery.
One Saturday in October, leaving Stephen in charge of Mugsie and her kittens, Rufus, and G.Q., I drive up to New Hampshire to meet Buster the bulldog.
I know little except what the New Hampshire woman has told me—that he is about four, that he is good with kids and other animals, that he takes a battery of medications each day on a precise schedule, medications the New Hampshire family will gladly give me for free if I take the dog off their hands.
“He loves to play with balls,” she adds.
As instructed, when I reach the city limits, I stop at the 7-Eleven and call the number she has given me.
“I'm here,” I say to the woman who answers. “If you could give me directions to your house now …”
“Just wait there,” the woman says. “We'll bring the dog to you.”
This is odd, I think as I hang up. I am a bit nervous about adopting this dog with epilepsy, sight unseen, from people who don't want me to know where they live, who know nothing about me, and who are so desperate to get rid of him, they'll hand the dog over to me at an interstate 7-Eleven. Were I to consult Stan at this moment, he'd explode, What are you thinking?
But these days, Stephen and I are more and more indifferent to conventional modes of behavior. We're taking risks together for the first time in years, and in so doing we seem to be breaking free of the rigidity and fear that for so long dictated.
Over the past year Eduardo has helped us. And when the bills became so tremendous that it looked like we would have to stop therapy with him, Ed assigned me the task of editing his workbook, a book he would give parents and children regarding his often unorthodox approaches to troubled teens and culture.
We worked out a barter—my editing for sessions for Stephen and me. And through editorial reading of Ed's Play and Pride, I came to know his ideas and philosophies well.
Ed's office also became a refuge in the event of a disagreement. In the first months with Ed we discovered how easy it was to fall into the old patterns of rage and isolation.
“You need to practice detachment,” Ed would say, taking time out from a session he was conducting to look in on me. Having literally run up to his office, I sat weeping in the knife-throwing room.
“And go ahead and cry here.” He patted my shoulder. “But when you go home, don't. Don't cry in front of Steve if you can help it.”
“He's locked me out of the house.” I hated hearing myself whine.
“We'll work on this,” Ed reassured me. “We'll make it fair. For now, relax. Throw some knives, or play a little Nintendo. And when you're ready to go home, don't expect this kid's sympathy. Use your head. Climb in a window. Have humor. Practice detachment. And go in prepared to be effective.”
Through Ed's guidance, counseling, and coaching, Stephen and I have come to understand our relationship almost entirely through fairness, through what's fair to each of us in any given situation. Fairness—or the lack of it—was at the root of most of our problems, and by extension, Stephen's problems with authority.
“You probably raised Steve with two goals in mind,” Ed said to me one day. “You wanted to protect him, and educate him, right? I don't doubt that you've been a good mother.”
“You're right,” I'd said, tears coming to my eyes as I listened to him. “And thank you. You're the first person in a long time to say that.”
“Wait.” Eduardo smiled at me. “It gets better. You gave this kid a lot of freedom while he was growing up. I saw right away that Steve is the kid of a baby boomer, maybe the kid of a true child of the sixties. Come on.” He laughed. “I bet that once you thought of yourself as a real flower child.”
“Something like that,” I answered laughing, letting the tears come freely.
“You really wanted things to be different for him—different than they were for you. I'll tell you, Steve has a very sophisticated vocabulary for his sexuality, for instance. He seems real at home in it, freethinking, comfortable. That was your doing, right?”
“I worked at it for both my boys,” I said, blowing my nose.
“You really let them discover things without making a lot of moral judgments, let them wear the clothes they wanted, play with toy guns. You let them make a mess, even take risks you thought might be a bit dangerous. Stephen tells me you let him build fires when he was little …”
“That's because he was obsessed with fire,” I jumped in defensively. “I thought if I let him build—campfires, we called them—and oversaw it, let him explore his fascination in a safe context…”
“Did it work?”
“I think so …”
“See, you were right. You protected while you educated.”
“That was before” I'd countered. “Think of our lives as before and after. Before was good. After is hell.”
“It's hell because it's turned unfair,” Ed answered. “Kids like Steve have come to understand themselves as capable, independent thinkers by the time they reach their teens. Despite their problems with impulse control, even problems with conventional learning, they believe in their abilities to solve their own problems because— Steve's an example—they've been allowed to. Or because—like his street friends—they've had to.
“After a childhood of being allowed to make his own decisions—after your encouraging him to explore his passions and play them out, even when they were a bit dangerous, even when they involved risk—now you're telling him no. That's all over. Now he's got to do what you say, what his teachers say, what the cops say, no questions asked.”
“But the stakes are so much higher! He got himself into gangs and guns. And he's still just a kid. He's failing school…”
“Okay, okay. Listen. What do you want right now for you and Stephen?”
“I want us to be able to talk without screaming at each other, without his running away all the time. Breaking all the doors. He really has a thing about doors.”
“Try joining him.”
<
br /> “Huh?”
“You've got a thing about doors yourself.”
“What?”
“Come on. You've got a bit of an attitude yourself, Digges. I bet you've kicked a few doors yourself.” Eduardo laughed.
“That was a long time ago.”
“Too long. Look, this strict controlling parent thing you've been attempting is all wrong for you. Your heart's not in it. It's not what you do best as far as your parenting goes. Steve knows it. He thinks you're being phony.”
“He's right.”
“Let go of it, then. Join Steve. Join him in his anger at life. Join him when his teachers call him on the carpet for being late to school. Don't educate about what he should have done. Let him figure it out.
“And don't try to protect him from the consequences. Get out of his way. Hug him when the cops bring him home, hug him, and then shut up. Listen to what he's got to say. He has remorse, but when you jump in with questions and accusations, he turns it against you. Let him own it.”
“But he can't be on the phone all night,” I argued another day in a session with both Ed and with Stephen.
“If Stephen thinks he can be on the phone all night and still get up for school, and pay his own phone bill, it's fair to say he should be able to do so,” Ed had countered. “Right, Steve? Isn't that fair?”
“Sure,” said Stephen.
“But what if he can't get up for school? Or pay the bill?” I said.
“Well,” Ed considered. “What would happen to you, for instance, if you couldn't get up for work or pay your phone bills?”
“I'd lose my job,” I said. “And they'd turn my phone off.”
“Right.”
“But school is different,” I said.
“Well, not really. I mean for a kid, school is like a job. If Steve misses school, he gets fired, sort of. Then he can either try again or drop out for a while, then go back. Or maybe he won't ever go back. Right, Steve?”
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