Father & Son

At the risk (more like the certainty, actually) of embarrassing him, I write today on the occasion of my older son’s twenty-first birthday.

On June 11, 1987 his mother and I lived in Leesburg, Virginia but, for what now seem obscure reasons, the obstetrics practice my wife was using was at Alexandria Hospital, nearly 50 miles away. My wife, an impatient woman who in her ninth month had taken to skipping up and down the streets of Leesburg to hasten our child’s arrival, woke me shortly before dawn exactly 21 years ago, saying “I think it’s time.”

My response, “Wake me again when you’re sure,” was not well received and I was not permitted to return to sleep. We trundled into the car and made our way to the hospital, my wife obstinately insisting that I, though still quite groggy, do the driving. Once under way, I remember toying with the idea of driving just a bit recklessly: speeding, driving on the shoulder to pass the growing rush hour traffic, that sort of thing.

My plan, born of similar TV and movie scenes, was to yell out to any cop who tried to pull me over, “My wife’s getting ready to deliver, Officer!” He would then, of course, yell back “Follow me,” turn on his siren and escort us to the hospital. Alas, as my wife pointed out, while a policeman might actually provide such escort to the nearest hospital, a 50 mile, high speed escort was pretty much out of the question.

We arrived at the hospital somewhere around 7 a.m. to what they called the “birthing suite.” It was, far and away, the nicest hospital room I’d ever seen and, but for all the medical gear tucked away here and there, it could have passed for a decent room at the Hilton. It cost roughly the same, assuming the Hilton in question was in Tahiti and air fare was included. At this point all sorts of hospital personnel, all women, began to come and go from the room, not talking of Michaelangelo but introducing themselves to my wife, arranging things, hooking up monitors, taking vital signs, rearranging things and pretending that I was not only welcome but somehow useful.

We had, after all, taken the Lamaze classes where I learned that breathing was very important even during childbirth and that I should encourage my wife to continue breathing just in case, in all the excitement, she should forget. There was even a special sort of breathing (in and out, I think) that was supposed to facilitate delivery and minimize labor pains. My wife had, of course, opted for “natural childbirth,” meaning she wanted none of the pain relieving drugs I wished someone there would have offered me.

An hour later, I noticed that among the cadre of scrubs-clad health care providers who traipsed in and out of the room the one sort that had not made an appearance was an obstetrician or, indeed, anyone with an M.D. after her name. If the doctor didn’t think her presence was necessary yet, I wasn’t sure mine was either, especially given the fact that my wife’s labor pains had increased. All that Lamaze nonsense was quickly abandoned and her preferred method of distracting herself from the pain focused on, for example, questioning my parents’ marital status. Worse yet, the staff seemed unanimous in their attitude that I was only getting what was coming to me, after all, and that I should remain in the room as the target of my wife’s increasingly vociferous scorn. This, apparently, was my usefulness.

Shortly before 10 a.m., nature took its course – yes, easy for me to say – and as our son’s head crowned the obstetrician magically appeared, nodded general approval at the state of affairs and, beckoning me to join her, squatted before my wife like a baseball catcher. Only a few moments later, Edward Townsend Ridgely first saw the light of day.

Many of our friends had no idea my wife was even pregnant and were nonplussed at the announcement of Edward’s birth. As mentioned, we were living some 50 miles from where many of our friends lived inside the Capital Beltway. It is hardly our fault more of them didn’t come to visit us more often and we were not hiding the fact so much as simply not sharing it with them. This for a reason requiring a brief digression.

Several years earlier we were all at a large house party. We had been to dozens if not hundreds of such parties before, but something was suddenly very different. As the men gathered in groups to discuss politics and sports and tell embarrassing stories about each other, all the women were talking about children: being pregnant, wanting to be pregnant, having a child, wanting to have a child. It was eerie. It was, I swear to you, the biological equivalent of Pink Floyd’s “Time” resounding throughout the entire distaff half of the gathering.

Flash back now to the spring of 1987. We have removed to Leesburg while many in our cohort have begun to raise a family and, as a result, to spend far less time socializing with old friends. This became a matter of great irritation to a friend who shall remain nameless but whose name rhymes with “con all daily,” which would, as it happens, make a pretty amusing nickname for a journalist. Oblivious to the fairly apparent fact that my spouse was already in her third trimester, he looked at us both and exclaimed “At least you two aren’t spawning!” At that point, of course, it became a game. Several months later, when we presented our son as a fait accompli to him and others, many of them at first refused to believe he was not adopted.

We have a picture of Edward taken only moments after birth. No one looking at that photo would infer he was happy. If anything, he resembled a very, very old man with a very, very bad case of constipation. The latter, I soon discovered, was not far from the truth, but the more important truth was that he was, indeed, a grumpy and willful baby from the moment of his birth. We have often told our second son, seven years younger and the most placid baby imaginable, that we’d have had him much sooner had we known he was going to be so little like his brother. As an infant, Edward almost never took naps and cried himself to sleep nearly ever night. He viewed his crib and any playpen (understandably, to be sure) as a cage to be escaped. For a while there we thought we’d given birth to the reincarnation of Steve McQueen and I had visions of Edward astride his Big Wheels sailing over the child gate, making a break for freedom.

I won’t embarrass him with any more childhood stories. I will say that the ensuing 21 years have been, on balance, richly rewarding. His mother and I love him dearly – which, of course, one is obligated to say and then further obligated to add “as we do all our other children as well!” – but we are also inordinately proud of him. Inordinately in the slightly misused sense of unjustifiably, and unjustifiably in the sense that we can take little credit. Make no mistake, parents are capable of doing great harm to their children, but their ability to improve them is far smaller than they would like to believe. In the perennial nature versus nurture debate, parents of multiple children know that nature often thwarts their best efforts.

Even so, the whole point of civilization is to defeat the uglier aspects of nature and the whole point of parenthood is to civilize; that is, to make one’s children ready to live in civil society. Even though our son does show a disquietingly abysmal lack of practical knowledge, he’ll be fine.

Children really are the only people on earth you genuinely want to do better in life than yourself. Then again, what counts as good, better or best varies more that a little from person to person. When I was, myself, still shy of 21 someone asked me, oddly enough, if I was proud of my father. The question had never occurred to me before.

My father never finished 4th grade and worked at various poorly paying manual and low skill jobs most of his life. We were on the poor side of our working class neighborhood and there were few luxuries of any sort in my childhood. Dad loved my mother without qualification, but she died of cancer when I was fourteen and he was left to raise me alone.

Which he did, remaining in the old neighborhood five more years so I could finish school there and then selling my childhood home (which, unlike almost all of our neighbors, he owned mortgage free) for money to send me to college. I never saw him read a book but I also never saw him break his word, and when he died in his eighties he not only left money in the bank but dozens of people (especially women!) who genuinely loved him and mourned his passing. Yes, I was and am and will always be enormously proud of my father.

The parent / child relationship is asymmetrical: you cannot understand what it is to be a parent merely by having been a child. I want all my children to be healthy and happy and harmless people who are loved and share love freely. Beyond that I am mostly indifferent about the particulars of how they choose to spend their lives and even less concerned about how they make a living.

Not so my suddenly adult son. Aside from rejoicing that he is today old enough to drink and buy firearms, always a salubriously combination, I fear he is too captivated by a prodigious but unfocused ambition. There are worse fates than Alexander the Great’s, but there are better ones, too. Not the least of which is to realize that even if you do manage to win the rat race, all that makes you is the lead rat. Life is not a business.

My father understood that. The very day after I graduated from high school he boarded a jet for Florida and, living on a small disability pension, spent the next twenty years as a widower in a sea of widows who vied for his company. He was a very, very happy man and his name was Edward.

Happy Birthday, Son.