Choosing the Children

Versions of this meme have been making the rounds:

It’s funny, of course – a playful twist on the promise of a dutiful parent, the promise we give to our teens: “No matter how late it is, if you need me I will come and get you.”  We smile at the thought of a perhaps thirty-two-year-old texting her sixty-something mama with this plea. The joke raises a question: when does parenting end?When do we shift from being caretakers to consultants? When do we turn our phones off at night, confident that an adult child’s crisis can wait until the morning?

I don’t read as many novels as I should, but after reading a review in the Times, I ordered a copy of Roxana Robinson’s latest, Leaving.  (Lots of spoilers ahead.)  The premise is straightforward: a man and a woman, each in late middle age, bump into each other at the opera.   Warren and Sarah had dated decades ago, in college, and then gone on to marry other people.  Each has grown children. Sarah is divorced; Warren grits it out in a lukewarm marriage to a woman he neither respects nor understands. 

Deciding the gods have given them a second chance, Sarah and Warren have an affair. Warren tells Janet, his wife, that he is leaving her.  Janet is devastated, but it is their late-twenty-something-daughter, Kat, who is enraged. If you leave mom, you will lose me forever, she says.  Caught between the life he longs for and the fear of losing his only child, Warren calls it off with Sarah.  He stays with Janet.  Kat allows him to remain in her life, but never seems to fully forgive him.  At the end of the book, Warren goes for a hike in the mountains – and flings himself off a cliff. The title of Robinson’s book proves apt.

Warren walks away from the woman he loves, returning to a woman he doesn’t, for the sake of a third woman: his grown daughter. In Robinson’s capable prose, his decision makes sense. He isn’t acting out of a religious sense that marriage vows are eternal, or out of a philosophical conviction that he must honor an old promise. Warren sees his chief obligation as something owed not to the woman he married or the woman he craves, but to the woman he brought into the world. No matter how miserable he is in the marriage to her mother, he will stay for the hope of keeping Kat’s love.  As it turns out, he cannot live with the decision, and he makes his way to a summit from which there is no descent.

I was a bit shaken by the end of the book. I have dealt with suicidal ideation all my life. In recent years, I have contemplated going to the San Gabriel mountains I know so well – and not coming back.  I’m the kind of introvert who likes to hike uphill in solitude. I always dread the descent. It is nice to fantasize that someday, I won’t come down.  Except that I must come down, because I don’t get to leave this life on my own terms – for the same reason that drives Warren back to his marriage.

Affairs and suicide are not novel themes in literature. The sense that we owe everything to our children, and that we must sacrifice our own happiness for theirs in perpetuity?  That is a new twist. Warren goes back to his marriage for his daughter’s sake, but also for his own: like so many modern American men, he sees fatherhood as the defining role of his life. He can bear being an unfaithful husband, but he cannot abide being a bad father.  He knows that when they are teens, girls often find their fathers tiresome, if not outright revolting. Warren had trusted that his daughter would age out of that stage. He planned to become a sturdy, steady, reliable counselor; after all, our culture declares that is the Highest Destiny of Good Dads to Grown Children.  Kat makes it clear that his only chance at becoming what he craves is to give up what he wants.  

Warren makes his choice, and it’s difficult to imagine it as a choice any literary character would make until very, very recently.  It’s shockingly modern, only possible in a world of middle-class (and upper-middle-class) helicopter parenting, where your child’s flourishing is the chief -- perhaps, the sole -- barometer of your success.  One can fall out with a sibling, cut off a cousin, or – as I can attest – get divorced five times. If your most defining relationship is with your children, and you build a life around setting them up for success and joy, you can afford even a great feast of lesser losses.  

(As another side note, some of my socially conservative friends might observe that Warren would not have had this problem if he and Janet had chosen a large family.  Perhaps the estrangement of one kid is easier to bear if others remain in your life. In Warren’s case, Kat’s hypothetical siblings might have held him back from that final hike.)

It has been nine months since Victoria and I ended our marriage. I have not gone on a date, looked for a date, considered a date. Though I reserve the right to change my mind, I have decided to be single and celibate until June 2030 – when my son graduates from high school. Several friends have told me that if I make my children my sole priority over these next six years, I will not regret it – and I will give Heloise and David a very great gift. These friends caution me that I mustn’t frame this as a terrible sacrifice.  The fictional Kat notwithstanding, most children hate the idea that a parent gave up happiness for their sakes.  I must decide that this is a want and not merely an obligation, even if the line between those two is sometimes very thin.

Perhaps I’m getting this advice because I’m me. Most people have not been divorced five times. Most men do not have quite as colorful a track record, and most have not already caused great scandal and heartache because of their romantic and sexual decisions.  Celibacy in my case might make especially good sense.  And yet, my friends don’t frame their advice in terms of my own specific frailties. They frame it as a gift to my children, and thus to myself.  They know that in the modern world, particularly for those of us who do not belong to churches and shuls, our children are our most profound vocation.  To walk away from sex and romance for the sake of one’s offspring? It’s not necessarily noble, exactly, but it’s the healthiest and most life-affirming choice an aging man like me can make.

When I was at the nadir of my life, in the disgrace and detritus of 2013, I read everything I could about the impact of a father’s suicide on his children. I looked desperately in the literature for evidence that most kids could slough off such a violent and final abandonment. I wanted permission to go with a clean conscience. I could imagine the devastation of my mother, my brother, my sisters, my extended family. I knew it would be hard on them. But the thought of their pain wasn’t enough to outweigh my longing to kill myself. What stopped me was Heloise and David. I didn’t have permission to cause that much trauma, and the evidence was that the trauma would be immense and permanent. So, I stayed for the children, and I am glad I did.  I suppose the question is, besides not killing myself, just how much do I owe them?  It seems the answer at the moment is my singleness – and the focus on their flourishing that my own chastity will provide.

I tell friends that when my children are grown, and my mama has gone to the ancestors, I will get the hell out of Los Angeles. I will buy myself a little cabin in the Tehachapis or the Davis Mountains, living somewhere with dark skies and acres of succulents.  I will be a very benign and dignified version of the Unabomber, periodically sending missives out into the world, but otherwise living as a hermit.  (I might get a dog.) This too is a pipe dream – while I might be able to get out of a city, I must be an available counselor and confidante to my children, even as they grow into adulthood and carve out paths of their own. I must be available for playful texts like the one that opens this post. That will be hard to do from a shack in Terlingua. 

Little pink house of my dreams

My mother divorced my father when I was six, and my brother three. That was 1973, and mama has been happily single for more than half a century. She was not single out of a sense that she owed her children her full devotion. She stayed single because she found her deepest happiness on her own.  Mama reminded us constantly that while she loved us very much, we were not her only reason for living. We were not her sole source of joy.  She had her books, her teaching, her friends, her poetry club. Mama’s roots were nourished by many springs.  Knowing that her fulfillment was not contingent on our flourishing was a great relief, and a great gift.

I must give my children the full measure of my devotion without making them into the sole purpose of my living. If I choose prolonged singleness, I cannot frame it as a great sacrifice.  I must decide it is a gift I give to my children, and to myself. (And, let’s be honest, it’s a gift to  family and friends who are worn out from my weddings.)  I will still go on hikes alone, because there is no greater pleasure than solitude on a trail at dawn. I will climb for myself, and I will come back down for them, doing my best to blend desire and duty so well that I cannot tell where one begins and the other ends.