Feasting in the Sandwich Season

Yesterday, David had a soccer match at 11:00AM, in Beverly Hills. Heloise had a game at 3:30PM, in Culver City. This morning, Heloise had another match – early, at 8:00; David had an afternoon flag football game in Santa Monica.  Tomorrow, a holiday, each child has a morning practice. In the afternoon, I will take David to the orthodontist.

This is a relatively easy weekend! In the spring, we will be traveling to club tournaments for both children. We wangle scholarships and carry credit card debt to make it happen. As long as both children remain enthusiastic about sports, their mother and I will continue to support them, coordinating schedules as well as any divorced couple can. If our kids had other passions, we would do everything within our means (and beyond our means) to help them pursue those interests.  This kind of intensive parenting is… bad? Au courant? Ideal? Who knows?

We do not expect either child to get an athletic scholarship to college. We do hope that they will learn something about teamwork, about camaraderie, and about perseverance.  And we do these things knowing that it is more or less sure to come to a very abrupt end as first Heloise, and then David, turns 18 and moves on to… well, if not college, at least something productive that will occupy them.

On these weekend days, I also call my mother, invariably from some soccer field or adjacent parking lot. I tell her I’m watching one or another of her grandchildren practice, and I give mama an update on various triumphs and trials.  I ask mama how she is, listening carefully for signs of exhaustion or frailty, knowing that at any moment, I may need to drive the 330 miles back to the hometown. 

I know that someday – not soon, I hope, but someday – there will be no more phone calls home.  This is, as so many of my peers know, the exhausting and terrifying sandwich season, the phase of worrying about an increasingly fragile parent while caring for still dependent but rapidly growing children.  My mother gave up her car keys this summer; Heloise has a learner’s permit and now drives her grandmother’s Corolla. As the meat, or at least the lettuce of the sandwich, it is my task to comfort the mama who hands over the keys – and teach the child who receives them how to use them carefully.

“It’s fine, dad,” said Heloise this morning, as she accelerated on to the eastbound 10 freeway in surprisingly heavy weekend traffic, “I’ve got this.”  I made a small noise, halfway between a grunt and a squeal. The noise meant, I can see that you do, but I’m still afraid.

“I’m fine, darling,” says mama, when I called her a few hours later. “I’m just very tired today.  But there’s nothing to worry about.”  Unlike with Heloise, I avoid squealing in my anxiety , and instead remind my mother that I can be there in five hours if she needs anything, and that I will see her for Thanksgiving.

This is just a season. Soon the daughter will be driving the car by herself, and I will send my worries out into the ether instead of exasperating my child from the passenger seat.  I think that David will graduate high school in less than six years. I calculate mama’s odds of living that long. (Fear of inevitable grief turns some of us, maybe all of us, into amateur actuaries, asking How long? and How many more times? and Perhaps three more Christmases? This week, Was this mama’s last presidential election?)

It is exhausting, all this driving about and all this fretting. Add in the uncertainties that come with being a freelance ghostwriter, and, well, you can understand why I’m a high-strung old man.  At the same time, it is wonderful to be the lettuce – or the baloney, or the mustard – in that sandwich. It is wonderful to be needed! It is wonderful to witness so many things. For someone who has led a particularly self-destructive and self-centered life in many ways, it is wonderful to have become someone on whom others can rely. Not every man with my track record and diagnoses gets to spend a season as the sturdy one. It is a gift, even in the exhaustion.

A friend said to me the other day that by living only for my children, I am setting myself up for a hard crash when Heloise and David have entered adulthood, and mama has gone home to the ancestors. “Empty nest is gonna hit you like a ton of bricks,” she said, mixing metaphors delightfully.  Perhaps it is so. Perhaps it is then that I will finally say “Right, now I really do need to start dating.”  I should very much like to give my children many years of being grown-ups in which they do not have to worry about their papa. On the other hand, I am a contrarian at heart, and if the conventional wisdom is that  heterosexual men go batty on their own as they grow older, I intend to prove that wisdom wrong. I do not want either a nurse or a purse.

This meme made the rounds on Instagram a few weeks ago.

It’s not quite Elizabeth Bishop, but it captures at least a sliver of the truth the poet knew. I have lost a lot of things quite purposefully, like marriages and careers and friendships and reputations. More than once, I have watched a woman I loved dress herself, and known with certainty that I would never see her naked again. More than once, I have held the hand or the paw of someone or something I adored very much, knowing that they were dying, and I would never touch them again.  More than once, I have sat in an office and had some authority figure – a headmaster, a lawyer, a boss – tell me that my conduct meant that my time at their particular institution, a place I loved and where I had once been valued, needed to come to an immediate end.

 I have made myself a tribe

out of my true affections,

and my tribe is scattered!

The therapists tell me I liked to lose things I didn’t believe I deserved. Perhaps that is so.  Children are different. I nearly lost these two when they were very small, and I won’t risk accelerating our inevitable separation by even a moment.  When I leave this life, it will not be on my terms, and it will be (please, please) only after they have built worlds of their own.  Mama has lived long enough to know and to trust that when her sons lose her, they will grieve – and they will still endure.  I should like to do the same for Heloise and David, leaving not when they are ready, because a child is never ready, but when they know better who they are and what they can survive.

Life is, as the poet says, a feast of losses. I look at pictures of my children when they were small, and I remember when one rode on my shoulders and another in my arms. I remember when they loved the silly songs I made up, songs that now provoke only eyerolls and pleas for silence. I remember my mama, two decades younger than I am now, strong and steady, wrestling a ten-foot Christmas tree into the perfect spot in the corner of the living room. I remember on our daily phone calls when it was she who had to ask, a second or third time, “Darling, are you sure you’re all right?”  All those times are gone, and yet as even the third-rate poets and greeting cards tell us, the greatest loss is the loss of present joys, happinesses and sublimities we ignore in our nostalgia for what was and our fear of what will be.

I am very tired, and I worry about many things (money and car accidents and death, the usual), and I have even begun to have dreams about arguing with linesmen about whether my child was really offside, and I know, I know, I know I will miss this season so very, very much.