Some Assembly Required (20 page)

“You do have excellent ideas, honey. And that is why you should keep those precious thoughts to yourself. What’s right for us is to lop off some of the tentacles we have wrapped around our kids. I’ve had to do that, too. Otherwise, we oppress them.”

I dug the fingers of one hand into my face, and attempted to pull off my nose and lips, but Doug loosened my grip. “This is hard,” he said. “How could you have been ready to be a grandmother any more than Sam was ready to be a father?” I shrugged. “But honey? Here we are.”

I got in bed late with the dogs and cat, and lay in the dark praying and thinking. It is a violation of trust to use your
kids as caulking for the cracks in you. So I said to God, Fine, have it your way. What ev.

It’s a new prayer, to add to the other two, Help me, and Thank You: What ev. I should get this tattooed on my shoulder, “Help me, thank you, what ev, and lower the bar.”

God is my witness: Sam woke me at six to say that Amy and Jax are flying home today. Doug was already up, because he was on Chicago time, and I bounced into his room like Pogo Stick Girl to tell him my good news. He was happy for my temporary reprieve, but he knew it was just that, a stay of execution, and I knew that, too. We made tortillas with cheese and avocado for breakfast, and read
The New York Times
in cheerful silence.

Sam called from school to say that Amy and Jax got in last night, and Jax was great, hilarious, so cute you couldn’t stand it.

I wanted to go into San Francisco and be Big Mama to Amy, plus God, the Bank, and a Molly Maid, from the local cleaning-lady company, but instead I called her. She was distant. I asked if I could come in and take them shopping for food. She agreed. So I did.

Seeing Jax, in his brown beauty and charm and loveliness, gave me a big hit of peace. I think the shadow side of being a grandparent is that the child becomes like an ATM of self-respect and completion. You can be at your worst mentally, with grudges, anxiety, and no self-esteem, then spend five minutes with the Unit and feel instantly restored. It is a form of love addiction. There are twelve-step programs to stop using other people to fill up your holes.

Oh, well. Too bad, so sad. Hand over that kid! I will deal with this soon.

Jax threw himself at me after a few moments of shyness, such a big boy, very toothy, with longer, thicker dark hair, crawling around like an all-terrain vehicle. He looks tall when standing, but when he crawls, he looks like the Prince of the Pillbugs, all round rolled-up aerodynamic thrust.

We hung out in their apartment for half an hour, and though Sam had gotten it all picked up, it needed a deep cleaning, and I did not say a word or offer to help. I said to myself, sternly: It is their house. Their house—what a concept.

I do not really believe it for a second.

I have tried to accept for twenty years that Sam is not an extension of me, that children have their own autonomous existence, and that parents have the moral obligation to help them discover this. But this should not apply to me and Jax, too, since I am once removed; it applies only to Sam and me. All the grandparents I know have glommed on to the grandchildren,
like barnacles with credit cards, and yellow rubber gloves for doing their dishes. And it is good.

Amy, Jax, and I went to Safeway for groceries. While Amy filled the cart to overflowing, I got to hold Jax and explain how essential each of the products was, and suck up the smells of his hair and neck like an anteater.

The good news was that in the hours we spent together, the only time money changed hands was when I picked up the grocery bill. The bad news is that it was close to three hundred dollars.

I played with Jax while Amy put the groceries away. I intentionally, heroically, did not instigate a single interesting conversation. Our time together was awkward. But we did okay, and that is a lot. There is going to be hard work ahead of us, even though I love her deeply and would do almost anything for her; and I know that she loves me deeply and would do almost anything for me. It’s like the story of Ruth and her mother-in-law, Naomi, without the unimpeachable characters. We are both so impeachable, willful, damaged. But as they say, more will be revealed. Whoever “they” is.

“Sam? Having just spent forty-eight hours with Jax, after having not seen him for a while, how has he changed?”

“Well, you are right that he is an ATV now, or an SUV.
He’s gone from needing perfect conditions in order to scooch across the floor, to having four-wheel drive. There is nothing on the ground, no obstacle at all, that he can’t get over. You’ll see—at your house, he will be able to crawl over the dogs.

“Before, if there was something on the floor that he wanted when he had pulled himself up at the table, the only way he could get it was to fall down. Now he can
lower
himself from a standing position to pick it up. Like, you might think you were having a nice conversation with him while he’s standing, and then he remembers what it is he wants, and he lowers himself to get it, and then sees you on the way back, and he’s like, ‘Oh, hi—there you are. I forgot something. What were you saying?’

“He’s very polite. I talk to him like he’s an adult, and he hears everything, and listens patiently, but then something might catch his eye. He doesn’t interrupt anymore by flailing and grabbing for the object, but he’ll see something out of the corner of his eye, and you can tell he is thinking, ‘Oh, nice Daddy doesn’t matter,’ and he crawls away towards the object. I guess that’s what it will be like more and more from now on.

“He’s like part dog, part bat now, the way he uses his senses. The first test of anything is to taste it, and to measure it orally. Then the second test is to see how it sounds when he smashes it against other things.

“He’s mellow and happy most of the time. He’s peaceful,
but like Bodhi in that he can accidentally hurt you with his love and that huge head.

“When you watch him watching things, it’s like seeing the history of mankind and suddenly understanding where inspiration comes from, how humans are inspired to create just from watchfulness, without hard-and-fast preconceived positions on everything. Watching Jax watch stuff, you can see how Egyptian statues were created, or how Michelangelo saw David in the block of marble, or how all those inventions came to Leonardo da Vinci.

“These last weeks have been very hard, terribly painful, but part of being a man is to take the pain and make something out of it, like being able to grow, or having insights or ideas for art, or maybe just coming to be less of an asshole. Instead of dishing it out, or having to hurt others because of it. Because that’s the worst thing.”

I have been practicing being dispensable, and lowering the bar, which is good, as I have not heard from Amy since my drive-by.

I opened the Bible randomly and ended up on one of what Tom calls the Cursing Psalms, 109, a nice, juicy rage psalm—“You make me sick, may the dogs eat your bones.” Or something like that—I have never been able to memorize Scripture.
Tom told me a few weeks ago that Protestants need the Cursing Psalms much more than Catholics do, that we have a lot more to be angry about. When I asked him why, he said, “You don’t have the daily joy of the papacy.”

Remembering this is the only thing that has cheered me up so far today.

I was going a little stir-crazy earlier, wondering why I had not heard from Sam and Amy, but I tried not to butt in with my thinky thoughts, bribes, and offers. I know Amy is not glad to be back from Chicago, but she is not sure of much else right now—whether she will stick around San Francisco so she and Sam can raise Jax together.

Then she called to say she and Jax would be here at five with many loads of laundry, and they might stay over; I could have danced all night. Maybe I should take issue with these spur-of-the-moment visits, and instead set some boundaries.

Yeah, right. That’s going to happen.

They both arrived with colds, but cheerful, and I was so in love with them that I didn’t mind that they were shedding virus all over me. Jax sounded croupy, like a goose, but his appetite was good, and Amy said he seemed like himself again, and he scooched all over the living room, the furniture, and both of us. I took this at face value and remembered that it was
their
baby,
their
life story. That my job is to
try not to keep trapping them in the web of my great wisdom, comforts, and fear. So I practiced letting go, although Jax’s breathing did sound labored to me, and I may have possibly in the tiniest way mentioned this to Amy again; left to my own devices, I would have brought in the Medevac helicopter. But the story is also about my taking joys as they come, which is Jax on the move, my little SUV plowing across the floor, right over the dogs, like his daddy said he would.

Sam called nice and early to say that they wouldn’t be coming to church, that Amy was still sick and trying to catch up on sleep on the couch, and he and Jax were lying in bed talking. I could hear Jax barking in the background, and I asked if he was better, and Sam said he was. So I spoke to myself in my silent guru voice: Release! Tuck in those tentacles! Breathe.

Sam said, “Do you want to do a little interview?”

“Yeah!”

“Because I can finally see that the way he grabs his bottle and sucks it in five different ways is a sign of his intelligence. He’s like a little space alien, and his mouth is his major deductive tool. He flips bottles around—right now he’s flipping around my water bottle—trying to figure out how to get the water out. And it fills me with respect for his process. I mean, he’s been sticking things in his mouth since the very second
he could, as his main survival instinct; but who knew it was developing into scientific inquiry? He used to slobber in a way that could be annoying, because you had to keep changing his shirts or bibs, but now he’s doing it in a way that is teaching him all about life, and how things work. For me to interfere and try to get him to stop sucking on everything, shoving everything into his mouth, would be like telling an astronomer to stop staring through his telescope.”

All was well with the world again, but when I got home from church, there was a message from Amy that Jax seemed to be having trouble breathing.

I texted back that they needed to take him to the emergency room. Amy texted that she’d take him to their doctor tomorrow when his office opened. I replied that it might be best to take him to the ER today.

Then I called, and said it offhandedly: Take him to the goddamn ER.

They did. When I didn’t hear from them for a few hours, I naturally assumed Jax was in the ICU, after thoracic surgery, or hooked up to a heart-lung machine. Amy finally called to say there was no cell-phone reception in the ER. Jax did have croup, and was being given all the stuff I used to give Sam when he got asthma during a head cold—major meds like albuterol and steroids. Jax was doing fine, but the doctors wanted to watch him for a while. Amy made it clear that she would call when she could; there was no point in my calling, because there was no reception.

I was flooded with relief. But after I got off the phone, I wanted to jump up and down and shout, “Croup croup croup! I was right!” Because I’m human, which is to say crazy in some respects, and some people who shall remain nameless tricked me into loving them too deeply and ruined my life.

Then I had to wait for hours till I heard from them again. I kept gently reminding myself that they would call when they could, that there was no reception; that Jax was fine; that Jesus was right there in the ER with them, overseeing things with His gentle love. Then I remembered that He was with me, too, and loved me with my tentacles and schadenfreude just as much as He loved perfect Jax, which to me is the central mystery of my faith. So I stretched out on the couch with the dogs, the cat, and all the sections of the
Times
I hadn’t read yet, and that is what grace looked like for a few hours.

At nine I began cracking under the strain of not hearing, so I called a friend whose kid has a brain tumor. She said I should try to stay out of the obsession and fear, because that morass is not helpful to live in. It’s like that joke about wrestling with pigs—you get hurt and dirty, while the pigs love it.

But what is the alternative? I asked.

“Well, you know,” she said. “God and prayer. Faith.”

“Oh!” I said, smiting my forehead. “Right.”

I managed not to call Amy or Sam. I practiced releasing them to grow and find their own way. I did not become a voice that either of them would need to argue with or resist. Instead, they should listen to their son’s breathing improve,
and to the voices of doctors and nurses. What a concept. And I was doing pretty well, until nine-thirty, when I cracked, and called the ER. A nurse told me that Jax had just been discharged, and they were all headed home. “Oh, that’s great,” I said. “Pretty much what I expected.”

Pretty much, except for the trach, and the iron lung.

Sam called not long after, to tell me that this great old doctor had said Jax was fine—he prescribed lots of medicine in case Jax got worse or had the same symptoms in the future. The doctor told them to keep an eye on Jax, and to see the pediatrician in the morning. “Mom, we both appreciate how calm you stayed through this,” Sam said. “And how you didn’t bother us at the hospital. It was kind of amazing.”

“Oh”—I laughed—“not a big deal.”

I am doing endless interviews with newspapers and radios in the cities to which I will be traveling on a book tour. This is how you prepare. Packing for a week away is nothing, as I bring only carry-on luggage. I always buy new underwear, in case I am involved in a plane crash. Best to be wearing nice fresh underpants in case you are
not
burned beyond recognition. I just bought a whole new batch, big and roomy like underpants a dancing bear might wear. Amy and Sam despair at my underwear whenever they take my clean clothes out of the dryer to put their own in. They do not think I can ever
get a good boyfriend with underpants like these. When Sam was six or seven, one of his babysitters, a beautiful teenager, was helping me fold my laundry, and she picked up a pair of my underwear. Looking very worried, she said, “Do they even
make
them bigger than these?” I told her, “Oh, honey, you just wait.”