Parenthood Full Of Fear, Hope

Dear Eric:

Hello, grandson.

I’m sorry that greeting doesn’t come naturally to me yet. You see, you’re a bit of a shock.

Your mother, 18 and unmarried, kept it secret from us that you were on the way. She did not, she said, want to “hurt” or “disappoint” us.

She hid her body in oversize clothes, denied pregnancy indignantly and repeatedly. Her mother suspected she was pregnant anyway, but me, I accepted her denials. I wanted to believe her.

Raising a child is a hell of a thing, Eric. You want so much for them, want it with a purity and a selflessness that shock your jaded soul. You want them to have more than you did, reach higher than you could, to be better than you are.

You don’t necessarily want things like that for your friends or your siblings, but you want it for your child - a truth, I guess, your mother will now learn.

But the thing is, she’s our child, and we wanted so much for her. Still do, I suppose.

Maybe, during one of your 2 a.m. lung testings, you chanced to catch the movie “Parenthood” on cable. There’s a scene where Steve Martin, coaching a youth league baseball team, pushes his son to play a position the son doesn’t want. Well, the kid drops a pop fly, which costs his team the game and earns him everyone’s scorn. Martin fantasizes that years later the kid is shooting people from a bell tower, screaming, “Dad, you shouldn’t have made me play second base!”

As far as I’m concerned, it wasn’t much of an exaggeration. When you’re a parent, you fear your own ineptitude. You fear that you will ruin a young life by saying or doing the wrong thing, or just not being equal to the task.

You fear that your 18-year-old daughter will come home pregnant. And when it happens, you fear you screwed up.

Even though intellect informs you with irrefutable logic that you’ve done everything you could as a parent, your heart insists with a fervor that you have failed. It yells that you could have said something, done something, somehow changed something. You’ll never figure out what the something is, but not knowing won’t silence the clangor of your heart.

It’s like I told you, Eric: You want so much for your kids.

Possibility renews itself through children. You see things in their eyes … a reflection of far horizons, a shadow of discarded dreams coming back for another chance.

As a parent, you are the guardian of all that. It’s hard to imagine a more daunting responsibility.

Of course, I don’t blame you, Eric. You are the most blameless of creatures. But I have silences with your mother now, wounded places that have yet to begin to heal.

I can’t say it enough, Eric. You want for your children. Want with an unrelenting ferocity that leaves you aching and numbed.

Which brings us, I guess, to you.

I don’t know you, yet. You are an awkward fit in my arms, an uncertainty wedged into my life. And I don’t mind telling you, I’m ill at ease with the absurd new role you’ve thrust me into.

Grandpa? Ugh.

I don’t know you, but I do know this: Holding you, I feel it stirring again - that desperate sense of wanting, without regard to self.

You struggle, you gurgle, you watch the world with eyes that have yet to see meanness and pain, and wanting is just automatic. Wondering, too. Who are you, child? A teacher or preacher? Entertainer or explorer? Will you sink the winning shot? Win the Nobel Prize? Or will you, just possibly, change the whole world?

These are questions that must wait a lifetime for answers. But their mere asking has power to lift downcast eyes and spirits.

Don’t get me wrong, kid. I expect the silences in our home will remain deep and the wounded places tender and raw for a long time to come.

And yet, those questions buoy me. Even your young aunt and uncles see it. They gaze down at you with such luminous eyes, wondering who you are.

Perhaps, they see in you what I do - possibility renewed, a future unmortgaged, a second chance.

And a hope. That someday the wounded places will be healed and the deep silences overflow with joy.

xxxx