To present my son to my parents–each in a far corner of the world–meant to be recognized by them as someone new: a parent, an adult. I was circling the globe to close a circle inside me.
By Ivor Shapiro (writing as Evan Vanovic)
Published in Chatelaine magazine, September 1997
High above the dark South Pacific, my 10-month-old son slept in my arms while his mother prepared a bed on the aircraft’s floor. I looked into Paul’s face and drank in his peacefulness; I kissed him lightly on his soft cheek and he moaned without stirring as the humming jets pulled us on to where his grandparents waited to meet him for the first time.
I had waited a long time to see my child in my parents’ arms. I was 34 when I met the woman of my dreams, and my wife and I were both on the wrong side of 40 when Paul arrived. Our son’s Canadian grandparents met him as a newborn; my parents, oceans away and too frail to cross them, had to wait. A journey to visit them would be the longest possible on earth: south and west to Perth, Australia, where my 79-year-old and multiply diseased father lives with his wife of two decades; westward again to South Africa, where my somewhat healthier mother chooses to live alone, at 77, on the Atlantic shore of my boyhood; westward once more, and north, to my home and adopted land.
We waited a year, gambling that my father would stay alive long enough for Paul to become a settled child whom his grandparents could meet and remember as an individual. As to the journey’s purpose, we barely had to think about it at all: to see our child in his grandparents’ arms was a necessity beyond debate.
Why? Partly, merely, to give my parents the pleasure. Partly, to create memories and photos that would help us tell our son that, while alive, all his grandparents had cherished him. But I also knew the strongest impression of these memories would probably be left on me. To present my child to my parents meant to be recognized by them as someone new: an adult. I hoped, as children hope, to win Mom’s and Dad’s approval–I could imagine nothing prouder than to hear one of them say: “You’re a good father, Evan.” But even if not, I hoped that to be a parent alongside my own parents–to watch myself giving my child a glad attention I had seldom received, within a marriage rich with pleasure and esteem–would be to recognize myself as a parent worthy of approval.
I was circling the globe to close a circle inside me: to see myself, in the same instant, as the child of my parents and the parent of my child. For most parents, this momentous encounter with past, present and future lasts years and may be taken rather for granted. But, for the expatriate, the closing of the circle must be waited for, planned for, and then lost, except for the memories. My five-week moment in the circle was beginning. How could it fail to change me?
# # #
“Is it worth it?” I asked myself, aloud, at 6 a.m. on January 1st on the harborside boardwalk in Sydney, while the wheels of Paul’s stroller crunched over New Year’s morning-after broken beer bottles and he peered over his shoulder at me through jet-lagged little eyes and a boozy mist. Paul shook his head, as he does for a joke whenever asked a question he doesn’t comprehend, but I took it as an honest answer. We had escaped a hotel room full of sleeplessness and misery–all three of us feeling the effects of a 22-hour flight and a 16-hour maladjustment in our body clocks. My wife and I took turns to soothe and entertain our son and to accuse each other of underheating a bottle, of adopting a wrong tone of voice or of sleeping too soundly.
It was little comfort that Paul was too young to grasp the brittle words; he may have caught the tension of that fraught night as clearly as I had felt the tension between my parents for 16 years. This would be the only bad night between my wife and me for the whole five weeks, but I replayed it tormentedly among the beer bottles on the boardwalk: could the ghosts of my childhood–now that I was just a country’s breadth away from my father–be haunting me with fresh power?
Suddenly, I was as terrified by the prospect of seeing my parents as I had been electrified before. Why had I been so foolish as to think this would be a happy time? Happiness and my parents were not easy companions. My commanding memory of my father is of a man who came home from work tired and sat in a chair staring through a window at the Cape’s storms. My commanding memory of my mother is of shouted reminders of household rules, of complaints that my two sisters and I were destroying her frayed nerves, of mysterious ailments that called for glasses of lemon tea and quiet in the house.
There are other, more faded memories: weekend vacations with my father, during which we hugged a lot and enjoyed exploring the southernmost part of Africa. Weekly trips with my mother to the symphony, and listening with her to comic LP records like You Don’t Have To Be Jewish that left us both holding our stomachs, and feigning illness so that I could stay home and she would cook the tomato stew I called “sick food” and bring it to me in bed, where she would sit quietly watching me eat.
In their own ways, Dad and Mom had treasured their children, and never knew the effects on us of their self-absorption. Had my parents damaged me for life? Undoubtedly: hadn’t everyone’s? The question now was: would I pass on the damage to Paul? Back in the hotel room, My wife and I forgave each other our exhaustion and began packing winter coats into the bottom of a suitcase. Paul tried to mount the bed to help, and I found myself catching him up in my arms and saying, “Oh, Paul, tonight you will meet your granddad.” At the sound of the words, I began sobbing, depositing loud wet gasps on my frightened son’s tiny shoulder until his mother quietly removed him. I was crying for joy, I think.
And then we were in Perth, watching my father kiss my son and later, at his home, watching Paul’s Zaide lean forward in his chair and waggling the crook of his cane for the baby to grab at and pull. I was visited by the memory–or rather, the vision recovered from old stories told me–of playing just so at the feet of my father’s father, my own Zaide for whom Paul was named, as that other old man held and waggled his cane (perhaps this same cane). For a few hours, my happiness was total: I had yearned to see my Dad once more and here he was; I had yearned to show him his grandson and see life and delight light up his eyes, and so I did.
My father was still alive, yet he was half-dead. Illness had bloated his face and left him frighteningly weak on his legs. And he was still my father: depressed, even while happy. He still sat limply in a chair staring, although the Atlantic storms were now far away. He called and cooed at Paul in a vapid singsong whose function seemed to be to draw, rather than give, attention. I grew angry over Dad’s inability to see that Paul hated being squeezed, and to sense when the cooing and cane-swinging had begun to annoy the tired baby. By the end of the long first day, I had grown silently furious (far more than was fair) and barely said goodnight.
My problem with my father crystallised two days later. It was my turn to be up early with Paul and by 9 a.m. the baby was rubbing his eyes, so I was singing him to sleep as Zaide awoke and called for him. I knew Paul just needed to sleep, but I could not refuse Dad this precious playtime and so we went in and played on Zaide’s bed until the baby was hyper, overtired and cranky. For the rest of the day, I wondered why I had put Dad’s needs first. Why could I not say, “Not now, Dad, but after his nap”? Perhaps because a parent remains the ultimate arbiter: Dad was my only model of fatherhood, and it was his approval that mattered most. Besides, moments of intimacy with my dad had always been too precious to lose.
There was a day when I was about 11, when I was upset over some petty conflict with my mom, and Dad said from his chair, “Why don’t you get your microscope out and show it to me?” I remember feeling both delighted that Dad had initiated a contact with me, and angry that it had taken too many weeks for him to express interest in my microscope, my current pride and joy. That day, the anger overpowered the delight and I said, “No, I’m going out for a walk.” I walked along the beachfront in tears, bereft over a lost chance at connection, as if there would never be another. And indeed, I never did show Dad my microscope.
So Paul had to wait for his nap: Zaide’s feelings would set the agenda, as they always had for his own son. So far, my wife and I generally are able to resist the impulse to place ourselves at the center of his play. But some time mid-way through our time in Perth, Dad’s 300th cry of “Daaaaa-vid, cooooo-coo” startled me into a realization that I sometimes speak to my son in that same demanding falsetto–when he is absorbed enough in his own world to frighten me out of complaisance. And that I long for his head on my shoulder, and cringe physically over the knowledge that as he grows older he will no longer want to nuzzle into my neck.
I also realized that the target I had set myself, of being the father my father was not, would get harder. Paul the perfect baby would grow into a child who would demand more and who would, from time to time, disappoint. When that time came, would he find me staring out a window at the snow?
On our second-last afternoon in Perth, while my wife shopped with my stepmother and Paul napped, while goodbye hung over all of us like death, I sat on the sofa next to Dad’s chair and we held hands for a while. Dad said once, as if in passing, “I thought I’d never see you again,” and I nodded and squeezed his hand but said nothing. I wanted to ask him, “Are you afraid to die?” Instead, we ran out of silence and Dad accepted gratefully my suggestion that we watch cricket on TV, for old times’ sake.
As red ball bounced on green grass again and again, I complained mentally about Dad’s silence, his passivity, his inability to recognise emotions. But there were two people in front of that television set. Where do I begin, and the son of my father end? Where does Paul begin, and my son end?
# # #
Some time in the night that we left Perth, among the stars above the Indian Ocean as my father receded and my mother loomed, I poked into a bag for a diaper and came up with a clump of used film. I knew that in almost every frame of seven rolls, someone was smiling. Likewise, I noticed, my memories of Perth had assumed a glossy tint: connections outshone the disconnections. I remembered how my foot had touched Dad’s leg under the dinner table last night, how our eyes met and we kept our feet touching for the rest of the meal. I remembered Paul sitting on Zaide’s bed eating bits of the old man’s breakfast; I remembered watching through a patio window as my son sat serenely on my father’s lap, his arm draped across Zaide’s belly as if it were an armrest.
And I remembered–after all, it had happened just hours ago as Dad watched me dismantle the travel crib–the most substantial conversation that he and I ever had.
“Even when I can’t see you,” I had said, awkwardly and with an effort, “I will look at Paul and see you. You gave me a sense of humor; I am already giving it to him. You taught me to get pleasure from giving, and I will try to pass it on.”
Dad looked at Paul across the room, smiled, and nodded.
“Is there anything you want to say to me, Dad?” I asked, looking up from the poles and vinyl. “Dad?”
He watched me and said, “You know what I want to say.”
I said, “No, I don’t.” He said something short, very softly, to the floor. I moved closer: “I didn’t hear.”
Then, he looked at me, tears brimming: “Don’t go.”
I also remembered Dad saying, a few minutes later: “You’ve given me the happiest week of my life.” No doubt, when I start telling stories about this trip, I will tell Paul his Zaide said that. No doubt, I will not even hint at the discomfort, the anger, the silences of the preceding days. Therefore, Paul will grow up with an idealized picture of his paternal grandparents–as (I now realize) I did. I adore the memory of my own Zaide, that other Paul, at least partly because I hardly knew him: I cling to him as an icon of gentleness in my life, and he provides a sense that I belong to a greater family.
Memories help you find your place: they tell you where you come from, who you are. In the absence of actual conscious memories, “recovered” memories seek to do the same trick of explaining where you belong. The trouble is, memories of either kind are often filtered to contain only that part of the truth which meets the day’s need. Back in Perth, one morning while Paul played on the carpet, Dad and I had talked about good old days. I mentioned the weekend explorations; he mentioned the pride of watching me debate competitively on my high-school team.
“Were you and mom ever happy together?” I asked. “Mm-huh,” he said, “for a while.” He spoke briefly of the problems in the marriage, and said: “But you weren’t aware of our troubles, were you? I mean, until you were older?” The question astounded me. Surely he must recall that when I was 9, I became so anxious about my parents’ arguing that I refused for several weeks to go to school for fear that Dad would be gone when I returned.
“I never knew it was about that,” Dad said. But he knew, and forgot.
The jet soared westward to Africa with Paul squeezed into a bassinet and me pressed sadly into the back of my seat. I dug into the valise again and retrieved a book loaned to me for the journey: Growing with Your Child: Reflections on Parent Development by U.S. journalist Elin Schoen. Reading Schoen’s careful reflections on the difference that parenting makes, I was struck by the obvious truth that sentimentality and filtered memories would provide Paul with little useful. Only by facing the past in its reality and compensating for its pain could I offer my son a happier childhood than mine.
But besides a chance to repair the past’s damage, becoming a parent can heal in another way: it allows us to understand our parents more fully, because for the first time we know what it’s really like to rear children. “Most of us continue identifying with as well as separating from our parents throughout our lives,” wrote Elin Schoen. “And both our attempts to emulate and our attempts to be different from our parents can be healing.”
In Cape Town, I would find out what she meant.
# # #
“Tu-raru-ra ru-ra, tu-raru-ra ra….” It was bedtime in my sister’s house, and there was a closed door between me and my mother, but I hoped Mom could hear me singing to my son the Irish lullaby she had begun singing to me when she was less than my age and I less than Paul’s. I thought about the book I’d read on the ‘plane and realized that Paul had given me something profound in common with my mother. We both now knew what it is to sing to a baby and want nothing in the world more than for him to find peaceful sleep; we both now knew the pleasure of seeing a son laugh, the misery of seeing him cry, the sublime but sometimes imprisoning sense of being needed more utterly than ever before.
Two days later, Paul burned his fingertips in a misplaced cup of coffee and I, at last, forgave my mother for her negligence with a pot of boiling water when I was 10, the spill that left a lifelong scar on my chest.
Not that all the wounds between me and my self-obsessed mother were now magically healed. When I urged her to leave her tiny apartment and spend a few days in a nice bed-and-breakfast near my sister’s so that we might see more of her while fitting in with Paul’s food-and-nap schedule, she refused outright. “You’ll just have to fit in with me, too,” she said, to my silent fury. When Paul cried and my wife looked up from a conversation, my mother chided: “He has you twisted around his little finger.”
And yet, it was also my mother who several times over managed to come up with the words I had been waiting, in my vanity, to hear. Others encountered on the voyage had celebrated our good fortune in having a child so sunny, cuddly and adaptive; my mother said: “That’s because you’re bringing him up right,” or “taught him well.”
Our departure date neared. Just as Perth had shown me traits inherited from my father, Cape Town helped me focus on aspects of Mom worth emulating rather than the parts that drive me mad. She loves music (from Tu-raru-ra to Brahms), and so do I. She enjoys the company of gay men and others cast out by “respectable” folk (whom she scorns). She has a responsive instinct toward poor people: for years, my mom’s closest friend seemed to be her maid, a then-young Xhosa woman who continues to visit to this day.
With all due scepticism toward the distorting powers of selective memory, the voyage seemed to have delivered on Elin Schoen’s promise of healing. At the very least, it had given me perspective. The special madnesses of my family had left me with scars, yes, but they were mostly invisible. My parents had done the best they were able to do, and had produced three decent, well-meaning adults in a world well stocked with the other kind. If my sisters and I had been able to achieve happiness in our families and passions, surely Paul could do at least as well.
Saying goodbye to my mother at Cape Town International Airport proved easier than leaving my father in Perth. Partly, I think this was because I did not feel my mother’s dying to be so imminent; partly, it was because this time, I was going home. Life is not a circle after all: life is moving forward. Boarding the ‘plane that would dislodge the family of my future from the family of my past, I waited for the usual sickening clamp across my chest that always had come when the aircraft’s wheels let go of Africa. At this final wrenching, I would twist in my seat and strain for the last view of Table Mountain, the last green vineyard, the last white gable of the inner Cape.
But this time was different. This time, my head was held down by my son, who was drinking juice in my lap while his fingers explored my hair. This time, when the wheels left the ground, no tears came, because that which was most precious, more precious even than Africa, was coming home with me.