Living Out Loud

by Anna Quindlen

  But when there is a tussle over the fire engine, his baby develops a name, an identity, a reality that is infuriating. “Christopher,” he says then, shaking an index finger as short as a pencil stub in the inflated baby face, “you don’t touch my truck, Christopher. O.K.? O.K., CHRISTOPHER?”

  He actually likes babies; he even wants to bring one home, the two-month-old brother of his friend Sonia. Eric, he thinks, is perfect: he cannot walk, cannot talk, has no interest in Maurice Sendak books, Lego blocks, the trucks, the sandbox, or any of the other things that make life worth living, including—especially including—me. One day at Sonia’s house he bent over Eric’s bassinet to say hello, but what came out instead was a triumphant “You can’t catch me!” as he sailed away from him.

  His baby can’t catch him yet, but it’s only a matter of time. Then he will have to make a choice: a partner, an accomplice, an opponent, or, perhaps most likely, a mixture of the three. At some point his fantasy of a brother may dovetail with the reality; mine did when my younger brother, the insufferable little nerd with the Coke-bottle glasses whom I loathed, turned into a good-looking teenage boy who interested my girlfriends, had some interesting boyfriends of his own, and was a first-rate dancer. But it’s not as simple as that, either. In his bones now my elder son probably knows the awful, wonderful truth: that he and his brother are yoked together for life, blood of each other’s blood, joined as surely as if they were Siamese twins. Whether the yoke is one of friendship or resentment, it will inevitably shadow both their lives. That is certainly something to bear, as good a reason as any to look at someone and wish that he could, impossibly, occasionally, go someplace else.

  SESAME STREET

  People sometimes ask: Whom would you like to meet most in the whole world, if your press pass magically opened doors and was not just a meaningless rectangle of laminated plastic with a bad picture of you in one corner? I used to have difficulty answering that question. In the course of my professional duties I have met most of the people I wanted to meet. Some of the famous writers were as smart and enthralling as their books, and some were pompous bores. Some of the famous actors were as smart and enthralling as their roles, and some were pompous bores. Sean Connery is remarkably sexy, although monosyllabic and bald. Barbra Streisand has glorious skin and is much smaller than you would imagine. I don’t know how tall Paul Newman is.

  Now, however, there is someone I want to meet more than anyone else in the whole world. I want to meet the man who decided some time back, during a week in which the rain stopped so seldom that mothers of toddlers were locking themselves in the bathroom to get away from their kids, that the regularly scheduled children’s programs on public television would be preempted in favor of the confirmation hearings for Justice William H. Rehnquist. This decision found kids across America, mine among them, saying of Chief Justice Rehnquist what perhaps has never been adequately expressed about him before: “He not Cookie Monster.” Out of the mouths of babes.

  It was then I realized that Sesame Street is my salvation. It is sometimes difficult for me to believe that a scant three years ago I could not tell the difference between Bert (tall, crabby, fastidious, collects paper clips) and Ernie (short, extroverted, messy, deeply attached to Rubber Duckie). It is equally difficult for me to believe that some program director took the show off the air for even a few days for the sake of the judicial confirmation hearings, which to my mind do not qualify as educational television. Oh Lord, you’re saying to yourself, not another piece about letter recognition and reading readiness and exposure to good values and alternate cultures on television. “Hah!” as Oscar the Grouch might say. “Bah!”

  Sesame Street is my salvation for two reasons. The first is that on a day when the younger child has tried to drink the bottle of floor wax he found in a childproof cabinet, which is secured with a neat little Danish lock he learned to open just after he learned to roll over, and when the older child has taken the floor wax away from him and poured it on the floor where he supposes it belongs (and where, naturally, the golden retriever has found it and licked it up), Sesame Street provides an hour of quiet, sustained concentration. And I do not have to feel as though the high-culture police are going to bang down my door and say, “Television, eh? O.K., boys—lower their S.A.T. scores twenty points apiece.”

  As a nice corollary to Sesame Street, my three-year-old can count to twenty, can identify all and draw some of the alphabet, knows how peanut butter and crayons are made, and understands what adoption means. The younger one has a much expanded vocabulary. His first word was Ernie. He can also say Cookie, Big Bird, Bert, and Grover. On occasion he has attempted, without much success, to say Children’s Television Workshop.

  The other reason Sesame Street is my salvation is that it is written for adults. How else to explain the egomaniacal singing bird named Placido Flamingo? (“That not Placido Flamingo,” said my elder child one day, when a promotional spot for the real opera singer was on. “Placido Flamingo is pink.”) Or the Miami Mice, J. P. and Tito, with their designer suits and carefully groomed whiskers? How else to explain Ferlinghetti Donizetti, the beatnik poet who performs the rappin’ alphabet, or the disco sequence in which Grover wears a white three-piece suit with an open-necked shirt and dances on squares of colored light? What about NTV, the station that regularly features a music video by Nick Normal and the Nikmatics titled “The Letter N”? (Actually, a superior music video is the one of a song by How Now and the Moo Wave, who sold milk on the streets before they made it big.) Or the Cookie Monster number, “Hey, Food,” taken directly from the Beatles, or the scene when Oscar learns that the Museum of Trash wants to put his trash can in the Cans Festival?

  My children don’t understand these allusions, but I do; I’m entertained by them, and on a day when I’ve read Pat the Bunny nineteen times, that’s no small thing. I have two theories about how the allusions get in there. Either the people who make Sesame Street are looking out for parents’ interests, or they are bored out of their gourds counting up to twelve and finding words that begin with the letter b, and so are amusing themselves.

  I prefer the latter hypothesis. Certainly, that program director I want so badly to meet was not thinking of parents, an oversight I will force him to confront if we do meet. Of course, that’s not all I’ll do. I don’t want to be more graphic, but if any of you recall what Oscar did to Luis the day he tricked him into looking into the trash can—well that’s the kind of thing I have in mind.

  THE SECOND CHILD

  The second child was a year old yesterday. He is everything I wanted to be as a child: fearless, physical, blond. He takes no prisoners. He has also changed my life. Before him, we were two adults and a child they both adored. With him, we are a family. There is no going back.

  I had a crisis of confidence when the second child was, quite literally, on the way. We were timing contractions and watching Bachelor Party on cable TV when I was felled by the enormity of what we had done. As a textbook-case eldest child—a leader, a doer, a convincing veneer of personality and confidence atop a bottomless pit of insecurity and need—I suspected we were about to shatter the life of the human being we both loved best in the world. We were about to snatch away his solitary splendor. Worse still, to my mind, we were about to make some unsuspecting individual a second child, a person whose baby clothes would be mottled with banana stains the first time he ever wore them, who would have a handful of photographs scattered amidst the painstaking documentation of his brother’s life. An also-ran. A runner-up. “This is the heir, and that is the spare,” the Duchess of Marlborough once said of her two sons.

  The second child came prepared. He had a true knot in his cord, and it was wrapped around him three times, so that he emerged looking like a kidnap victim. It turned out he was feisty and winning, intrusive and alert. His character (not to mention his yellow hair) demanded clothes of his own. He clamored for the camera. He knew what he was doing. More important, so did I. The first child got me
shiny new, like a new pair of shoes, but he got the blisters, too. The second child got me worn, yes, but comfortable. I told the first child I would never go away, and lied. I told the second child I would always come back, and spoke the truth. The second child had a mother who knew that the proper response to a crying baby was not to look up “Crying, causes of” in the index of Dr. Spock. As a matter of fact, he had a mother who was too busy to read childcare books at all, and so was in no position to recognize whether his “developmental milestones” were early/late/all/none of the above.

  What had I expected of the first child? Everything. Rocket scientist. Neurosurgeon. Designated hitter. We talked wisely at cocktail parties about the sad mistake our mothers had made in pinning all their hopes and dreams on us. We were full of it.

  I have always been a great believer in birth order. I will chat with someone for fifteen minutes and suddenly lunge at them: “You’re an oldest child, aren’t you?” That means something specific to me, about facing the world and facing yourself. My husband is also an oldest child, and the slogan one of his brothers coined for him is instructive: either pope or president. Not in words but in sentiment, my siblings felt the same about me. A substantial part of my character arises from such expectations.

  I worried about that with the second child, worried that the child called Number One would always be so. During my second pregnancy, when I drank a bit of wine and forgot to count my grams of protein, I wondered if I was being more relaxed—or simply careless.

  When I went into labor with the first, I sat down and wrote my thoughts in the beginning of his baby book. With the second, I went to a barbecue next door and then put the first to bed. The elder son was born with considerable pain, manhandled into the world with those great silver salad spoons called forceps, and when he was laid in my arms by the nurse, he looked like a stranger to me. The second somersaulted onto the birthing room bed, and as I reached down to lift him to my breast, I said his name: “Hello, Christopher.” And as I saw his face, like and yet not like his brother’s, I suddenly realized that wine or no wine, he had arrived with a distinct advantage. He came without baggage, after I had gotten over all the nonsense about in-utero exposure to music, and baby massage, and cloth vs. disposable diapers. What a wonderful way to be born.

  And so it has occurred to me often in the last year that I must strive to give our elder son some of those things that in the usual course of events come to the younger ones. I worry less now about the second being an also-ran than I do about the first being the kind of rat-race marathon runner that birth order, in part, made me. The saddest thing I always imagined about the second child was that we would have no hopes and dreams for him. I was wrong. What he has taught us is that we will have hopes and dreams, and he will decide whether he is willing to have anything to do with them. I accept him. Perhaps in other times, or with other people, that might mean settling for less. I like to think that in his case it means taking advantage of more.

  Perhaps it means that I will not push him when he needs to be pushed. I hope not. And perhaps it means I will push my first child—whose each succeeding year and stage will be inaugurals for me—when I should not do so. One teaches me as we go along, and the other inevitably reaps the benefits of that education. Each child has a different mother—not better, not worse, just different. My greatest hope and dream now is that, taken together, these two ends will make me find a middle ground in myself from which I will be happy to observe them—neither pope nor president nor obsessively striving to be either, but simply two people, their own selves, making allowances for me.

  GAY

  When he went home last year he realized for the first time that he would be buried there, in the small, gritty industrial town he had loathed for as long as he could remember. He looked out the window of his bedroom and saw the siding on the house next door and knew that he was trapped, as surely as if he had never left for the city. Late one night, before he was to go back to his own apartment, his father tried to have a conversation with him, halting and slow, about drug use and the damage it could do to your body. At that moment he understood that it would be more soothing to his parents to think that he was a heroin addict than that he was a homosexual.

  This is part of the story of a friend of a friend of mine. She went to his funeral not too long ago. The funeral home forced the family to pay extra to embalm him. Luckily, the local paper did not need to print the cause of death. His parents’ friends did not ask what killed him, and his parents didn’t talk about it. He had AIDS. His parents had figured out at the same time that he was dying and that he slept with men. He tried to talk to them about his illness; he didn’t want to discuss his homosexuality. That would have been too hard for them all.

  Never have the lines between sex and death been so close, the chasm between parent and child so wide. His parents hoped almost until the end that some nice girl would “cure” him. They even hinted broadly that my friend might be that nice girl. After the funeral, as she helped with the dishes in their small kitchen with the window onto the backyard, she lost her temper at the subterfuge and said to his mother: “He was gay. Why is that more terrible than that he is dead?” The mother did not speak, but raised her hands from the soapy water and held them up as though to ward off the words.

  I suppose this is true of many parents. For some it is simply that they think homosexuality is against God, against nature, condemns their sons to hell. For others it is something else, more difficult to put into words. It makes their children too different from them. We do not want our children to be too different—so different that they face social disapprobation and ostracism, so different that they die before we do. His parents did not know any homosexuals, or at least they did not believe they did. His parents did not know what homosexuals were like.

  They are like us. They are us. Isn’t that true? And yet, there is a difference. Perhaps mothers sometimes have an easier time accepting this. After all, they must accept early on that there are profound sexual differences between them and their sons. Fathers think their boys will be basically like them. Sometimes they are. And sometimes, in a way that comes to mean so much, they are not.

  I have thought of this a fair amount because I am the mother of sons. I have managed to convince myself that I love my children so much that nothing they could do would turn me against them, or away from them, that nothing would make me take their pictures off the bureau and hide them in a drawer. A friend says I am fooling myself, that I would at least be disappointed and perhaps distressed if, like his, my sons’ sexual orientation was not hetero. Maybe he’s right. There are some obvious reasons to feel that way. If the incidence of AIDS remains higher among homosexuals than among heterosexuals, it would be one less thing they could die of. If societal prejudices remain constant, it would be one less thing they could be ostracized for.

  But this I think I know: I think I could live with having a son who was homosexual. But it would break my heart if he was homosexual and felt that he could not tell me so, felt that I was not the kind of mother who could hear that particular truth. That is a kind of death, too, and it kills both your life with your child and all you have left after the funeral: the relationship that can live on inside you, if you have nurtured it.

  In the days following his death, the mother of my friend’s friend mourned the fact that she had known little of his life, had not wanted to know. “I spent too much time worrying about what he was,” she said. Not who. What. And it turned out that there was not enough time, not with almost daily obituaries of people barely three decades old, dead of a disease she had never heard of when she first wondered about the kind of friends her boy had and why he didn’t date more.

  It reminded me that often we take our sweet time dealing with the things that we do not like about our children: the marriage we could not accept, the profession we disapproved of, the sexual orientation we may hate and fear. Sometimes we vow that we will never, never accept those things. The stories my fr
iend told me about the illness, the death, the funeral and, especially, about the parents reminded me that sometimes we do not have all the time we think to make our peace with who our children are. It reminded me that “never” can last a long, long time, perhaps much longer than we intended, deep in our hearts, when we first invoked its terrible endless power.

  POWER

  At two o’clock in the morning I am awakened by the appearance of a person no taller than a fire hydrant, only his black eyes visible over the horizon of the mattress. “What do you want?” I whisper. “Nothing,” he whispers back.

  What can have woken my younger son and brought him down from the third floor to stand here in his blue pile Dr. Dentons? It usually boils down to some small thing: a glass of water, a night light, a token rearrangement of the blanket. I always suspect that, if he could put it into words, the explanation would be something else entirely: reassurance that he is not alone in a black world, that nothing horrible is going to happen before daybreak, that someday he will sleep the sure, steady, deep sleep that his elder brother sleeps in the twin bed next to his own. His search for reassurance leads him to our bed, where two terribly fallible people toss and turn, the closest thing he knows to God.

  This is what no one warns you about, when you decide to have children. There is so much written about the cost and the changes in your way of life, but no one ever tells you that what they are going to hand you in the hospital is power, whether you want it or not.

  I suppose they think you know this, having been on the receiving end all your life, but somehow it slipped to the back of my mind. I was the eldest in a large family; I was prepared for much of what having a baby required. I knew how overwhelming were the walks, the feeding, the changing, the constancy of the care. I should have known, but somehow overlooked for a time, that parents become, effortlessly, just by showing up, the most influential totems in the lives of their children.