Suspended Sentence

by Janice Morgan

  Then came the terrible evening when, together, we told our son. I will never forget this; it was one of the worst days of my life. I remember Dylan hearing the news, then bursting out in tears, then coming up to each of us, his dad and me, to hug us—still crying. We were all crying. It was excruciating, and so touching that my son would try to comfort both himself and us. At that moment, I would have given anything to be able to go back in time to change this outcome. I would have vowed to do the impossible: change us, do whatever was necessary to build a better family, either with his dad or by myself, to make everything work for all of us. But I didn’t have that power. Besides, it was too late.

  Initially, after the break-up, we worried about how our son would take this. Would he be OK? When Mike moved hundreds of miles away to Cleveland, I scheduled appointments with a therapist for myself and for Dylan. The therapist met with me for a good six months or so, with Dylan maybe three or four times. After that, Mr. Baldwin determined that the boy was resilient and didn’t seem unduly upset by this turn of events. He would weather the storm and adapt. I remember the therapist was impressed by ten-year-old Dylan’s vocabulary and his ability to discuss his life and emotions. Baldwin said he didn’t often encounter that in a rural area. But truly, at that age, Dylan was probably the calmest and best-adjusted he had ever been. He was articulate and rational. He knew how to do a lot of practical things, like simple repairs. He loved tools and was always taking gadgets apart and putting them back together. I learned to save whatever strange, small metallic objects I would find around the house, remembering they would probably be needed to fix a toy car or be useful for some project or other. Dylan was talkative, too; we had many long, lively conversations, and he was a great companion. It seemed like we were bonded beyond all adversity.

  During the first couple of years following the separation, my son and I were very close. We had to stick together; we were shipwrecked on the same island. At least we had each other. I helped him keep up with his homework; we did things together on the weekends; we sat close together at church. When he developed a passion for BMX racing, we deliberated on all kinds of bike parts and enhancements. I drove him to the closest BMX bike track, thirty or forty miles away, so that he could try out his skills. He loved the rolling bumps, the zigzags, the jumps—everything that took physical effort and brought strong sensations. Sometimes, he would persuade a friend to go with us. BMX was still a little new in our region at the time. I was worried at first about the dangers, but then I figured he had to express his daredevil nature somehow, so this was as good as anything. At least I knew what he was doing. Most kids were on sports teams, so they had strict schedules of weekend participation in games. He had been that way, too, for a number of years. But gradually, from maybe eleven on, he started moving away from soccer and wanted to do an individual sport. I think he wanted to test himself, do something that not everyone around was into yet. He had to find an area where he could excel in the way he wanted to. He won trophies, and I cheered him on.

  It must have been right around this time—or maybe right before it—that I wanted to take the photos, the ones before the major transformation that I knew was coming. In trying to catch my son in an image that I could look back at for years, Dylan would say I was trying to hold on to him and to the past, hold on in a way that wasn’t possible or wanted by him. At age eleven or twelve, he was all for growing up, coming of age and into his full powers. It’s probably true I was holding on, trying to capture some quality of youth and innocence that was going to be lost. Maybe I remained haunted by the last sentence of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s novel, The Yearling, a book I read when I was the same age he was back then: “A boy and a yearling were gone forever,” she wrote. And part of me didn’t want that to happen.

  I spent the first year or so after the break-up doing inner reconnaissance—to understand better what went wrong in my marriage and to restore some sense of balance. The therapist, Mr. Baldwin, assigned M. Scott Peck’s book The Road Less Traveled, which I read and discussed with him. He suspected out loud what I only dimly sensed: a lot of my emotional life had gotten buried, and I would have to search my way through the ruins before rebuilding. I wanted to transform myself from the inside out. Withdrawing as much as possible from excessive career responsibilities while still working, I took up Tai Chi and yoga; read Rumi, the Sufi mystic poet; poured cascades of confused feelings onto the pages of several journals. I also listened to the neo-Vedic advice of Dr. Deepak Chopra. A Massachusetts internist who had grown up in India, he felt it was time to bring the ancient wisdom of Ayurveda to the attention of ambitious, stressed-out Americans. Alarmed by how narrowly focused—and intrusive—standard medical practices were becoming, Chopra talked about health in a different way. Health meant finding ways to balance the natural rhythms of what he called the “quantum mechanical human body.” Rather than being mere machines of flesh and bone, in his view our bodies contain “rivers of intelligence and consciousness” that are always flowing, always influenced by thoughts as well as events.

  Whatever else of use I may have learned from Chopra, at least the three Ayurvedic doshas offered me a conceptual shorthand to explain why my marriage failed. Health in relationships, too, was a question of finding balance and counter-balance. Doshas are basic human types, based on body build, temperament, energy patterns. Like many readers of his early book, Perfect Health, I took a quick questionnaire to find out which dosha best described my own characteristics. Checking my assessment, I found out I was mainly a Vata type, meaning dry, nervous, alert but easily agitated. According to Ayurveda, warm, buttery, or oily dishes could help to balance such qualities, which meant completely revamping my cuisine. Meanwhile, I couldn’t help but notice that my ex-husband would fit that category too. That didn’t bode well for us from the get-go. Two brittle, anxious Vatas co-habiting? It didn’t seem like it would be too comfortable over the long term. Then I discovered my son was a Pitta type: being hot and temperamental, he would do best seeking out cool, refreshing foods and avoiding spices, especially during the summer, when a tendency to overheat could send Pittas over the edge. Aha! I marveled at the accuracy of these descriptions. No wonder our household had been so incendiary, with two dry, airy Vatas around a fiery, hot Pitta. That was practically the formula for explosions. Call it Vedic voodoo, but all this made perfect sense to me. It explained the family dynamic as well as anything else. For counterbalance, what each of us needed was a calm, earthy Kapha type—someone of the third dosha. Unfortunately, cool-headed, steady Kaphas were in short supply within our immediate vicinity.

  While at first I was content to pursue the road less traveled, I eventually found myself facing quite a few diverging paths in the yellow wood. For one thing, I had to look around to rebuild my social life. Old friends from my married past had drifted away during my seclusion, and besides, I needed to seek out new people. In that regard, Dylan and I were in the same boat. And so, for one memorable period, we both ended up spending quite a bit of social time with members of the Hassan family.

  The Hassans were new in town, and their international background made them unusual for a rural area in west Kentucky. I first meet Lena in my department, where she had applied as a fulltime lecturer. She was an American who had grown up in a military family stationed in Europe and who spoke Spanish and French fluently. She also knew Arabic because she had recently lived in Saudi Arabia for several years, and her husband was Sudanese. It soon got out that if you ever met one of the Hassans, you were bound to meet the whole clan sooner or later. True enough, I found out that her older son had been that sole native-speaker student in two of my advanced classes, and her second eldest son had just enrolled at the college, too. It was because their sons were students here that the parents decided it was a propitious time to relocate and begin a new life in the U.S. Not long after that, I learned that one of Lena’s younger sons happened to be the same age as my own. In fact, Dylan had just told me a story about a new boy from Saudi Ara
bia, named Ramul, who was in his class at school.

  Through these interconnections, Dylan and I ended up spending many a late afternoon or early evening with the Hassans. We were all in transition, and both sides were eager to make friends. Lena was the welcoming matriarch, holding court at the center while her husband phoned his business contacts or moved about the house with various hobbies. She didn’t pretend that her household was anything other than improvisational. For me, her home felt like an open tent of hospitality in a social desert, and I took refuge there. While our sons rode together on bikes outside or dealt cards indoors, the two of us would sip mint tea and talk. We could discuss anything at all openly, whether we agreed with each other or not. Of course, there were endless interruptions: cooking, kids, the salty commentaries of the family’s talking parrot. For me, Lena’s opinions were endlessly fascinating and contradictory. For example, she had become a devout Muslim who practiced Ramadan even with a busy teaching schedule, but she was also a staunch feminist, especially when it came to workplace rights and salaries. She told me many stories about the family’s recent years in Saudi Arabia, where she had taught English to Saudi women, dressed like them in a black robe and hijab. I could barely picture such a robust, outspoken woman wearing these clothes, let alone working in them. Having grown up as an American in France, she valued independent thinking, but at the same time, she’d grown fond of Arabian-style community and hospitality. I found her critical of our stateside brand of individual-ism; she preferred her own particular blend of both worlds.

  Before Lena, I had never met a fellow American citizen who had not, until coming to our town in 2000, actually lived in the U.S. It seemed to me that during her first year here, she was in many ways a foreigner, someone who looked at our culture from an outsider’s challenging perspective. Then, too, so many basic elements of smalltown America were new to her: Fourth of July parades, fireworks, school sports, picnics—even rain. With great delight, she would tell me how her desert husband loved to sit with her on the porch watching the fascinating phenomenon of a steady spring rainfall.

  Given my newly divorced status, it wasn’t long before Lena took it upon herself to become my romantic advisor. However hardworking and dedicated to family she might be, it wasn’t beyond her to issue statements that sounded like something from a fortune teller in One Thousand and One Nights. “Love lite, that’s what you should look for,” she told me. “You have an interesting career; you have a child. You don’t need interference or distractions from those. Believe me, love lite is the way to go.” And then she concocted a rare, exotic perfume I could use in my conquests. I took a whiff of the musky potion and laughed. This was something for Scheherazade, not me, but in any case, it couldn’t hurt. My prior, intermittent romances hadn’t exactly flourished; I concluded it was going to take a while before the right person came along.

  This friendship helped me regain confidence; it offered support to branch out in new directions, try new ways of doing things. There were new opportunities on the professional level, too. When she successfully applied for a grant to develop her language teaching skills in France, she encouraged me to do the same. I applied and spent four weeks with teachers from many different countries taking classes in Grenoble the next summer. I was able to find ways to balance my parenting responsibilities at home, while relying on Mike’s summer trips with Dylan and two or three weeks of summer camp to cover times when I traveled. Shortly after this, the chair of our department announced a magnificent windfall. The dean had secured a generous grant from a major health corporation to support international travel for faculty and students in our department. This was a special gift that many of us could use. Over three or four years, after attending a summer conference in Martinique, I was able to return on the grant to interview two authors from this unique island culture about their novels. Each project taught me something valuable and led to other opportunities. It was a time of expansion.

  And Dylan, what did he perceive back then? In those years between ten and thirteen, did he feel insecure, lonely? He didn’t seem that way to me. He hung out with different friends, mostly guys his age who lived nearby. A couple of those I worried about sometimes, but I liked Paul, the boy who lived in the house directly behind ours. I found out his mom was the Methodist campus minister. I enjoyed her sense of humor and could identify with her being a single mother, raising a son and a daughter by herself. We all hit it off, and I wanted to get to know her better. She told me she felt a little isolated, though, being away from family and living in such a rural community. Not long after, Beverly accepted the call to a metropolitan church in Denver. I knew this would be a better fit for her, but both Dylan and I were sad to see them leave.

  Now that I think about it, quite a few of the boys he spent time with back then were also sons of single moms: Cory, Logan, and then later on, Ryan and Lonnie. Not all the boys, but most. It’s as if when his dad and I separated, our son somehow decided that he was going to have to shift social identities. He was going to have to move from the success track, where all the cool kids had intact, professional families, to the outlier track, the one where kids were mostly from single-parent households, meaning that Dad wasn’t around. Was this a decision he made, or did it just happen that way? He always had friends, but they weren’t the long-term, solid kind you would expect to have in a small town. Some of that was due to a friend moving away with his family, like Paul. But other times, the choice to “move on” to another friend was Dylan’s choice. That’s what happened with Ramul. After a while, Dylan felt this new friend wasn’t proficient enough in biking. In fact, he was a “disaster on wheels” who could actually cause accidents to happen for anyone in his way, Dylan claimed. After a while, it became clear to both of them that Ramul was more introspective, more of a person who liked reading and quieter pursuits indoors. I regretted Dylan’s attitude, because I found the younger Hassan to have a calm temperament and an understanding that far surpassed his years. If only some of that would have rubbed off on Dylan! Maybe Lena’s family members were the much-needed Kapha types that were in such short supply nearby. It didn’t surprise me to hear a few years later from Lena that Ramul was thinking of becoming a doctor.

  It seemed Dylan had contradictory impulses when it came to friends: on the one hand, he wanted to be with the “cool” group, but on the other, he seemed drawn to kids who were somehow on the fringes, maybe new kids or someone not as integrated into any group. As I look back, I wonder if that ambivalence was due to the way he began perceiving himself.

  The inner shift to seeing himself as an outlier was something I didn’t notice back then—not sufficiently. It was only years later that he spoke about that. And this ambivalence about where he fit in socially showed up, I think, right around the time he began realizing that things were going on for him internally that other kids didn’t have to deal with: racing thoughts, fluctuating energy levels, mood changes, temper flare-ups that went out of bounds. I knew about the red-hot temper, but I didn’t know much about the other internal events. He didn’t talk about them much, only a few times. I should have paid more attention to those, should have sought help, but I didn’t. Everyone knows preteens go through mood changes. Even the hot flare-ups seemed like “normal” anomalies.

  Meanwhile, I was taking on more career responsibilities. I took my son’s adjustment for granted. He was so smart, so articulate, so resilient. He was getting good grades. I was proud of all those things. Mr. Baldwin, the therapist, saw that too, didn’t he? To me, it seemed completely inevitable that Dylan was going to grow up to go to college and become a professional person like his parents. It was his birthright.

  Our tight dyad lasted a while, but shortly after Dylan turned twelve, I think we both sensed that the sands were shifting under us. My son was growing up fast, moving from a more or less secure childhood toward a more uncertain adolescence. He, too, had to test his powers in a widening world. He also had many more choices to make, and it wasn’t clear whose in
fluence he would be under in making them. Looking back, I can see the two of us were living under the same roof, but our worlds were diverging in ways I couldn’t predict. While I was practicing yoga and tuning in to sitar music for meditation, my son was turning on to a whole other type of influence from the external world. It was Deepak versus Tupac.

  Dylan had two powerful tools for expanding his possibilities: his bike, which could even take him into distant neighborhoods, and the internet, a gift from Grandpa. My dad was convinced that this was the wave of the future, and Dylan had to be aboard. Mike and I had been skeptical—we’d put it off as long as possible. Computer, yes, but the internet? Ready or not, when Dylan turned thirteen, the bulging computer arrived in a gigantic black-and-white box, soon to be ensconced in part of our wide living room. From there, I felt I could keep up with what he was doing. Dylan’s main interest was in finding music and later, films. There began his huge interest in hip-hop, R&B, and rap. Within a short time, he was an expert in this domain and started taking in cash by burning his own CD collections for friends and acquaintances. Occasionally, though, I got hints through the grapevine that some of the parents on the receiving end were not so appreciative of the productions.

  There were many rappers he listened to over the next few years, but one rap artist he especially admired was Tupac Shakur. Most likely Dylan listened to him more often a few years later, but his interest started early. I try to speculate on what, exactly, it was about this music—and rap in particular—that would so attract a young teenager like my son at that time. First and foremost, it had to be the sheer intensity of it. Dylan loved beats. He liked his music loud and vibrating, wanted to feel the impact of it in his body. He received music from the same place a Digital Underground musician said that Tupac rapped from: the solar plexus. I remember once he wanted to me to listen to some music, and he positioned me right where he himself liked to be, body right in front of the speakers so that each of the beats and rhythms would hit me full in the chest and abdomen. I remember the visceral impact of it almost knocking me out of my chair. The beats struck like a boxer’s hits, only they were strangely coming from the inside, as if reverberating off my own heartbeat. “Yeah, that’s it, Mom,” he told me.