sleep.
Chapter 1
Road Trip
Maybe there are families that have never taken trips of any kind together. But—as son, husband, father, even just as observer—I’ve never come across a family that didn’t have its road stories. The Summer We Went to Yellowstone. The Night Dad Drove the Car off the Road Outside Phoenix. Why Mom Hates Delaware.
For many of us, trips with our families are the only grand adventures we will ever have. Others morph the tedium of the experience into tales gently or bitterly mocking.
Sometimes these memories of family travel are fond. Sometimes they’re over-simplified and one-sided cautionary tales explaining why we will never take a driving vacation with our own kids, ever. They become simultaneously inspiration, metaphor, and excuse.
Family life itself is a kind of road trip. Often the route coincides with the map only occasionally and, even then, deceptively.
Melanie and I have adopted five children over the twenty-five years of our marriage. When they came to us (not all at once), they were four, five, six, seven, and ten.
Sometimes when people ask me how we got them I say we found them along the side of the road—since we’d eaten the last of the fried chicken there was a little room left on the back seat so we said sure, why not, hop on in.
When people ask, How did you know they weren’t going to turn out to be serial killers?
I might rejoin, How do you know your kids aren’t?
I understand the need to question. Things do get scary out on the road, and practically every responsible person tells you not to pick up strangers.
But I knew they weren’t strangers. I knew they were my kids from the moment I first glimpsed them through the windshield, standing beside the road with their flimsy little cardboard suitcases.
Wasn’t it a little dangerous?
Everything’s dangerous. Even in your dreams. Even if you sleep without dreams. From the moment you jump out of bed and take that first breath. Something terrible might happen. Someone’s bound to die before the story is over. You might even fall in love.
What I’ve been telling you is metaphor. They’re pretty rare in these parts but some days you can actually bag your limit. I’m told they like to travel in packs for added security.
I love my family beyond reason. The fears I have for my family run beyond reason as well. Traveling beyond the lands of reason you enter the kingdoms of imagination and metaphor. Melanie and I are both professional writers of fiction. One of the many disadvantages of that particular occupational choice is that we’ve become quite adept at imagining the worst.
As parents, we’ve also learned that the worst can happen, and somehow the family must go on.
Both as parents and as writers, we’ve come to respect the imagination, but more than that, to understand just how much a family and its members make their lives there. What might happen next.
What they’re going to be when they finally grow up. What their own children will be like. What really happens behind closed eyes, in the middle of a reverie, or late at night when the real world fades into a dream of what happened yesterday.
This memoir—or testament, if you will—is as much a biography of one family’s imagination as a chronicle of real life events. It is about both our love and our fear, about what we know and what we cannot know but can imagine. And although what happens in the imagination may be real in a different way than the apparent history of waking events, it is real just the same.
Like memory itself, this testament travels freely through space and time. At one moment our children are youngsters, crawling across our knees. And then, when we’re not quite prepared for it, they are adults, with children of their own. We began this story as parents, and are surprised to end it as grandparents, as Grandma and Poppie, as Baba and Papa.
You may wonder what really happened to these people. You may wonder where the day’s documentary ends and the dream’s journey begins.
I remember driving for a long time that day: ten to twelve hours at least. The kids had been asleep for hours. Melanie had finally dozed off after a long discussion, not exactly an argument, but it had made me tense. I’ve never done well with conflict, but she never lets me get away with just backing off. Now, I wasn’t even sure what exactly we’d been talking about for all that time, but it had much to do, I knew, with our children, and with what I could see outside our car.
Along the side of the road, as far as the eye could see, the children waited. Some of them were babies, owning nothing but the baskets they were in and their own dirty blankets. Sometimes the older kids—and by older
I mean two or three years of age—would take care of them, holding and singing to them because that came instinctively, feeding them out of other people’s garbage cans.
The babies’ dreams were elemental. The babies did not dream of parents. They dreamed of warmth and nipples and other good things in their mouths, arms around them keeping them close.
It was the kids old enough to know what families were, or could be, but lacking the cynicism that comes from constant disappointment, who dreamed of parents. Their ideas of what good parents might be were unrealistic, of course, derived as they were from what television shows or movies they had seen. But if there was anything in common in those dreams, it was that the parents were present. They did not go away, they did not vanish into some invisible tear in the world.
I looked around the car, at my own children sprawled into haphazard sleep, their bodies twisted as if dropped from a great height. I never had understood how they could find comfort in these positions: Veronica with her hands under her cheekbones and her butt in the air, Chris with his head upside down and hanging off the edge of the seat, Gabriella with one arm raised as if asking questions of some invisible sleep teacher, and Joe with arms fiercely crossed as if trying to break his own rib cage.
And not for the first time I wondered in what nook or cranny Anthony would have found to make his nest, if he had lived long enough to know Gabby and Joe. I wondered if any of my surviving children ever dreamed of him, of how he was or how he might have been. I wondered about what lessons he might have taught them about death, and how they might use that knowledge. There was so much for them to know, or at least to try to understand. Anthony could be a good teacher— certainly he taught me everything I know about loss.
Outside the car windows the children came in droves. Some had barely escaped house fires: you could see places on their necks bubbled like a plastic toy left on the stove. Some had crawled out of floods or earthquakes, their faces smeared and broken. Some stared with eyes that had seen everything but from which nothing looked back when you gazed into them.
There was no more room in the car. I wanted to stick my head out the window and tell them that, and somehow apologize for it, but frankly there were so many I was afraid. Already there were so many, and they were so close, I was afraid I was going to hit one of them so I drove more and more slowly, then sped up for fear of encouraging them to rush the car. That much need, that much evidence of our failure is terrifying. Sometimes I wonder if we will be judged on how we’ve cared for all our unwanted children and it makes me shudder.
I won’t say I wasn’t tempted, especially by the ones with something wrong in the face, or something more subtle that still managed to keep them separated out from the rest, as if they might be mythological creatures in disguise, needing someone to champion what was human, and essential in them. I was tempted. But the car was only so big, and I had only so much time, and as it is I don’t really know what I’m doing—I’m just playing all this by ear.
"You do what you can. I remember that was one of the things I said to Melanie during our long discussion.
But it isn’t enough," is what she said back to me and although I tried to talk her out of that notion I knew of course this is true. How do you live with the fact that the very best you can do isn’t enough? I don’t know.
We didn’t adopt our children in order to save them but that doesn’t change the fact that they needed to be saved. We adopted our children because we knew we’d be good parents for them, because already, in a sense, we knew they were ours to parent. Being a parent is not promising you’re going to love a child. Being a parent is having sufficient faith, that strong arm of the imagination, to make that child your own, despite everything you know and everything you can’t even imagine.
What links our family together is not blood, but that kind of faith. Our children, even though they have come to us out of different failures, different disasters, are brothers and sisters because of that faith, that leap of the imagination that has brought their histories together with ours.
We’ve done the best we knew how to do. Minute by minute, we’re still doing our best. We haven’t been able to fix everything.
Despite Chris’s innate innocence, he has spent most of his adult life in and out of prison. He does not set out to hurt anyone, but he has hurt a great many people, and I have to admit that I understand him less now than ever.
Veronica has the biggest heart of anyone I have ever known. But the fear she has carried around since she was a little girl, despite our sometimes desperate efforts to heal it, threatens to destroy her time after time.
Gabriella and Joe do well despite their struggles, but they must live with dreams of a birth father who broke his children’s arms and fractured their skulls in his fits of rage, and a birth mother who did nothing to stop him.
And Anthony is dead. And we will never know for sure if it was the madness of his first four years that finally caught up with him and ripped him from our lives.
But for just that moment my family was safe, sleeping in their own particular ways. They dreamed of things I was not privy to, but they were safe. All I had to do was pay attention and keep that car on the road.
But you never know what’s going to happen on a road trip. You can’t always anticipate what you’re going to run into.
And the number of desperate children gathering outside the car continued to grow. There’s no room, I wanted to tell them. It’s all I can do, I might have said, but how could they possibly understand? I looked in my rearview mirror at the other cars, praying they would stop and pick up just a few of those children. But there were so many. You could not begin to imagine them all.
Chapter 2
Alchemy
Imagination transforms one substance into another. It changes what is into what might be, what was into what might have been. Straw becomes gold, gold straw, and neither is more real nor, I submit, more precious than the other. Pebbles turn into luminous pearls and pearls into little gray rocks, both solid and beautiful, both essential. Human beings take shape from clay, angels’ wings are spun out of water, fire gives rise to the long tongues of demons, love emerges out of thin air, and the basic elements reconstitute themselves again and again.
Like other powerful tools—language, nuclear energy, genetic engineering—imagination carries risks. If I had imagined my children too vividly before I became their mother, I might have missed who they were and how they would reveal themselves to me. As they grew up, I tried to resist imagining the best or the worst for them (which is to say, my version of the best and worst, not theirs), lest anticipation or worry interfere with meeting them where they were rather than where I hoped or feared they might be.
Anthony did not grow up. One spring evening when he was nine years old, he hanged himself from the post of his top bunk bed with the rope he’d been using earlier to walk the dogs.
I would have imagined that to be unimaginable. Sometimes I still do.
For a while after Anthony died, I sought out the company of other bereaved parents, desperate to immerse myself in their stories and my own. I noticed how the stories often became litanies, told with exactly the same words in exactly the same rhythms:
When she called to tell me about the accident, we thought it was her son who’d been killed, but it turned out to be mine.
I knew she was gone before they told me, because her little ears were blue.
It was the middle of the night when the knock came at the door, and I knew right away that our son was dead.
When I called him for dinner he didn’t answer, and I thought he’d fallen asleep, so I asked Steve to go in and wake him up.
I was struck, too, by how imagination rushes into the miasma of acute grief and does its best to make sense—any kind of sense—out of something not so much nonsensical as a-sensical. Perhaps the need to impose order at almost any cost is primal; perhaps it serves some evolutionary purpose. Any explanation was better than none. In our desperate circle, we created our own myths, which might or might not have been constructed around objective truth, and clung to them even when they caused us harm:
The school should have known this was going to happen.
The doctor didn’t catch it soon enough.
If I’d had dinner ready earlier that night, he wouldn’t have done it. Five minutes earlier.
God is punishing me.
God has broken His word to us.
Was it careless play or suicide? Anthony was not a depressed or angry child; in fact, of all our kids, he was the least volatile. But he had been mad at us that evening because we wouldn’t let him go to a friend’s house, and he had been horribly abused and abandoned during his infancy and early childhood.
If it was suicide, did he know what he was doing? Is a nine-year-old capable of imagining the finality of death?
Is anyone?
I am. Now.
Knowing the how
of my son’s death became urgent, and my imagination supplied one scenario after another. He’d been playing doggie
and had slipped off the top bunk. He’d been thinking, with a child’s logic, I’ll kill myself, and then they’ll let me do what I want.
Early trauma had come home to roost.
But the truth is, we’ll never know what happened that night or why. And it wasn’t until I surrendered to that hard un-knowing that the grief could begin to flow freely. It’s still flowing.
So imagination can obfuscate, constrict, trivialize. Imagination can keep us from knowing what’s true.
But sometimes imagination is the best or the only tool available to us for apprehending truth. Before I loved my children, before I met them—before I knew about how Chris would hold my hand when I thought I was going blind, how Veronica would race down a long sidewalk to jump into my arms, how Joe would come and get me to show me a rainbow, how Gabriella would call me Mommy
well into adulthood, how Anthony would cock his head to the right and sing me a song—before I knew my children at all, they were my children, because I imagined they were.
I did not imagine my children into being. What I imagined—what would not have existed had I not imagined it—was being their mother. I was their mother before we ever knew each other, and they were my children, because of the alchemy of imagination.
It couldn’t have been any other way. Some fundamental truths are accessible to us only through imagination. It’s magic, and it’s as real as it gets.
Usually imagination goes forward. But there’s also a form of imagining that, for its own purposes, possesses things from the past.
Everything can be possessed, and has the power to possess. There are places that after-shadow the past in much the way the future can be foreshadowed—viscerally, with evocation rather than precision, inviting us in to imaginative participation. They come to us through time and space and dimension, demanding—what? Attention, at least. Creative and truthful use.
Increasingly throughout my adult life, I’d had visions of the place of my girlhood. Flashbacks, memory fragments, summonses, breakthroughs from another dimension—I never knew what to call them, and I didn’t know whether other people also experienced such things. Vivid, highly sensory, plotless and without characters, they seemed to be about place.
These visions would burst into my consciousness at moments that seemed entirely random and in no way connected to their content. I’d be doing my motherly duty helping one of the kids with algebra homework, and suddenly white fence blue spruces little marshland along the road, the side yard of the house where I grew up and then I’d snap back into the present with the sullen child at the dining room table, evidently not having lost any time or space in this reality.
Or, I’d be absorbed
