EVERYTHING
FOR YOUR FAMILY
Fatherhood
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We stayed out too late that night, watching the electrical storm from our friends' glassed-in balcony. The sky kept going white; the thunder was quick and close and sharp, like kernels popping at a movie house. We adults watched like kids; the kids went inside and jumped on the bed. Five miles from where we were, a woman stepped in a puddle and was electrocuted. The kids on the bed, bouncing: Our friends' son is 5 and their daughter is 3. Our son is 2 and 9 months. The electrocuted woman, I will learn, was a mother of four. The morning papers wondered about the cause: Was it a lightning strike? A downed power line? Wiring problems in an electrical box? I wondered how we live when we know that at any moment we can die. I am reading a novel, Elise Blackwell's "Hunger," about the Leningrad blockade. The townspeople were trapped and starving; shoe leather was boiled for soup. Surrounded by death, some wondered if living was worth the trouble. The narrator, who is childless, envies parents their sense of purpose: They know they must survive, because their children need them. He speaks of the agony he's seen parents go through as they watch their young suffer, the brutish will with which mothers and fathers sustain themselves and their families, the eschewal of every moral standard that gets in the way of this one: "You must feed your children." He is told that he's fortunate not to have offspring. He is a scientist, a cultured man; he knows that he, too, must be brutish to survive. But he can't explain to himself WHY he should survive... "I longed for the lucidity of parenthood during the bad time." I have never boiled a shoe, but I understand the scientist. I understand him, if one can say such a thing about another person, completely. I grew up thinking too much about the future, and my mortality fears always took the banal and oddly untrustworthy shape: "But there's so much ahead of me..." That thought is still there; it will always be there, whether there's really so much ahead of me or not. But it now must contend with a meatier idea: "I am needed." The woman's death that stormy night would have been a tragedy whether she had children or not. Indeed, some might say the real tragedy is to die WITHOUT children, that parenthood is a fulfillment - an accomplishment that makes the end more palatable. This, too, I understand. But it's hard to draw relief from the idea that I'd be leaving something behind. My son is not a pair of initials I've carved in a tree. He's more like the tree itself, thirsty and exposed. And before the lightning comes, I'd like to be the rain. Greg Blake Miller is a writer and college instructor in Las Vegas. The UC Irvine graduate is a longtime contributor to Churm Publishing, Inc. His son, Elek, turns 3 this month. |
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