Sometimes,
late at night, well into my second glass of wine, my husband at work and my son
sleeping, I mourn the loss of other people’s children. It’s usually during that
hour when I’m immobilized by weariness yet unwilling to drag off to the
bathroom to brush and wash, so I sit in front of the computer, study the photos
of little boys, and have an unhealthy cry for Ronan, the one who died of tay-sachs;
for the Staten Island mom whose sons were yanked from her arms by Hurricane
Sandy; and for another mother whose entire family was washed away by the
Southeast-Asian tsunami. My grief is discriminate; I mirror the bereavement of
mothers who had and then who did not have anymore. I pluck stories from around
the world about the entire annihilation of motherhood.
Let me tell you something about the way
parenthood can change you: It is like an anti-anti-depressant or like a polarizing
disorder that doesn’t just swing to and fro but that swings wildly. This is not
to say that the opposite of anti-depressed is depressed or that it’s all bad;
I’m talking about the loss of casual numbness about anything. Joy, for example,
is amplified into something wildly exuberant. Love for a child can make you as
giddy as a teenager, with all the angst-y hysteria, plus some added depth. On
the other hand, anger is a coiled whip that now sits closer to your hands, and
sadness can grab your lungs and squeeze them until your heaving tears in front
of your computer at midnight for people you have never met. This sickness of
parenthood may just be mine. I don’t know…
Fear, too. And compassion. They become more
palpable. At Disney’s California Adventure there is a Ferris wheel that
features gondolas on tracks that roll and swing out wildly hundreds of feet in
the air above the park. Yesterday my niece and I rode up and around, and what
looked like fun on the ground became nauseous, instinctual discomfort. Far
below I could see my son asleep in his stroller, his grandmother waiting for us
on the bench. Across from us in the gondola a girl visiting from Arizona clutched
her father’s jacket in abject terror, the tears gathering but not yet falling.
All I could do was talk to her in a low murmur: “It’s okay honey. I know it’s
scary. We’ll be on the ground soon. Don’t worry.” And so on. I couldn’t stand
to see her like that. I didn’t even know her.
I think this is probably more personal that
I can fully grasp. Last summer my son suffered a series of partial seizures,
and for a week we knew from his MRI read that something was wrong with him, but
we didn’t know whether it was a disorder that would work itself out over time
or whether he was showing the beginning signs of a “demyelinating process” that
would piece-by-piece disassemble the puzzle of what makes him him. We wouldn’t
know until we saw the neurologist. In fact, we’re still not completely
positive. I have seen two full-blown febrile seizures that turned a very busy
three-year-old into a vegetable for a half-hour. The things I have seen. I’m all
too aware of the possibility of losing the one, small person that marks me as
someone’s mother, not just from my own experiences with my only child, but also
vicariously from others less fortunate, which sounds too mild to describe the
catastrophic ending of motherhood.
At amusement parks there is always that
game where you’re supposed to climb across a ladder made of rope to win a
prize. The rope is anchored in the middle on either end so that the climber
must rely on speed and balance to make it across, or the ladder will spin on
its one tether and knock the climber off. This is what it feels like to be the
parent of an only child. I imagine that two children would be like two tethers
at either end, and I could climb across with more confidence, but since I
wanted two and only have one, sometimes I feel like I’m spinning around on this
rope ladder, and my grip is really compromised. I’m really worried I’m going to
slip. I don’t trust my ability to balance.
Neuroscientist David Eagleman says this about religion: "Our ignorance of the cosmos is too vast to commit to atheism, and yet we know too much to commit to a particular religion. A third position, agnosticism, is often an uninteresting stance in which a person simply questions whether his traditional religious story (say, a man with a beard on a cloud) is true or not true. But with Possibilianism I'm hoping to define a new position — one that emphasizes the exploration of new, unconsidered possibilities. Possibilianism is comfortable holding multiple ideas in mind; it is not interested in committing to any particular story." 
