An Uncomplicated Life Page 4

  My father married Elsye on June 1, 1968.

  As I’ve grown up and raised my own family, I’ve come to appreciate what a dicey proposition a second marriage can be. Throw in the maelstrom of three kids, and survival odds are less than hopeful. I also wondered what my dad’s biggest motivation was for marrying again. He doesn’t like being alone. He wanted adult company. But how much of it was for me?

  “I wanted a mother for you,” he said not long ago. “And I got tired of being by myself.”

  Elsye and my dad bought a house in Bethesda, Maryland, that they could barely afford, for the security everyone had to have. In those days, Bethesda was a middle-class suburb of Washington. Today, it’s a booming haven for ethnic restaurants, high-end boutique shopping and rich people. Our house was a brick-and-board postwar two-story: Three bedrooms, a bath, a one-car garage converted into a den. It occupied a corner lot, with trees and a fenced-in backyard.

  A house. My house. Nobody living above us or below us; there were no shared walls or exotic kitchen smells. We had a partly finished basement where we could play our records loud and not disturb anyone except our parents. There was a separate dining room and a yard for a dog. Trees and grass, and the Good Humor truck in June.

  And just like that, I had a brother and a sister, too. I was ten years old, not so old I’d become set in my ways. I could welcome a new family, even the instant kind. I’d never come home to an empty house again, and I didn’t need a key on a shoestring.

  We lived in that house for four years. They were good cocoon seasons. No surprises. I had close friends and sleepovers. I played Little League. I was on a wrestling team. I shared a bedroom with Jeff and a life with everyone. I felt loved and secure in a way I never had before. All these people, they care about me, and they aren’t going away.

  I still go back to that Bethesda house. Every fall, my work takes me to Baltimore. I rent a car at the airport and point it south, down the Baltimore-Washington Parkway to Interstate 495 to Old Georgetown Road. I park in the old neighborhood, and I walk around, calm with happy yesterdays.

  No one else in my family does this. And they think I’m nuts for doing it myself. Jeff still lives within an hour’s drive, and he hasn’t been back since we moved. No matter.

  Can a house inhabit a soul? What business does a brick-and-board structure have, burrowing into my essence that way? I haven’t lived there in more than 40 years and yet the place haunts me like the kindest ghost.

  Things were good for me there for the first time. No surprises.

  WE BROUGHT JILLIAN HOME from the hospital to her own room. It faced the back of the house and afforded a pretty and pastoral view of the mature woods that rose up almost immediately as the yard ended. The limbs of a 100-year-old shagbark hickory peered into the window. Squirrels occasionally danced there, doing some snooping of their own.

  During her pregnancy, Kerry had bought for all our relatives some rolls of plain, white wall border a foot wide, several pints of primary-colored paint and a few dozen empty baby-food jars. She put the paint, the jars and strips of the border in individual boxes, with these instructions:

  “Where I marked your name and color, please make a handprint with the paint, and sign it underneath.”

  Grandmother Daugherty, red. Grandma Jean, blue. Aunt Debra, green. Every relative got a box. The aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins. Everyone from Hopewell and Aliquippa and every precinct where my family had landed. The Phillipses and the Daughertys, the Coopers and the Allisons. The Turneys and the Ryans. Kerry’s sister, Janis, her husband, Marc, and their two sons.

  Everyone dipped his hand into a color, and laid it on the border. They all lent our little girl a hand. We brought Jillian home to this room with its border of family hands, its beautiful backyard and its nosy squirrels. Twenty-two years later, it was still her room.

  Kerry and I came from different ends of the family ideal. We arrived at the center with one thing in common: Our kids would have the love and stability that ought to be every kid’s birthright. A parent on the kitchen floor, bleeding from the wrists, isn’t something you’re likely to forget. Nor is a childhood spent in the loving idyll of an extended family.

  Kerry wanted her kids to have the childhood she had because it was familiar. I wanted that, too, because for me it was anything but.

  At various times, Jillian has lacked for things along the “typical” kid continuum: Friends, sleepover invitations, car dates, spring-break trips to the beach. Some of the grand and happy attachments of high school were not meant to be. The daily bone on bone we would encounter was never so strong that it infiltrated our four walls, though. Home was a sanctuary. The place to go when nowhere else mattered, filled with loving hands.

  We’ve lived in the same house for 26 years. That’s 22 years longer than I’ve ever lived anywhere else. It’s the only home Jillian and Kelly have ever known. Subconsciously I made a promise to myself, as an eight-year-old twirling that apartment key, that if I ever had kids they would have a life that didn’t wobble and a home that didn’t scare them.

  Kerry shared that, even if she approached it from a far more sylvan path.

  I didn’t have a dark childhood, only a dark event. My dad loved me. Elsye rescued me. Jeff and Deb were willing coconspirators in my personal happiness plot. The scene for my happy ending was the house in Bethesda. The past informs the present. Who we are is owed to where we’ve been. There is always a footprint.

  Every summer, my son, Kelly, and I go to Montreat. We hike Lookout and appreciate the memories we’ve made and will keep making. I say a silent hello to Mom.

  On Jillian’s first night of her life at home, she slept in the family room, by a fire we kept stoked all night, in a house with no power. An ice storm had downed the power lines. But the bad weather broke that second day. Sun nudged the clouds. It was warm. Fall had returned. The second night, and every night after that, Jillian slept in the room facing the backyard. Her room. As we laid her down to sleep, a slice of moon brightened the floor of her bedroom, a luminous tribute to a loved child who would avoid the surprises.

  CHAPTER 3

  Kerry

  Jillian will define Jillian.

  —KERRY

  Bringing Jillian home was not like bringing Kelly home. There was joy, but it was latent. There was hope, but it was trying to get its sea legs. There was determination. That was Kerry’s. It was as if God were saying to her, “You want raising children to be your life’s work? Well, have I got a job for you.”

  For nine months, Kerry had prayed for some divine act that would allow her to remain at home with the baby. She had returned to work as a physical education teacher six weeks after Kelly was born. It was wrenching. Teaching school was not Kerry’s calling. Motherhood was.

  After graduating from Edinboro (Pennsylvania) State College in 1976 with a bachelor of science in Health and Physical Education, she took a job teaching high school PE in Westminster, Maryland, at the time a rural outpost an hour west of Baltimore. She coached field hockey and gymnastics as well.

  Three years later, I graduated from Washington & Lee University with a journalism degree and a job I would start three days after graduation: Beat reporter for a small daily paper, covering the town of Westminster, Maryland. By 1981, I was the sports editor of the daily paper in Westminster. Kerry and I met on the job.

  I WAS INTERVIEWING HER after one of her team’s games. My last question was, “Do you want to go out sometime?”

  Okay, she said and asked when.

  I knew I couldn’t date someone I had to write about, and I didn’t figure she would say yes so I said, “I don’t know . . . after your season.” I asked her out in October, even though her season had another six weeks to go. She thought I was strange.

  We dated for 18 months and got married in April 1983. Kelly arrived in July 1986. In the months before his birth, I’d done the required dad-in-waiting things: Attended couples’ Lamaze classes (“Breathe, dear”), construc
ted baby furniture, even placed a tape recorder of rock-and-roll music on Kerry’s stomach so the child would be born with an instant Rolling Stones affection.

  I wasn’t into it the way Kerry was, though. Maybe it was our age difference. She was 32, I was 28. It could have been that I didn’t see the need to complicate the great life we shared. It took me years to appreciate Kelly the way Kerry did from the start. Kelly was born at 7:00 in the morning on July 5, 1986. I covered a baseball game that night.

  I’d resisted having another child after him, for many of the same reasons I’d resisted having him. The selfish gene did not recede.

  “I want Kelly to have a brother or sister,” Kerry said.

  “I was an only child for nine years,” I replied. “My formative years, right?”

  “That explains why you’re so antisocial,” she said.

  She might have had a point. Being an only child means you don’t have to fight for the last piece of cake or wear someone’s used shirts. You exist in a childhood world of one. Life lessons such as sharing and patience and how to deliver a punch to the shoulder were not daily occurrences in my life. I didn’t have to learn to get along.

  “I did okay,” I suggested lamely.

  “Kelly will do better,” Kerry replied.

  Kerry wanted Kelly to have what she’d had, a sibling with whom he could share a deep relationship. I didn’t automatically see the connection. “Just because he has a little brother or sister doesn’t mean they’ll have a great relationship,” I said. My dad and his brother, my uncle Dave, spent half their lives not speaking. I went almost 30 years before reconnecting with another uncle, my birth mother’s brother. My cousins and I have next to no relationship. And so on.

  My side of the family could be an episode of Dr. Phil. On the good days. I was a little jaded on the subject.

  I relented, eventually, because relenting is part of a husband’s job description, and also because I agreed with Kerry. It would be good for Kelly to have a sibling. And Kerry wasn’t getting any younger. She’d be 35 years old by the time the new baby was born.

  In the months before Jillian’s arrival, Kerry eased Kelly into the idea of being a big brother. She made him a book, which she called God Bless the Baby. In it, a reluctant Kelly says he doesn’t want to share his house, or his possessions, with a stranger. Kerry illustrated it by taking pictures of Kelly while he was doing daily Kelly-things. In the story, when the baby arrives, Kelly decides sharing isn’t such a bad way to go.

  The book was just one example of Kerry’s earnestness as a mother. Given my preference for work, we made a decent partnership. The kids-and-careers balance is tough to find. We found it. I wrote. Kerry nurtured.

  Kelly had homemade Halloween costumes. For one of them, Kerry had him lie down on the floor, then traced his body on a big sheet of butcher paper so she could make a pattern for a clown outfit. His birthday parties always had a theme—one year it was Robin Hood, the next it was the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

  Her attention was vital because my job required me to be away frequently, covering a Final Four or a Super Bowl or a Kentucky Derby—whatever the calendar dictated. I missed birthdays because I was at the World Series. Father’s Day found me at a golf course, covering the U.S. Open. If this is April, it must be the Masters.

  Even when I was home, I wasn’t always home. The tyranny of a daily column often left me dwelling on today’s effort and pondering tomorrow’s. Physically, I could be sitting in the family room and we could be having a conversation, but I was really thinking about what I was going to write next.

  Kerry could say to me, “Kelly tied his shoes for the first time today,” and 30 minutes later I’d ask, “How close is Kelly to tying his shoes?”

  It was frustrating for her, not just because she knew I hadn’t been paying attention. Kerry knew my work obsessions were denying me precious memories. Firsts are firsts for a reason, she’d say.

  That changed when Jillian came, and our lives entered a completely different phase, one we didn’t request and never anticipated. Jillian’s birth forced us to downshift our lives, to match her pace better. To say we moved forward isn’t entirely accurate. Kerry moved forward. I hitched a ride.

  “We need a plan,” she announced a few days after we left the hospital. “I’ve cried. I’ve been upset. I’m done with that. Jillian has Down syndrome. What can we do about it? It’s not like we can’t help her. She has something we can do something about.”

  Within weeks after Jillian was born, Kerry had her enrolled in all manner of therapies. Early intervention, the experts called it. Jillian began occupational and physical therapies when she was two months old. Speech therapy followed soon after. She was eventually in a play group with other kids with Down syndrome at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital.

  At home, she entered the raucous world of a three-year-old boy and a shepherd-collie Kerry had named Deja-Vu. We treated her just as we treated Kelly. We decided there would be no special Down syndrome dispensations. Kelly, who didn’t quite grasp the concept, wondered if he could still play with his sister, “even though she has the Down syndrome.” We demanded he do so.

  We had thought that Kerry would go back to work when the school year started after Jillian was born. That could not happen now. One parent had to be on duty for the job of building the better Jillian. It wasn’t going to be me. Work defined me. I couldn’t imagine forsaking my career to raise a child. When Jillian arrived, Kerry couldn’t imagine anything else.

  “What’s better than raising a productive human being?” she asked.

  My moods and self-worth fluctuated daily, depending on how well I thought my column was going. I was working for the Cincinnati Post then, writing four sports columns a week. Getting a column was a plum appointment. The Post hired me from New York, where I’d worked as a sports feature writer at Newsday, on Long Island.

  Most columnists are egotists. A need to be noticed comes with the territory—as does a snobbish belief that we are the best writers at the paper. Without us, there’d be no paper. This isn’t true, of course, but some of us need that attitude to do what we do.

  Writing a column isn’t like covering a beat. You have to know a little about a lot: A mile wide and an inch deep. You have to be connected to those with wisdom about subjects you don’t have the authority to speak about. You have to have an edge to your personality, even if that edge is soft. You have to have the stomach to face people you criticize. And you have to be prepared to grind out four columns a week, 50 weeks a year, whether you’ve got news you can react to or not.

  Everyone thinks he can write a sports column. Everyone should try coming up with something to write in February.

  The column assumes a tyrannical existence in a columnist’s life. In those first few years of figuring out how to do it, the column ruled me. The minute I finished each day’s column, it was time to start thinking about tomorrow’s. Some days, the words flowed from brain to keyboard, strong and unimpeded. Others, they gathered some place in between, and took the day off. I’d go through stretches of ineffectiveness—writer’s clamp—that made me miserable to live with.

  “Why Can’t I Do This!?” I’d yell to no one. Kerry and Kelly knew not to come into my office during those times. The dog tucked her tail between her legs. “I’ve been doing this my whole damned life!” I’d wail to the gods. “And now, it just . . . STOPS?” It wasn’t unlike a hitter in baseball who runs into a slump. You don’t know how you get into it or why you come out of it. Only that when it happens, it drives you mad.

  So I was not always a gold-medal dad. I would be standard-issue. I wasn’t going to be Gibraltar. Gibraltar was Kerry’s department. Raising Kelly was who she was. And Jillian. Jillian would be Kerry’s life’s work. Any pressure Kerry felt was for Jillian to do well, even to thrive. Kerry assumed total responsibility for Jillian’s success or failure. She knew she couldn’t cure Jillian’s Down syndrome. She could help Jillian overcome it.

  “I
could help her so that she could do everything everyone else could do,” Kerry said. “If I didn’t do all I could do—the exercises, the therapy, the reading of books to her, practicing her letters—it would be my fault. That was my responsibility.”

  Kerry was there to keep stitched the fabric of Jillian’s progress. While I was out playing in the toy department of the newspaper, she took Jillian to therapies and doctor’s appointments and play groups. She immersed herself in the latest news. She became expert in the vital and mundane laws designed to give Jillian a chance. She took part in parent forums. Eventually, parent groups invited her to speak.

  It’s an amazing gift, motherhood. Some use it better than others. Some have it presented to them in ways they’d never imagined. Kerry made it look easy. Her skill allowed me to pursue my passion.

  I look back now, with wonder and with a small sadness at what I missed. Kerry will offer a Remember-When, and I won’t remember. It’s as if I’m hearing it for the first time. It could have been my way of coping with Jillian’s disability, or simply what I thought fatherhood should be. My dad was a rock when I needed him. He didn’t feel the need to be highly engaged otherwise. When my brother and I had kids of our own, my dad enjoyed them, but he didn’t dote. “I’m not a professional grandparent,” he explained.

  He could be emotionally vague. I inherited some of that. I earned the money so Kerry could stay home and take care of the children. I wasn’t completely disengaged; I just directed my energies differently.

  Kerry prepared diligently when she spoke to parent groups and attended school meetings regarding Jillian’s education. She’d ask if I wanted to know what she’d learned. I said no. I told her I had confidence in her ability to do everything right. This was true, but it was also an easy cop-out for someone who lacked the special determination to be a full-fledged partner in building the better Jillian.

  I attended the meetings. I could make forceful appeals if things didn’t go as we believed they should. Beyond that, I was furniture. If Kerry couldn’t explain an issue involving our daughter to me in ten words or less, she lost me.