Kid-Shaped Holes in Your Heart
I originally “published” the below post in late June, 2017, on Facebook. I’ve been intending to revisit it and that time has come.
Ginny and I just got back from two wonderful weeks in the UK with Vienna helping her relocate to York to start her masters program in “Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence” which she intends to view from an ethics perspective. (And boy do we need more of that—see Evan’s guest post with some informed viewpoints on the matter.) No matter how excited for and proud of Vienna we are, saying good-bye to her and heading back to London Heathrow was poignant and bittersweet.
And after our family outing to the Strawberry Music Festival in May, Rhiannon returned to her boat as First Mate as they began passaging their way north from Florida. And by “north,” I mean above the Arctic Circle by way of Greenland to Baffin Bay. The photos and videos she shared of polar bears and icebergs and the midnight sun were something to behold. But to say that she felt far away would be an understatement.
So with both of my daughters living their best—but far flung—lives, now seems like an apt moment to resurface this not quite ten-year-old meditation on what to expect when you’re expecting.
YAWP!
In "Song of Myself," Whitman exults in his "barbaric YAWP" to the Universe. So here is my YAWP for today:
It's early summer here in the northernmost fringe of the South. The weather is bouncing around, which means the heat and humidity are going from "yech" to "what a nice evening" and back again. (In a month it will be purely "yech" all the time, but right now the fireflies and Jupiter and a certain sultriness that those of you in San Francisco can only read about are immanent and adding a texture to the evening that you can almost taste and feel... but I digress.)
Our very first meal in our new house in the northernmost fringe of the south
And yes, a tiny bit of alcohol is involved (if you want to participate, get yourselves a nice Pouilly-Fuisse 2013 and indulge) but, that doesn't trivialize the YAWPISHNESS of the YAWP. (In fact, isn't a miracle that if you increase the concentration of a particular organic molecule in the blood stream that that amazing seat of ourselves, the brain, tweaks itself just a little to offer up a hint, if not a glimpse, of something larger than our workaday world?.. but again, I digress.)
Point being, I'm out on our porch, and I'm listening to music, and I scroll to some live recordings from an evening 12 years ago when we had tied up in Norfolk, VA, for the winter and had started making friends and found ourselves at the home of Mike Binetti, in the company of Ginny, Richard Spano, and Sandy and Dave Alexander, when Vienna and Rhiannon were maybe 9 and 11. Mike, fie upon him, turned on the mics and amps in his home studio and captured the group wailing and banging away to "Have a Little Faith in Me" by John Hiatt and "Paradise" by John Prine... And here's the thing. Vienna and Rhiannon and Ginny are singing along, singing their hearts out... and Vienna and Rhiannon's voices are so, well, tiny.
That winter was memorable for many reasons, including the bit of snow that visits Norfolk only rarely
And blame who you will—God, Monsieur Pouilly, Madame Fuisse, or just southern swampiness at Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil—but all of a sudden, you are whirled through a time machine and you are back in that room on that night when your girls were already—as always—fully themselves, but tiny, and you realize this: When your wife said, "I want to have a baby," and you finished freaking out, and embraced the project (and your wife) with enthusiasm, there was no one around to tell you the horrible, awful, amazing truth of parenthood: Your children leave kid-shaped holes in your heart.
I spent far too much time as a boy and adolescent watching TV; thus, burned into my visual memory, is the image of a Looney Tunes character sprinting through the Fourth Wall and leaving a perfectly shaped cut-out of themselves on the screen. (I think generally the escapee was Wyle E. Coyote, but I could be mistaken.)
This is what your kids do: They leave perfect silhouette cut-outs of themselves in the walls of your heart. But they don't leave just one. They leave one, and then another one, and another one. And even after they create what you and everyone you know pretend will be the last one, the "forever one," the one where they move out of the house for good to fully take up their own lives, just when you think maybe they're done leaving heart-holes, memories of them and visits with them and Facebook posts by and about them, rear up to punch through another one. And another. And another.
Gearing up for a family backpacking trip, c. 2009
...Holes in your heart from when they were tiny, and when they were big, and when they were angry, and when they worshipped you, and when they hated you, and when they needed you, and when you sat on the porch of the house where they used to live with you and their voices come to you across time and space and Bluetooth to tear open the kid-shaped hole in your heart that you thought had healed, but is now revealed to be as open and raw and joyous as the day those little rascals made it the first time...
College graduation is, of course, a huge launching point in a kid’s life
Vienna graduated from Stanford in 2016, and Rhiannon from Duke in 2019
And with dread, and gratefulness, and trepidation, and cautious hopefulness, you realize that your heart is strong but that your children will always keep tearing at it and not just when they are tiny, or cute, or leaving for college or getting married... But when they are adults, and parents themselves, and grandparents. And you realize that you yourself, whether you are ten, twenty or, god-forbid, 53 like me, are doing the same damn thing to your own parents, over and over and over.
So, thank you Mom (Pam) and Dad (Roger), for having me. And thank you Ginny for having me, and making me have Vienna and Rhiannon. And thank you Vienna and Rhiannon for being.
Yawp.