Living Out Loud (18 page)

Sesame Street
is my salvation for two reasons. The first is that on a day when the younger child has tried to drink the bottle of floor wax he found in a childproof cabinet, which is secured with a neat little Danish lock he learned to open just after he learned to roll over, and when the older child has taken the floor wax away from him and poured it on the floor where he supposes it belongs (and where, naturally, the golden retriever has found it and licked it up),
Sesame Street
provides an hour of quiet, sustained concentration. And I do not have to feel as though the high-culture police are going to bang down my door and say, “Television, eh? O.K., boys—lower their S.A.T. scores twenty points apiece.”

As a nice corollary to
Sesame Street
, my three-year-old can count to twenty, can identify all and draw some of the alphabet,
knows how peanut butter and crayons are made, and understands what adoption means. The younger one has a much expanded vocabulary. His first word was Ernie. He can also say Cookie, Big Bird, Bert, and Grover. On occasion he has attempted, without much success, to say Children’s Television Workshop.

The other reason
Sesame Street
is my salvation is that it is written for adults. How else to explain the egomaniacal singing bird named Placido Flamingo? (“That not Placido Flamingo,” said my elder child one day, when a promotional spot for the real opera singer was on. “Placido Flamingo is pink.”) Or the Miami Mice, J. P. and Tito, with their designer suits and carefully groomed whiskers? How else to explain Ferlinghetti Donizetti, the beatnik poet who performs the rappin’ alphabet, or the disco sequence in which Grover wears a white three-piece suit with an open-necked shirt and dances on squares of colored light? What about NTV, the station that regularly features a music video by Nick Normal and the Nikmatics titled “The Letter N”? (Actually, a superior music video is the one of a song by How Now and the Moo Wave, who sold milk on the streets before they made it big.) Or the Cookie Monster number, “Hey, Food,” taken directly from the Beatles, or the scene when Oscar learns that the Museum of Trash wants to put his trash can in the Cans Festival?

My children don’t understand these allusions, but I do; I’m entertained by them, and on a day when I’ve read
Pat the Bunny
nineteen times, that’s no small thing. I have two theories about how the allusions get in there. Either the people who make
Sesame Street
are looking out for parents’ interests, or they are bored out of their gourds counting up to twelve and finding words that begin with the letter b, and so are amusing themselves.

I prefer the latter hypothesis. Certainly, that program director I want so badly to meet was not thinking of parents, an
oversight I will force him to confront if we do meet. Of course, that’s not all I’ll do. I don’t want to be more graphic, but if any of you recall what Oscar did to Luis the day he tricked him into looking into the trash can—well that’s the kind of thing I have in mind.

T
he second child was a year old yesterday. He is everything I wanted to be as a child: fearless, physical, blond. He takes no prisoners. He has also changed my life. Before him, we were two adults and a child they both adored. With him, we are a family. There is no going back.

I had a crisis of confidence when the second child was, quite literally, on the way. We were timing contractions and watching
Bachelor Party
on cable TV when I was felled by the enormity of what we had done. As a textbook-case eldest child—a leader, a doer, a convincing veneer of personality and confidence atop a bottomless pit of insecurity and need—I suspected we were about to shatter the life of the human being we both loved best in the world. We were about to snatch away his solitary splendor. Worse still, to my mind, we were about to make some unsuspecting individual a second child, a person whose baby clothes would be mottled with banana
stains the first time he ever wore them, who would have a handful of photographs scattered amidst the painstaking documentation of his brother’s life. An also-ran. A runner-up. “This is the heir, and that is the spare,” the Duchess of Marlborough once said of her two sons.

The second child came prepared. He had a true knot in his cord, and it was wrapped around him three times, so that he emerged looking like a kidnap victim. It turned out he was feisty and winning, intrusive and alert. His character (not to mention his yellow hair) demanded clothes of his own. He clamored for the camera. He knew what he was doing. More important, so did I. The first child got me shiny new, like a new pair of shoes, but he got the blisters, too. The second child got me worn, yes, but comfortable. I told the first child I would never go away, and lied. I told the second child I would always come back, and spoke the truth. The second child had a mother who knew that the proper response to a crying baby was not to look up “Crying, causes of” in the index of Dr. Spock. As a matter of fact, he had a mother who was too busy to read childcare books at all, and so was in no position to recognize whether his “developmental milestones” were early/late/all/none of the above.

What had I expected of the first child? Everything. Rocket scientist. Neurosurgeon. Designated hitter. We talked wisely at cocktail parties about the sad mistake our mothers had made in pinning all their hopes and dreams on us. We were full of it.

I have always been a great believer in birth order. I will chat with someone for fifteen minutes and suddenly lunge at them: “You’re an oldest child, aren’t you?” That means something specific to me, about facing the world and facing yourself. My husband is also an oldest child, and the slogan one of his brothers coined for him is instructive: either pope or president. Not in words but in sentiment, my siblings felt the same about
me. A substantial part of my character arises from such expectations.

I worried about that with the second child, worried that the child called Number One would always be so. During my second pregnancy, when I drank a bit of wine and forgot to count my grams of protein, I wondered if I was being more relaxed—or simply careless.

When I went into labor with the first, I sat down and wrote my thoughts in the beginning of his baby book. With the second, I went to a barbecue next door and then put the first to bed. The elder son was born with considerable pain, manhandled into the world with those great silver salad spoons called forceps, and when he was laid in my arms by the nurse, he looked like a stranger to me. The second somersaulted onto the birthing room bed, and as I reached down to lift him to my breast, I said his name: “Hello, Christopher.” And as I saw his face, like and yet not like his brother’s, I suddenly realized that wine or no wine, he had arrived with a distinct advantage. He came without baggage, after I had gotten over all the nonsense about in-utero exposure to music, and baby massage, and cloth vs. disposable diapers. What a wonderful way to be born.

And so it has occurred to me often in the last year that I must strive to give our elder son some of those things that in the usual course of events come to the younger ones. I worry less now about the second being an also-ran than I do about the first being the kind of rat-race marathon runner that birth order, in part, made me. The saddest thing I always imagined about the second child was that we would have no hopes and dreams for him. I was wrong. What he has taught us is that we will have hopes and dreams, and he will decide whether he is willing to have anything to do with them. I accept him. Perhaps in other times, or with other people, that might mean
settling for less. I like to think that in his case it means taking advantage of more.

Perhaps it means that I will not push him when he needs to be pushed. I hope not. And perhaps it means I will push my first child—whose each succeeding year and stage will be inaugurals for me—when I should not do so. One teaches me as we go along, and the other inevitably reaps the benefits of that education. Each child has a different mother—not better, not worse, just different. My greatest hope and dream now is that, taken together, these two ends will make me find a middle ground in myself from which I will be happy to observe them—neither pope nor president nor obsessively striving to be either, but simply two people, their own selves, making allowances for me.

W
hen he went home last year he realized for the first time that he would be buried there, in the small, gritty industrial town he had loathed for as long as he could remember. He looked out the window of his bedroom and saw the siding on the house next door and knew that he was trapped, as surely as if he had never left for the city. Late one night, before he was to go back to his own apartment, his father tried to have a conversation with him, halting and slow, about drug use and the damage it could do to your body. At that moment he understood that it would be more soothing to his parents to think that he was a heroin addict than that he was a homosexual.

This is part of the story of a friend of a friend of mine. She went to his funeral not too long ago. The funeral home forced the family to pay extra to embalm him. Luckily, the local paper did not need to print the cause of death. His parents’
friends did not ask what killed him, and his parents didn’t talk about it. He had AIDS. His parents had figured out at the same time that he was dying and that he slept with men. He tried to talk to them about his illness; he didn’t want to discuss his homosexuality. That would have been too hard for them all.

Never have the lines between sex and death been so close, the chasm between parent and child so wide. His parents hoped almost until the end that some nice girl would “cure” him. They even hinted broadly that my friend might be that nice girl. After the funeral, as she helped with the dishes in their small kitchen with the window onto the backyard, she lost her temper at the subterfuge and said to his mother: “He was gay. Why is that more terrible than that he is dead?” The mother did not speak, but raised her hands from the soapy water and held them up as though to ward off the words.