Plan B (16 page)

 

I
got pregnant during Advent fifteen years ago, after which I had almost no further contact with Sam's father, John, for years. Who could have imagined that over the last seven years the three of us would become a quirky, tender family? Last week Sam and I went to visit his father in Canada for the fourth time. We came back home on the first Sunday in Advent.

This time Sam was going to meet his half brother, his father's first son, who is forty. No one had been ready to take this step until this year, and suddenly we all were. Sam was more excited than I'd seen him in a long time. I was, too, but—well, you know me with my bad nerves.
John's son was going to be staying on John's marvelous boat with his wife and baby. Sam would stay with John at his apartment, and I had booked a hotel with room service and cable TV, as I had not completely lost my mind.

John picked Sam and me up at the airport, took us out for sushi, and dropped me at my hotel. They headed off to John's apartment. My hotel was on the shore of an inlet that flows into Vancouver, with snowy mountain peaks across the water, trees seemingly aflame on every hillside, and a bustling harbor beneath my window. I was going to take a cab to John's later, and we would all meet up for dinner.

I holed up in my room with CNN and Kit Kats from the mini-bar, and grew increasingly tense. What if Sam's brother couldn't reach out, what if Sam went into adolescent glower mode, what if . . . I imagined everything that could go wrong that night, and then moved into the more spacious realms of gum surgery and colon cancer. I got some communion Milanos out of the mini-bar, performed the sacrament, and then prayed that I could just keep the faith. I have a lot of faith. But I am also afraid a lot, and have no real certainty about anything. I remembered something Father Tom had told me—that the opposite of
faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns. Faith also means reaching deeply within, for the sense one was born with, the sense, for example, to go for a walk.

First I showered off that horrible butt smell you get from being on an airplane. Then I bundled up and went outside. I prayed that everything would go all right, for Sam's sake. I wish faith wrapped you in a bubble, but it doesn't, not for long.

During Advent, Christians prepare for the birth of Jesus, which means the true light. All your better religions have a holy season as the days grow shorter, when we ask ourselves, Where is the spring? Will it actually come again this year, break through the quagmire, the terror, the cluelessness? Probably not, is my response, when I'm left to my own devices. All I can do is stay close to God, and my friends. I notice the darkness, light a few candles, scatter some seeds. And in Nature, and in my spiritual community, I can usually remember that we have to dread things only one day at a time. Insight doesn't help here. Hope is not logical. It always comes as a surprise, just
when you think all hope is lost. Hope is the cousin to grief, and both take time: you can't short-circuit grief, or emptiness, and you can't patch it up with your bicycle tire tube kit. You have to take the next right action. Jesus would pray on the mountain, or hang out with the poor or the imprisoned, or—as I'll get to in a moment—start doodling in the sand.

I walked around town for a while, stopped at some bookstores, bought myself a lipstick, a cup of cocoa with extra whipped cream, and then dropped by an old stone church.

The church was small and beautiful, cold and dark. This gave me some relief: we live in darkness. People know this by the time they turn twenty-one; if they don't, they're seriously disturbed. I started to get freaked out about dinner—there are six people in the world with whom I can bear to eat. And besides, what if the added weight of Sam's brother, with his inevitable baggage, caused Sam's life and mine with John to buckle and collapse?

What if Sam's heart got broken again? As with most kids who are fourteen, it has been spackled and duct-taped and caulked back together many times as it is.

The church smelled dank and musky, like Sam's dirty laundry, but I sat quietly. My mind perched on top of my head like a spider monkey and thought of more things that could go wrong at dinner, and whose fault those things would be. I tried to drop my attention from my head to my heart, which is actually an ascension of sorts. My heart is so amazed that John and I have made a little family for Sam. Still, my mind chattered on, as if the spider monkey had taken acid. My mind is my main problem almost all the time. I wish I could leave it in the fridge when I go out, but it likes to come with me. I have tried to get it to take up a nice hobby, like macramé, but it prefers to think about things, and jot down what annoys it.

Another problem involves what I think the light looks like. I have thought, over the years, that the light would look like success, a good man, a child, a Democratic president, but none of these was right. Moses led his people in circles for forty years so they could get ready for the Promised Land, because they had too many ideas and preconceptions about what a Promised Land should look like. During Advent, we have to sit in our own anxiety and funkiness long enough to know what a Promised Land would be like, or, to put it another way, what it
means to be saved—which, if we are to believe Jesus or Gandhi, specifically means to see everyone on earth as family.

I left the church and took a cab to John's. I cannot tell the whole story, but Sam says that I can share the following brief report: His brother is tall and warm. They looked enough alike that I could see they were related, but not so much that I had to breathe into a brown paper bag. And they were both a little shy. Sam's brother's wife is smart and lively, and their baby is lovely beyond words. We connected, in the perfectly imperfect way of families. We ate and were kind to one another. We watched TV and raced around after the baby. Sam staked out turf close to both me and his father, and ventured out as small children do to try new lines of conversation. I was hoping that something dramatic would happen, and I'd have a great story to tell, but after several hours I realized that this is the best story there is: A small group of related people came together, willing to be supremely uncomfortable, so that Sam could know his brother, and his brother's family, and therefore come to know a bit more about who he is. This is why we did it.

I am also allowed to report that Sam's niece and my niece Clara were born on the exact same day—I tell you,
when God is not being cryptic and silent, He or She is so obvious. Sam was wonderful with his niece that day, like a cross between Big Bird and Tony Soprano. “Hey, you,” he called to her, when she was babbling incoherently over the sound from his TV show, “put a sock in it.” Then he performed the two most important functions for an uncle—made farting sounds to amuse her, and took care that she didn't get her fingers caught in any drawers.

Sam also doodled throughout the evening. The rest of us talked, overate, cleaned up messes as we went, held our tongues, ignored the inevitable family tension. The oil of manners made it possible. When you're kind to people, and you pay attention, you make a field of comfort around them, and you get it back—the Golden Rule meets the Law of Karma meets Murphy's Law.

And all the while, Sam drew his little guys, from time to time asserting his adolescent grump. I felt anxious much of time, but what else is new? Something larger than we were, larger than our anxieties and ferocious need to control, got us through, connected us, even if the connection was precarious at first. What shone through was the odd responsibility we took for one another, the kindness, marbled through the past, the bad and silent patches of our shared histories, our character defects,
hidden and on the surface, and the glitches. Things got broken—they always do—and children always yap and stamp and cry and demand your attention. It's called real life, and it's cracked and fragile, but the glue for me is the beating of my heart, love, and whatever attention I can pay to what matters most to me—making a good life for Sam.

“Hey, Sam,” I said, as I hugged everyone good-bye before leaving the hotel. “Doodle on.”

The next morning, I lay in bed giving thanks for having come from where we were before Sam knew his dad to where we were now. I ordered room service, and then made the mistake of turning on the TV. What if there really was no hope this time? What if the insanity had grown more intense than wisdom? Outside my window, the nearest trees looked sick and in trouble. Their leaves had all fallen, and they looked dead. I could only lean on my shaky Advent faith that things would be okay, more or less, that we are connected, and that everyone—everyone—eventually falls into the hands of God. I pray, and try to be kind, and go to church, and Sam doodles.

But these are the things that Jesus did, too. In John 8, when the woman is about to be stoned by the Pharisees for adultery, we see Jesus doodling in the sand. The Pharisees, the officially good people, are acting well within the law when they condemn the woman to death. A huge crowd of people willing to kill her joins them. The Greatest Hits moment here comes when Jesus challenges the crowd: “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.” But the more interesting stuff happens before, when he leaves the gathering storm, goes off by himself, and starts doodling.

Jesus refuses to interact with the people on their level of hatred and madness. He draws in the sand for a time. Maybe he's drawing his little guys—the Gospel doesn't say. But when he finally faces the mob and responds, all the people who were going to kill the woman have disappeared.

You have to wonder: Where was the man with whom she committed adultery? Some people suggest he is in the crowd, waiting to join in with the others and kill her. We don't know. But I can guess how the condemned woman must have felt—surprised. She was supposed to die, and her life was spared. Hope always catches us by surprise.

It poured all morning. Even in the gloom and desperation, I played over the scenes from the night before, in all their magic and klutziness and ordinariness: Sam and his brother getting to know each other; the baby in a state of busy wonder. I have to say, I continue to be deeply surprised by life.

I had invited everyone over to my hotel for room service lunch and a movie. I was anxious while I waited. The rain came down, dark and loud. I couldn't wait to get back to my own home: this was the perfect time to plant bulbs and scatter seeds, in the hope that some would grow. But meanwhile, in Advent, we show up when we are needed; we try to help, we prepare for an end to the despair. And we do this together.