It’s my fault that everything’s my fault
Our youngest son, Aidan, was born on May 24, 2005, which means that as of this week, there are two teenagers in the outer, outer, outer, outer Excelsior.
We did the whole parenting thing late in life. Brian wanted to wait until he wasn’t touring. Which means that whenever we go to St. John’s Crab Feed, people confuse us as grandparents. No one’s fault, really. Our family has a lousy sense of timing. It’s an Irish Catholic thing: My mother, Nurse Vivian, and Pop practiced the rhythm method, only when I was born eight years after Brother X and Brother Not X, Pop mused, “Everybody needs a little syncopation.”
But now that I have two teenage sons, everything else is my fault. Here’s my example: Aidan teased Zane, who teased Aidan back, and they wrestled underneath the kitchen table, and Aidan busted a tooth. Whose fault? Daddy’s. “You should have told me to stop teasing Zane before it got serious.” Whose fault is it that Zane must go to summer school? I blame Zane for cutting class. Zane blames me for being so hung up on academics.
In our family, it’s all about the culpa. Back in the early ’60s in South Ozone Park, Sister Mary Magdalen was relentless that all the St. Anthony’s boys and girls would get their Latin prayers down, one of the first being “Mea Culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.” Which translates to something along the lines of “My fault. No, really, my fault. I mean Big Time My Fault.”
Nurse Vivian, my mother, was good about the culpa business. She had done her relentless parenting with Brother X and Brother Not X, and me being the nerd in the family, I was a lot less likely to go for the big culpas, the someonewrecked-the-neighbors’-tractors-atGrandma’s-birthday culpa or Idropped-out-of-Queens-College-andI’m-moving-to-Adak-Alaska-culpa. All of my culpas seemed minor in comparison, from the bought-the-Nehru-jacketand-bell-bottoms-the-day-it-went-out-ofstyle culpa to the only-one-in-the-family-to-teach-disco-dancing culpa.
But Nurse Vivian was very clear that the fault was always with the son and never the parent. So I was unprepared to raise children who thought I was to blame when Bravo’s Pizza was closed on a Monday.
The Bedlam Bungalow has become the Culpa Cabana.
As a child, I slept through almost every one of Father Fusco’s sermons, so it wasn’t until years later that I stayed awake for the Easter Vigil, which talks about the “felix culpa” or “happy fault.” What’s that mean? Thomas Aquinas explained that sin brought good to humanity because it was a bigger victory than remaining perfectly innocent. Now get this, in a religion full of shame and guilt, they got this escape clause that says, “Sure, we’re all sinners, but if it wasn’t for that, we wouldn’t have this great excuse to get together.”
And that’s just the thing. It’s my fault. And Papa’s. And Zane’s, Aidan’s, Buddyboy’s, even Bandit’s fault. One of us flushes magnets down the toilet. One of us leaves the kitchen cabinets open. One of us pees on the bed. One of us barks at the Australian cattle dog. One of us hides peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the furnace vent. One of us eats potato chips with his blood pressure medicine and puts mayonnaise on his cholesterol.
It would be easy to blame all this on the fact that we all have “challenges.” Every single Fisher-Paulson in the known universe has a reputation for being “spirited,” which is code for uncontrollable. Mental illness may have its stigma, but madness has a certain style.
These are our happy faults. Had any of the six of us been perfect, the other five wouldn’t have been able to stand him. As a family on the edge, we have a lower benchmark for triumph. We don’t shoot for an A in mathematics. We shoot for passing. So even a C seems extraordinary.
I’ve talked about the madly before. Started out a joke between Brian and me, two gays in a Harlequin romance, so that whenever Brian went on a tour, I’d say, “I miss you madly.” This became the shorthand of our relationship, so that whenever one us of so much as walked down to Cordova’s for a carton of milk, the other would shout, “Madly.” And, after 14 years of indoctrination, whenever I carry Bandit out to the lawn, the boys yell, “Madly.”
One of the neighbors, not Aunt Dorla, not John with the Roof Cow, but one of the anonymous neighbors, as I carried Bandit back in, said, “That’s what we like about your family. You guys never do it sane-ly.”
Madly. This is our felix culpa. And it’s still a great excuse to get together.