A heartache business— parents don’t get to give up

Sons ignore advice.

Back in South Ozone Park, my mother, Nurse Vivian, did not want me to drive a car. And of course, on the day my driver’s license arrived in the mail, I totaled a friend’s station wagon.

Nurse Vivian did not want me to become a liberal arts major at Notre Dame, because I would “never get a good job that way.” My bachelor of arts proved her right. Took me about 30 years to get paid for my writing.

Nurse Vivian did not want me to come out of the closet at work. I did and paid the price (though this one I don’t regret).

The point is that parents are right. But sons seldom learn that way.

In November 2001, Nurse Vivian flew out with my father to celebrate Thanksgiving. She didn’t know how to tell me she had cancer. As we baked apple pie, I announced that my husband Brian and I had been attending parenting class, with the intention to foster children.

Nurse Vivian rolled her eyes: “Two gay men playing house. You don’t know the heartache. Get another dog instead.” At the time, I thought that first sentence was out of character for her. But maybe she meant to put the emphasis on that second sentence: that indeed we did not know that brand of heartache, and she hoped we never would.

I imagine her heart ached when Brother XX dropped out of college. And again when Brother X gave up the accordion. And again when I moved to California.

But as the pie came out of the oven, Nurse Vivian told me none of this.

She’d been staying in the guest bedroom, the purple one that is now Zane’s. Afterward, as I straightened up, I found she left the little statuette of St. Jude. The patron saint of impossible causes is tailor-made for the FisherPaulson clan. This figurine had been in our china cabinet since before I was born. My father used to refer to him as the patron saint of the inside straight.

Nurse Vivian’s been gone 20 years now, and those have been the decades that my husband and I have parented an impossible family, full of unlucky boys and rescue dogs. Nurse Vivian didn’t leave me an instruction book, and I got most of this parenting business down wrong. The first time that Zane got expelled, and when Aidan broke his arm, I wished that I could call her to ask how she made it.

When Zane first went away, over the mountains and across the desert, the one thing I knew she would have wanted me to do was light a candle to St. Jude. And so we did and kept a candle burning by the window in the porch until the day he came home.

Parenting really is a heartache business. At the end of the day, there is no end of the day. All we’ve got to show for it are broken windows and guttered candles. Here’s what we learned: We don’t get to give up. We don’t get to surrender. Sometimes the only thing we can do is be there.

Zane is now a legal adult and he makes mistakes. He went away again this week. Not as far, actually, but it still feels like a thousand miles away. No matter what happens or what choices my sons make, I will always feel like I’m one who failed. But when a son makes a mistake, we’ve got to believe in them even more. Maybe, just maybe, that statuette of St. Jude was all I really needed for advice.

The FisherPaulsons are an improbable collection of four humans and two dogs clinging to the edge of San Francisco, hoping to hang together, hoping to get this thing called family right.

He called this morning to tell me that he misses me. I told him, “I’ve been missing you for a long time.” His voyage away had been a long time coming, and somewhere in his quest he lost his way. For parents, in the end, there is no end. We can only keep lighting candles to light the path back to his purple room.

But it’s up to him to journey home.

For parents, in the end, there is no end. We can only keep lighting candles to light the path back to his purple room. But it’s up to him to journey home.