Only Sons of Single Mothers

Liam asks me tonight, "How come you didn't get married?" and I say, "It just never occurred to me." "I'm never getting married," he says. "Oh. Why?" I ask.

He's suddenly blinking back tears.

"I just can't do all that stuff--making breakfast and buying food and stuff. It's too much for me."

So either he discounts our family altogether in his assessments, or he's afraid of something we don't have--something unfamiliar. "Don't worry," I say; "I'll help you with all of that."

"Really??" He's all smiles now. And in that instant I realize I SHOULD have reassured him that when he's a grownup all that stuff is easy, and that if he gets married whoever he marries will help with it, too. Types suddenly flash into my head. The helpless man. The man who wants to marry his mother. The man whose wife files his nails, caters to his quirks. It all begins somewhere.

He just blindsided me. It happens. I think most parenting fuckups occur in blindside moments; most parents would do better if they had a mirror on the post and could see around the bend. Don't you think? Anyway, as fuckups go, this one's not even top twenty.

The real fuckups are in the expectations. Too high, too low, too unsuited to the child. The adoption agency asked me what my expectations were of the child I intended to adopt, and I remember thinking what an insane question that was--as if I was drawing the kid on a blank page, as if his own self had no bearing. I said I had no expectations, and I knew as I wrote it that it was the wrong answer. Now that I know him and can imagine him down the road, I have dreams: of him happy, of somebody loving him, of his children. I expect him to be kind. To be able to support himself. Bu that I don't have dreams of him in med school makes me worry, now and then, that expectations of your children are the ways in which you establish for them some framework--some way to begin to think about their own life and its possibilities--some way to set their default bar high, since they may not be able to set it high for themselves. Maybe I need to think bigger for them. Maybe I'm too soft with them.

It's half an hour later. He's been thinking and comes back to me. "Actually, there's two things: one is the whole cooking breakfast thing. And two: I don't know how to get married--how to meet somebody and what words to say and stuff."

"Don't worry, honey--I'll help you."

So much for the mirror on the post.