Through the Children's Gate (3 page)

The new paternal feeling is partly an effect of feminism, which required that mothers surrender exclusive child-love for freedom, and partly the consequence of many parents’ advanced childbearing age. The father is no longer a kid on the make but a man who has, to some brief degree, been made, and who therefore has more time to cook dinner and wipe noses than his own father did. And the self-consciousness that now comes with child rearing comes from that, too. My own dad—father of six, grandfather of fourteen—said once that the greatest difference in life is between having children at (so to speak) twenty and having them at (so to speak) forty: When we're twenty, they are just there, smaller fellow climbers on the same mountain; at forty, we have been up the mountain once already, and we become their Sherpas, carrying their equipment, checking their oxygen supply, hoisting them up to the peak and telling them they did it all themselves, just as generations of Sherpas did for generations of Englishmen. The new love of childhood and parenting is also the consequence of a kind of boot-strapping into “adulthood.” For those of us who lingered in
boyishness, child rearing and child-love, far from being regressive, are part of the forced march to maturity: You have to do a thing, and here is a thing you have to do.

Whatever the origins—and I leave it to some meatier-minded cultural historian to trace them all—what child rearing is, when you live it, is a joy. It should be seen as we really do feel it—less as a responsibility imposed than as a great gift delivered up to us, just as the troubador poets opened up romantic love for everyone, so that it can still serve Lorenz Hart or Paul McCartney.

Children reconnect us to romance. For children, as my sister Alison, the developmental psychologist who makes sapient, recurring appearances in these tales, has written, every morning is the first morning in Paris, every day is the first day of love: The passions that for us grown-ups rise and fall only in exceptional circumstances, unexpected storms on the dull normal beach where the tide breaks unchangingly, rise every day for them. Shock, hatred, infatuation: “I hate you,” they cry, slamming the door, and they mean it; and then the door opens fifteen minutes later for dessert. They compel us to see the world as an unusual place again. Sharing a life with them is sharing a life with lovers, explorers, scientists, pirates, poets. It makes for interesting mornings.

And then they are not here to do better, or to be smarter, or to get ready: They are here to
be,
and they know it. We delight in children because they keep the seven notes of enlightenment, as the Buddha noted them. Keep them? They sing them, they
are
them: energy, joy, concentration, attentiveness, mindfulness, curiosity, equanimity. (Well, not the last, maybe, but they still keep it better than we do; they are often in pain but rarely in panic.) Detachment, too—they are detached from us in ways that we know only after; they study us exactly as monks contemplate the world, to free themselves from needing us. Their ultimate enlightenment lies in that emancipation. What we didn't grasp before is how badly the world feels about being abandoned by the monks. As parents we are, briefly, objects of intellectual desire; we are, for a moment, worlds. We should be proud to have been as large as worlds, but instead, we are merely sad to be abandoned. The risk of
sentimentality lies only in failing to see that the most charmed thing they will do is leave us. They have to renounce their attachment to us as the adept abandons his attachment to the world. All we can hope for is the pleasure the world takes in once having been seductive enough to attach somebody to it. All we can expect from children is the memory the monk has of the time he was attached. We can hope for their pity, and their tolerance, and a spring visit after we have been banished to Florida and white shorts and socks.

There's no bad place to watch children grow, but Manhattan is a good one. The intersection of two very small points with one very big place, the constant daily back-and-forth between small emerging consciousness and huge indifferent stuff, is always instructive. Having them, you get a much clearer sense of the city's sharp edges and smooth spots, of the grace it gives to things—the literature of epiphanies received at the Museum of Natural History by now is larger than that of miracles found at Lourdes—and of the grace it denies, as well, of its
overwhelmingness.
When you get on the subway together at five o'clock, you have to hold them tight, as if you were white-water rafting and they might fall into the river; they could just get swept away by the crowd. They show you quiet places—my son, Luke, once gave me a back massage on Father's Day in a little glade in the park that time and man had forgotten—and they get you to take them to noisy ones you had sworn off for good. My daughter, Olivia, and I go every year at Christmas to Tiffany to window-shop and gape at the giant diamonds, and the sheer press of tourists seems for once like a benediction, not a curse.

Your children make their own maps, which enlarge and improve your own. They inscribe permanent illustrative features on your map, like the spouting beasts on medieval ones. There's a spot on University Place where Olivia, furious at being too small to go bowling at Bowlmor Lanes nearby, yelled at me, “I used to love you! And now I don't even like you!” When I pass it now, she is still there, still indignant and still yelling. And if their maps are mutable, well, you believe, every child's map is meant to be, only to emerge in adulthood as the Only Map There Is, the one they're stuck with. The image of me they
settle on, I would shudder to see—but I hope their map of New York will be bright and plain: That's where we grew up, weirdly enough. My two, I hardly need add, though distinct enough for me, here in these pages stand in for, if not a million, than many others: They could be Jacob and Sasha, or Ben and Sophie, or Emma and Gabriel. The miraculous thing about children is that they really are all alike—boom, here comes three and an imaginary friend; whoosh, there goes eleven and the first stirrings of passion—and all utterly unique. They are radically themselves and entirely of their kind. Just like us, actually. The city doesn't change that, but it does italicize it: among eight million souls, these two.

F
or us, at least, these five years, the children's sober buoyancy bounced us through the gate and into the park even in the darkest times. It might have done so in any circumstances, but it
really
did so then. I ended the story of the five years we lived in Paris with the birth of a baby—on, as it happened, September 11,1999, the happy end of a rich decade spent under a Pax Americana as vast and essentially benevolent as the British nineties had been a century before, with an optimistic material civilization at the height of a power so absolute as to be nearly absurd in its creation of a soft empire of signs.

Two years later, we were preparing to celebrate that baby's second birthday when a phone call came. The rest is history, as we say of an unforgettable event with a unsettled meaning, unsettled because the meanings assigned to catastrophic events fluctuate so entirely as the rest of what happens unfolds that to claim to understand an event's meaning even long after, much less right away, is absurd. Was this the first Gothic sack of Rome, or Sarajevo 1914, or simply the Manson family to the power of ten? Or the sinking of the
Lusitania
for our time? We don't know yet, and we might not know for a long time, or ever. Searching for a remotely adequate historical parallel for the destruction of a capital's two biggest buildings in a single morning, one finds it only in the catastrophes that signal the ends of civilizations: the sacking of the Temple, the overthrow of Rome.

Anyone with a minimal sense of history recognizes that it must
have changed everything, and anyone with a minimal sense of reality knows that it has not. For the other truth, almost unsayable to this day, was that the disaster left, and leaves, the rituals and facts and even the comforts of the city practically unaltered. There was an assault, but no sack. We went home that night, even a mile from the site, to phones that worked and refrigerators that hummed in the background as we tried to make sense of a catastrophe that had not, as catastrophes had usually before, left a devastated epicenter emanating waves of other destruction. This catastrophe was as specific and exact in its place as it was nightmarish in its murderousness. As I wrote at the time, it was as though the
Titanic
had been sunk on the street before us, and we had watched it go down and then walked home.

T
he amazing thing was to witness the recovery and to learn from it. Those of us who had walked in through the Children's Gate had to choose to flee or stay; and choosing to stay, we chose to live, and so we chose to hope—to secure as much happiness for our kids as we could find, or make. Our own tiny family predicament echoed the larger one: We had, from then on, both to honor the memory of September
n
and to celebrate Olivia's birthday, and we had to do both, at once, as well as we could. (We were doing two things at once, the minimal number necessary for life.) There isn't any heroism in carrying on, because there isn't any choice. But not having any choice at least puts you in hailing distance of what real heroes do when they don't have any choice about what to do and do it anyway.

What was certainly true (and moving) was that New York was transformed and, for the first time in its history, became, in the world's eyes, vulnerable and fragile. New York, the Rome of the virtual age, suddenly became the Venice of the new millennium: the beautiful endangered place that could just shatter and be flooded and break. This was very different from what it had been back in the seventies, when it was ruined and doomed. Now the ruin was less but the fear, for a while anyway, larger. All the secular rituals of existence in New York went on, made newly poignant by a recognition that they could not be practiced complacently. A charge of fragility entered every family
snapshot, every picnic on the Great Lawn, every New Age birthday party with a yoga mat given to each child. It even took the comic form of an awareness that filled the children's eyes, of how low low-flying planes ought to be.

Flight was a rational possibility and—who knows?—may yet turn out to have been the rational response. But not very many fled, perhaps as much out of stolidity and fatigue as anything, and as we all went on living and choosing to live, we had no choice but to go on hoping. The tenor of our lives and the shape of our manners, in that space between sporadic fear and real pleasure, did change, in subtle ways worth setting down. There is, I think, no sense in talking about a “post-9/11” New York: History and individual experience don't intersect that neatly except in cheap journalism and bad novels. History and experience run on different tracks, and when history knocks experience off its own, we know the force of the collision from the dents on the people's hats and hearts. Fear changes minds, and minds change the forms of manners—but it changes as smoke changes the air in a room, subtly and in ways that can be recorded only by sensing the atmosphere. (The best novel about World War I is
Mrs. Dalloway,
in which the consequences of that catastrophe lie not in some overt transformation of that city and its manners, which are proceeding more or less just as they have for so long, but in the small tugs of gravity that work on hearts, coming from a new but still-distant planet: the mad veteran in the park on the shining morning with the party at its end.)

Manners changed just enough to be traceable. Our time in New York, to use a homely metaphor, was spent waiting for the other shoe to drop; and when it didn't drop—or hasn't dropped, not quite yet—we learned to live on one foot, hopping along spiritually in more or less normal times. It turns out that we can live quite happily on one leg, enough that the memory of two legs seems odd. Every age and city are scared of
something,
anyway. The real question that pressed itself upon us as parents was how to let our children live in joy in a time of fear, how to give light enough to live in when what we saw were so many shadows.

* * *

N
ew York, in times likes these, could seem an unfair place to have and to raise children. But then, there is no right time, never a serene and happy plateau in which to have them. As the great Szymborska reminds us in the little epigraph to this book, there has never been, throughout human history, a good moment to have a child: There is always something enormous and threatening happening, or about to happen, that makes it unwise. The Vandals are coming, the Gothard Pass is closed … we will have to get safely to sunny Acapulco for it to be possible, and we will never get to Acapulco.

And yet, we have them still and have to bring them up in the moment and the city that the time being gives us. That having them is more volitional than it used to be—no one caught in the snow in the Gothard Pass could imagine
debating
having kids; they just had them, as one had sex and its consequences—doesn't alter that. Having them in New York is just like having them anywhere else, only more so. The difference is that the speed of the city, its rhythm, accelerates the play between what happens outside in the world and what happens inside in their minds. It all happens, perhaps, one beat faster, sooner, weirder, with more nervous energy and too little breathing room. Their imaginary playmates are as busy as their parents. As Sid Caesar pointed out, playing the part of a feral child in the city, the pigeon
does
object to being eaten here, but only for a minute. Then it's gone, and another bird is in its place, eating and being eaten. No one mourns the vanished pigeon.

The odd thing is that a compensatory instinct—or is it merely guilt? In any case, whatever makes us all, in every circumstance, beat back against the current of our time—makes New York parents more concerned to live a life defined, however quaintly, as normal than people elsewhere. In my experience, at least, it is liberal parents who tend to be the most socially conservative—the most queasy at the endless ribbon of violence and squalor that passes for American entertainment, more concerned to protect their children from it. One might have the impression that it is the Upper West Side atheist and the Lancaster County Amish who dispute the prize for who can be most obsessive about having the children around the table at six p.m. for a homemade dinner from farm-raised food. Morals and manners proceed
in twisting spirals of contradiction more often than in neat sandwiches of sameness, and the attitudes of the prohibitive and the secular end up resembling each other. We try to find a way to say grace every night, too, although in our own way. We hold hands, and clink glasses.