I Have Two Children

I have two children. One is a girl child who just got married in June, and is now expecting my first grandchild. The other is a boy child who ended his life on June 30, 2006 at twenty four years old, and will be lost to me for the remainder of my mortal life.

My daughter just turned thirty and has completed her PhD at a prestigious university. She is now junior faculty at an innovative college in NYC, and has found the love of her life in her new husband, with whom she will work to build a wonderful, meaningful life. On July 1, 2006, I found my son who was an intensely earnest and disciplined young man, hanging from the back porch of our home in the early morning hours. I suspect this image of him will be forever with me.

Each is my beloved child and I am proud of them both. They are similar in their determination and work ethic, their achievement motive and the heart felt desire to accomplish their dreams. They are different in that one survived the difficulties and rigors associated with their lofty pursuits and the other did not.

I am deliriously happy for my daughter, and thankful that she stands on the precipice of this beautiful new life. I am forever heart broken for my son, who in the face of deferred dreams gave in to a fitful but deliberately executed impulse to take his own life.

Being a mother who is equally vested in both her children, I am having some difficulty reconciling these two very different realities. I am struggling with balancing the mother who is joyous, excited and enthusiastically supportive, with the mother who is forever traumatized, mournful and scared by loss. You see, I am both of these things simultaneously, and occupying these duel spaces is proving to be very challenging for me.

Years ago when they were very little, my ex-sister-in-law and I ran into a glitch when we were planning a trip for our kids to travel solo to visit Grandma and Grandpa in upstate New York. At the time, my daughter and hers were both six years of age, and my son was three years and eight months old. In those innocent pre 9/11 days, the airlines would fly minor children to their destinations without an adult escort. A problem arouse when we discovered children traveling in this way had to be a minimum of five. At the time, my sister-in-law suggested our daughters make the trip together and my son would just have to stay behind. She seemed annoyed when I said no; that my son would not be left out, and if his sister was to go, he must be included also.

The dilemma was resolved when I decided all of them would make the trip. They were all big and quite precocious for their respective ages. While my son was just short of four years old, he communicated well enough to pass for five and the girls were both protective, chatty young ladies who could easily pass for seven. That was the guise under which they traveled. The identification tags attached to their wrists stated they were five and seven respectively. Being the personable, talkative children they were, we latter found out they spilled the beans sometime during the flight, sharing the truth about their ages with one of the flight attendants they’d charmed. I understand the flight attendant seemed amazed by this revelation and responded by being even more attentive and charmed than she’d been before. She made sure they were delivered into the loving arms of their grandparents.

While some might see this as irresponsible on my part, in retrospect, I’m glad I made this decision to deceive. It ended up being the last full summer of my father’s life, and that trip provided the few early, hazy memories my son would have of his grandfather. Besides the importance of ensuring my son this precious gift of memory, I had taken the stance I would hold for the rest of my life; that my children were equally important and dear to me; that we must find the money and means to send both of them to Japan as high school exchange students; that we must do whatever was necessary to provide each of them equal opportunity to pursue their talents and dreams. My instinct about this has not changed. Like my love, it survives even through death. While I can no longer touch or see him, my son will always have my equal attention. And while that creates a difficult, painful duality in my existence, it is the only way I know how to do this.