Essays by DAR

Thanksgiving

(First published in Glamour)

Now that the sound of gunfire is fading from my ears as the front of this incredible National Divorce War moves down the block to reconstruct the make-up of other families, I find my major emotion to be one of thanksgiving. The wounds heal cleanly, I find -- the neighborhood children will pull through.

I seem to be sitting up in bed more mornings now, heeding my boys as they lie sleeping in their separate bedrooms (the six-year-old wearing the laid-back expression of an outfielder, while the three-year-old sleeps with the intensity of a pitcher), and waiting gratefully for them to waken. ("Ahhh," is usually the first sound uttered by the six-year-old, as he finishes the remains of the chocolate milk left on his dresser from the night before. "Oh, a sunny day!" exclaims the three-year-old as if, having plopped out of bed and scampered in woolen footsteps to peek out the window shades, he is astonished all over again every time.)

Maybe I heed them too carefully these days. I'm part of a joint custody arrangement (the only way to go), and after driving them to their Mom's place at the end of my stint, I always have to adjust the rear view mirror which was slanted down to view them -- but it feels right to do so, after a divorce. Besides, it's through my boys that I've grown related to the world. When my tv brought me the most recent Beirut massacre and I saw a dead shape on the ground the size of my six-year-old, I gasped first because I thought: I must protect my boys from such an atrocity. But I gasped a second time because I realized that the shape was someone else's child who was just as real as mine. Moments like those are when I know I'll never be the same again, having had children: I'm part of The Family now, like it or not.

But now that this Divorce War has moved down the street, as I say, and left me gratefully behind, I find that what's even better than sitting in bed heeding them in the morning is sitting in bed with them at night, having our chat. Last night we were stationed thusly, one boy on either side of me under the electric blanket, and it was cold, and we were discussing the things we like to discuss these autumn days: the foliage, and when we should order more firewood, and life, and sunsets ("Do you like sunsets?" the three-year- old was asking himself, "I like swing sets"), as it started to rain outside.

We picked up the Noah book -- somehow we always seem to read that book when it rains, we're all so relieved to be safely surviving -- and just when the six-year-old was pondering whether Noah used peanut butter to catch his squirrels the way we use peanut butter to catch ours ("Do you like peanut butter?" the three-year-old was asking himself, "I like jam"), the phone rang. It was the divorcee next door calling to report that her daughter said that my boys' shoes were left outside getting wet -- information transmitted from one custodial bedtime chat to another -- and in a moment I was barefoot outside in the dark drizzle alone.

The night was black and my heart was so aerated, knowing that my boys were out of harm's way upstairs, that everything my flashlight lit was treasure: the blue and yellow chalk drawings dissolving on the blacktop of the driveway, the silver jewels of moisture collecting atop the green grass stalks, one gray sneaker with red racing stripes, then another. I couldn't find the three-year-old's leather sandals (I found them next morning huddled together, weathered nicely from the exposure), but I had rescued what I could, and I started back to the warmth of the house, and as I passed through the dry haven beneath the fir tree a bird bumped into me -- just glanced off my shirt with a male energy that felt identical to mine. It was like a fatherly salute in the night, between hurried errands, a paternal "how-goes-it pal" across animal barriers; an event that was tiny in itself, really, yet astonishing enough that I found myself asking a question I had never before asked in my life, certainly never before being blown wide open by the grenades of divorce -- a question so simple, so dramatic and pure, that it heated my blood just to put it in words: are we all, are we really all of us in this thing together?