On Longing

My third-grade son returns from school. We ask about his day. He tells us of a multiplication quiz and the blacktop drama of recess kickball, then a pause. “But you can’t look in my backpack.” That, we tell him, is not an option. He explains he has to write a final draft of a persuasive essay he missed during last week’s sore-throat absence. I tell him I will glance over his work but will not give it a thorough read. I will consider his teacher’s red-pen comments and discuss them with my son before he puts pencil to paper.

With my boy engaged in his post-school wind-down of a snack and Mythbusters, I unzip his backpack. A blank sheet marks a page in his composition book. On the book’s cover, a drawing of a city skyline, the sky dotted with planes. I open the book. There’s his unmistakable scrawl, the letters veering from sloppy to painstaking and back again. The ends of his sentences rise as if lifted by balloons.

I read the first paragraph. The essay’s subject: a plea for a brother or two. Mindful of my promises, I close the book and return it to his backpack.

*

Is there a more human emotion than longing? Longing reaches through the mist of years. Distance itself waits within the word. Empty spaces separate us from our desires. We are left with daydreams of what might have been. For the next few days, I can’t stop thinking about the essay. In my heart, a pang, one for me, another for my son, the two of us longing for what will never be.

A nurse led us down the hospital corridor. We’d gotten to know each other over the past three months of injections and examinations. We’d seen the pictures of her children. We knew each other’s hometowns. She smiled at us. “You’ve got a perfect four-cell.”

There was the moment, my wife and I holding hands, nervous. There was the day, a box circled on our calendar, but beneath waited our private years of longing. The monthly cycles of anticipation and disappointment, a simple gift denied us yet granted so easily to others.

Earlier in the week, two of my wife’s eggs had been harvested, a procedure far less pleasant than my contribution to the cause. The unity of haploid cells had taken place beneath a microscope lens, but only one had developed. Our longing now had a single focus, four clumped cells, a dust speck of hope.

The procedure began, my wife in stirrups, a sheet over her raised knees. On the other side of the sheet, a doctor and his team. A technician wheeled in the cart holding a premeasured transfer tube and an incubator. The doctor and nurses moved with rehearsed precision, their bodies and hands engaged and intent, the workaday chatter behind their surgical masks concerned with the Steelers return to the Super Bowl.

I rested a hand on my wife’s shoulder. I felt myself balanced upon the cusp of longing, yet unlike the other longings I’d known, this time I was not alone. There was my wife. There were the doctors and nurses, and behind them, a benevolent tide, the years of research and shared study, the wonders of a branch of science concerned with a goal beyond squeezing a penny from a nickel or discovering a more efficient way to kill another man.

The doctor stood back and pulled down his mask. A smile-the procedure had gone well. All we could do now was wait.

My son’s ninth winter has been unseasonably mild. Unsure of when we’ll get another chance, we drag our sleds into Sunday morning’s fresh snowfall. A gray sky and icy breeze, our faces numb. Our sleds pack the snow, each run a little faster. We hold races. Snow clings to my boy’s jacket, testaments to his daring, mid-slope bailouts. Sometimes we ride in tandem, my son counting the seconds and comparing them to his solo rides. “Fifteen for the first one,” he says. “Seventeen for the second. Remember those numbers, Dad. We’ll write them down when we get home.” In his head, the burgeoning understanding of physics, just another of the puzzle pieces as he tries to make sense of his world.

My boy’s essay has been turned in, his confessions safe with his kind-hearted teacher. I now believe he didn’t want us to read his paper because he feared it would hurt our feelings, and for this, I love him all the more. We trudge up the hill again. An hour has passed, my steps heavier than when we started. I struggle to keep pace. From behind, his face is hidden, every bit of skin bundled against the cold. He is a shadow in a sea of white, and I think, as I sometimes do, about the fertilized egg that didn’t survive, the sibling ghost whisked away, a whisper consumed by the kinetic din of my son’s days.

Beneath the shadow of longing exists another version of my life, one in which I have another coat to zip, another pair of boots to tie. When we get to the hill’s top, I hug my son. He considers me, his breath steaming, his cheeks stung red. I hug him for the ghost we will never know. I hold the embrace for an extra beat when I imagine what also could have been, the alternate reality of a quiet Sunday morning, a house where there were no toys to sidestep, no sneaker-patterned dirt clumps across the kitchen floor.

I step back. “Seventeen and fifteen, right?”

“Right.” He mounts his sled. “I’ll count this one, too.” He’s gone before I can sit.

The doctor said wait. We waited. Wait implies stasis, stagnation, yet this was not that kind of waiting. Memory is a fragmented lens, and here is how I recall that time: misty nights, long walks, lit windows, glimpses into other lives, the nearness of so many strangers. I’d expected heightened emotions; what I hadn’t counted on was the calm. We’d done what we could, and all that was left was to let go and surrender to our longing. So we drifted on its current, unafraid, liberated by our powerlessness. One night we dined in town’s fanciest restaurant, not bothering to check the menu’s prices. Every night we talked, dreamy tangents that echoed back to our newlywed days.  Worries of money and jobs and the car that never worked right lost their hold, their value undercut by the realization that all that mattered was so close at hand.

I took a half day so my wife and I would be together to receive the doctor’s call. A word, two syllables so embedded with the voice beneath my skull that it rang foreign on another man’s tongue. In a breath, the sea of longing evaporated, our boat for two resting on solid rock, a landscape as unfamiliar as the moon. We climbed out and began our journey.

Our son’s Christmas list was short. We’d prodded, suggesting the toys popular among his peers. “No thanks,” he said.

One day in early December we asked again. A pause this time, then: “Maybe a skeleton on a stand.” He held his hands about a foot apart. “About this big.”

“That would be cool,” I said. I imagined him studying the bones, committing their names to memory, his thoughts churning with an appreciation of the miracles we carry beneath our skin.

He smiled. “And I’d like it to be able to come off the stand so I could carry it around and pretend it’s my little brother.”

On Christmas morning, he received the skeleton, a clattering arrangement of yellowed bones. My son held the skull so the feet danced upon the couch. He lifted its arm in a welcoming wave. The day passed-cutthroat competition on new board games, good smells from the kitchen, a bundled-up hike on our favorite trail. Later that evening, our son slept on the couch. On the floor, open boxes and wrapping paper scraps. Hissing embers in the fireplace. This might be the last Christmas we’d be able to carry his dozing form from the couch to his bed. I pulled up the blanket, only then noticing the skeleton resting on the couch’s top. The skeleton had been thoughtfully laid out, its legs straightened, a bony arm draped over its eyes. A pose of rest and sleep.

I considered the skeleton. Here was a reminder of fate and alternate realities. Here was an echo of the child we had and the one we didn’t. I laid my hand on my son’s chest, a communion with his life-giving currents. A secretly penned essay, play with a skeleton-here were my boy’s first rudimentary tools in the understanding of longing.

We could have opted for another round of IVF. We could have taken out a loan, the debt justified for the chance to have another child, yet I balked. Despite my reading and research, I hadn’t been prepared for the procedure’s ethical implications. Our first go-round gave us our perfect four-cell, but what if the next round gave us four? I wanted another child, not a basketball team. The doctors said we could choose the healthiest one or two; the other fertilized eggs could be frozen or donated to another couple. I couldn’t look into my son’s eyes and make such a decision.

A year passed, then another. My wife entered her forties, an age which brought its own set of worries and potential complications. The decision to change our minds grew harder to reverse. Time formed a sea around us. The three of us huddled close. This was our family.

Longings and dreams of alternate realities are, thankfully, often eclipsed by the day-to-day. The present absorbs us. We forget. We do our laundry and sweep the floors. We pull weeds from our gardens. We navigate traffic. We play with our children. Yet every so often, longing returns, the moment stealthy and hushed, an insulation of years. We employ the impossible math of calculating what we’ve lost. We imagine the trajectories we might have travelled. We spy upon the ghosts of our could-have-been lives.

Consider poor Gatsby, the novel’s last lines the most eloquent framing of longing I know: So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. Gatsby couldn’t escape the dreams he should have let die. The rest of us, if we’re lucky, can weigh our longings and be satisfied that reality has given us more. The difference between the two can be a mountain of stone or a butterfly’s wing. All that matters is the scales are tipped. Only then can we live with ourselves.

There are nine katas a student of Mu Duk Kwan must master before he receives his black belt. The first three are relatively basic, variations on the same set of footwork. Kata four brings new kicks and strikes, the daisy chain of linked moves twice as complicated. For the past year, my son has been working on five, a routine that requires not only the mastery of new poses but also heightened elements of grace and fluidity.

He readies himself, his feet wide, balled fists by his side. He says I can watch if I’d like. This surprises me-for the past few months, he’s shushed me from the room before his practice. I sit on the couch beside the skeleton. He begins. He doesn’t know it, but I’ve spied on him before, his moves sometimes lackadaisical, an uninspired going through the motions. Tonight, however, I’m impressed. His movements are crisp and controlled. There is purpose in his eyes. He pivots and kicks and punches.

He will never have a brother. He will live his days, forgetting then revisiting his longing. His hands chop the air, a snapping cadence. He works his way through the intricate dance, stumbling here, graceful there. I watch, reassured he will find his way, my heart both lightened and filled.