Work Text:
The Grandfather Song
J.P. Jones
Personal History
When I was growing up I admired my father, mostly because he was the one that stuck around. My mother only left a vague impression of hard stares and cigarette smoke on my memory.
Although with my father, “stuck around” was a relative term. He was in and out of bars and jail. When I was in second grade, he left for a week-long motorcycle run and came back a month later.
At the time, the hugs he gave me seemed like awards. He'd confide in me sometimes, late at night, and I thought that proved how much he valued my opinion. I remember how close I felt to him in the dark. I’d fall asleep listening to him talk.
I made all our meals starting at six. When I was nine, I would accompany a different member of his biker gang to the food bank each week to make sure some of the food actually made it back to our cupboards.
At ten I knew all the best ways to lie to authority figures. Everyone from my teacher to his parole officer received a personalized lie. I was proud of myself for my streetsmarts, grateful for the way he’d rub my head sometimes.
Now I know that that neglect is a form of abuse, and that my father was in fact, abusive. The first time a therapist told me that I laughed, and the therapist looked away, as if suddenly the picture of the tree that hung on her wall was fascinating.
Caught off guard, I changed the subject. Now I try to avoid the subject of him entirely. Although reporters bring it up all the time, new friends too.
“You’re such a great father,” they say. “You must have had a good example.”
The truth is I had the best example, in many ways. My wife Betty’s adopted father, Fred Andrews, was the living, breathing example for both of us.
He is the reason we became parents, I suspect, and the reasons we are, mostly, good ones.
When I run the above line by my eldest son, Jace, also a writer and a father (albeit a new one), he laughs and rolls his eyes.
“Don’t pretend to be humble now Dad,” he says, eyes gleaming. “You wrote the book on fatherhood.”
Some people think that I did, but Father Song is just a work of literary fiction. It is about raising children, and being raised by them.
Strangers have told me that they’ve turned to it more than any parenting book, as a source of hope and advice. If I knew people would see it like that, I would have been paralyzed by fear, unable to write at all.
I was not a young father. Betty and I got married in our late twenties, and then years after, for reasons that have to do with ambition and family history, didn’t have children. Betty was particularly reluctant to have kids, only warming up to the idea over time. Eventually growing to want children as much as I did.
I don’t see the point in re-tracing our long, frustrating journey towards becoming parents. But the journey ended in a musty office, with broken blinds, and carpets that possibly contained ecosystems. A social worker scanned through listing after listing of kids with us.
Betty’s hand was in mine. Her arm was trembling. I suspect now that mine was too.
There were other routes I was willing to go. Surrogacy, adoption from another country, seemed easier, like starting with a cleaner slate.
Betty had never been in the system, but when she was adopted by her next door neighbor, her slate was far from clean. Her father had just killed the rest of her family and himself.
She was a straight A student who was suspended from school about once a month for the next few years. If it wasn’t for her adopted brother, she would have been friendless, alone, untethered.
The aftermath of what happened will never leave her, but being adopted by Fred Andrews helped her get through it - he was her way through the storm, and she saw fostering to adopt as our way to become that for other people.
The night before we sat down in that office I almost backed out of fostering.
I held Betty’s hand in the dark and silently thought of all the ways it could go wrong. We were so naive. I thought about waking Betty, who was sleeping on her side, curled into me, and telling her we should take all the parenting courses, read all the books, and then maybe take on this challenge.
Instead, sleep eventually dragged me under. In the morning, tired and stiff, I called Fred while Betty was running the reservoir.
“Of course you’re not qualified to take in a traumatized child,” Fred tutted on the other end of the phone, “But who the hell is?”
I stammered a little. “Experienced foster parents maybe?”
“Sure maybe. Most are worn out, outnumbered or doing it for the income.” There’s a pause on the other end of the line. “Do you need the income?”
“Hell no.” Betty was still working at The New Yorker, her job alone could have kept us afloat, and I was teaching at Columbia, publishing regularly. Even in a city as expensive as New York we weren't worried.
“Then your motivations are already better than most. You want a child. This child, whether they know it or not, wants a parent.”
“Which child?”
Fred laughs, “Any child.”
It was his words that got me to the office, that helped calm me as we flipped through children reduced to pictures and words on the page.
Betty helped too. She seemed certain we were capable of this. That helped give me the faith that we were.
I wanted a young child, as young as possible really, although we were warned babies were not really an option. Betty had gone along with me, even though their age wasn’t important to her.
We were told in advance that the children still in the system were largely from a different racial background than Betty and I.
It worried both of us, to not be able to meet them where they were in terms of the skin they inhabited, that we might not understand the particular obstacles they might face. But it also seemed like a much better fate to be adopted than to be in the system for 18 years.
We knew boys had a harder time finding homes than girls, so Betty was pushing for a son. That was her focus, her priority.
Suddenly Betty stopped our social worker and said, “What about him?”
On the screen was a picture of a boy with black skin and vertical hair. His lip stuck out in a scowl.
His name was Jace. No last name. He was 2 or 3, his real birth date and family something that would never be known because he was found in a shopping mall, alone in the food court with a tray full of fries.
We met him for the first time in a room that resembled a waiting room for a doctors office. A few picked over toys and a lot of dingy chairs.
He didn’t make eye contact with us for twenty minutes, focusing instead on the toy set we’d brought him. It was a collection of people that transformed into animals. He chose the bat right away.
Then Betty took another transforming toy out of her bag. This one was of a leopard that was also a girl. She started to climb it up a chair in leopard form. Jace looked up, and then came over, his own minifigure in hand, and soon the creature-people they were both holding were playing together.
“He’s the one,” Betty said on the subway, and I knew that Jace was going to be our son.
Which isn’t to say that raising Jace, or his siblings River and Josephine (known as Jo), has been easy, but it has been the best challenge I’ve ever had.
It’s the sort of challenge I wouldn’t have considered on my own, and one that I certainly would have failed without Betty.
It turns out I’m the sort of dad who wants to have a good time with their kids, without really planning for it. I’d want to roll out of bed and have a slow morning, drinking coffee, reading the paper and cuddling Jace and Betty.
This is not how life with toddlers actually works, for the record. In order to get those quiet mornings there are pre-purchased stickers, or toys hidden for a while and brought out on occasion. Things Betty knew, and I learned slowly (a little too slowly sometimes).
I’m grateful for Betty’s patience as I played catch-up. When she returned to work, when we moved out of the city, and I became the stay at home parent it took me three days to figure out that lunch is actually a meal you make the day before if you plan to get out the door in time.
But it wasn’t just the practical work of parenting that Betty had done, but the intuitive work. She knew when a child needed special alone time with one or both of us, or to hear a particular story from our youths, misspent though they were.
We were a team, and over time I learned that I had to be the stricter parent sometimes, for Betty’s sake.
Our marriage before kids was good, wonderful, and peaceful even. After kids there was a good decade where I felt like someone had turned my life into a flip book, events proceeding rapidly, in a way that sometimes made me feel like a witness to my own life.
But even then my relationship with Betty was the most important part. The glorious foundation on which our family (sometimes) flourished.
Before we had kids there were some small parts of Betty that I didn’t know, but after - there were no secrets, accidental or otherwise, for either of us.
Raising children together, has made our partnership stronger, more vital even as it has rendered us more exhausted.
We’ve been through all the normal ringers of being parents, including sleepless nights, graduation, exploding diapers, the principal's office, driver’s license’s, and the “I only like pizza” year.
We’ve also survived two cases of toddler PTSD, the “you’re not my parents stage” and one very intense fiasco involving 23 and Me, which led to River meeting his biological father for the first time at twenty.
Surprisingly, we are the only parents we know that had a relatively easy time with teenagers. The college years were rough on us, with the boys. Both needing to find themselves in the larger world. Both returning to Betty first, and then to me, a little gentler than they ever were before.
Few parents get to have this period of extended connection. I like to credit our move to the country over a decade ago for that, as well as our kids themselves.
We chose them once, many years ago, and I like to think that now they’re adults they’ve chosen us back. Jo occasionally jokes that it’s Stockholm Syndrome. She’s never left home, happy to work the land and paint.
Both Jace and River have had their time away. Jace more notably had a girlfriend that didn’t like us, and he drifted for years in love with her, and doing what seemed best for everyone at the time. But when he started dating Callie and moved to Boston, he reconnected with us. Driving up most weekends to spend time with us.
I think he needed those years away, not for the girlfriend, but to come into his own as a writer, my shadow and his mother’s, an abstract thing.
River is attending graduate school at NYU, and his DJ alter ego has a cult-like following I don’t exactly understand. Still once a month at least he comes to plant, to harvest, and to talk.
I’m the father of three because of lots of long, detailed planning, consistent failure and finally fostering. I became a first time father in my early 30’s.
It was strange to watch Jace, at 23 become a father, by accident. His girlfriend Callie, with her complex jokes and line art, was part of our family before the possibility of children, never mind the reality of them.
We tried not to overwhelm Callie with our excitement, but we confessed to Jace every purchase of tye-died onesies, and designer baby bouncers.
Jo took up knitting as a source of self torture and baby gifting. River recorded an ill advised lullabye.
“I never expected to be here,” Betty told me, as she made her own board book from scratch, crafting a blessing for a person we’ve never met.
I didn’t know what she meant by this exactly, because as a parent and a partner she’s always lead with love. Even before our marriage, it was a never questioned fact for me, that she loved me, and would use different way’s - hugs, words, baked goods, hand made cards, to tell me that.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I thought even if we were lucky enough to have children, we wouldn’t get to see them have children,” she says softly, “I don’t know why I thought that, but I always had.”
I pressed a kiss of reassurance against her cheek, grateful to know this part of her too.
When our grand-daugther was born in Boston, we drove up, and awkwardly met Callie’s parents for the first time in the waiting room of the hospital. Betty broke the ice with a joke about blowouts and that helped.
It was a long labour and we had all done coffee runs by the end of it. Jo was texting us every few minutes for updates, and after all that fuss, and all that waiting, the first time we saw the baby was on Instagram.
Jace posting a picture of their daughter, Zadie, eyes closed on her mother’s stomach. I fell in love with a photograph. Although minutes later we were ushered in to meet her ourselves.
Only Jo was with us as a baby. She was premature and had health issues that scared a lot of other parents off. All our baby memories are of her, or our friends' kids, but it has been a long time since any of them were so small that we could cradle them like this.
“Careful Dad,” Jace says, as I take Zadie from Betty’s arms. Of course I hold her properly, her neck supported by the crook of my arm. Her eyes are green like Callie’s, her ears, teacups like Jace’s.
She looks nothing like Betty or me, but she holds our legacy, our love, just the same.
“Do you need to sit?” Jace asks, as if I am someone old and feeble, and I did not just the other day haul a sixty pound sheep out of the woodshed.
I shake my head, even though I do feel a little strange, standing there, holding an unexpected part of our Family’s future in my hands.
Way back, when I used to watch Jace play softball, I’d always get unsolicited opinions from another dad, (I’ll call him Doug), about how sad it was that my kids would never carry on my bloodline.
It was bullshit of course, but the kind of bullshit I’d ignore by staring out at the field most of the time, and then rant about in bed to Betty.
The fact is, my genes aren’t great. There’s nothing special about them, or Betty’s - our kids carry what I hope is the best of us, kindness and creativity, open minds and discerning hearts. They probably have the worst of us too, (Betty’s tendency to overwork, my comfort geared lazin-ess, other things as well, I’m sure).
Doug might think that the fact that his son looks like him, is the most important thing, but to me it’s the least. It’s corny, and not the sort of thing I usually explicitly type out, but if I have any legacy at all, I want it to be written in love.
With a newborn baby in my arms I felt that profoundly.
My whole life changed much quicker than it did when I met Betty on the lawn of a college campus decades ago, acknowledging her first only in passing. The question of what she might become to me, flying in one ear and out the other. At the moment she was just gorgeous, a fact that is still true, but is one of the least important things about her.
Callie’s parents have traditional jobs on another coast so they fly out a few days later, but Betty and I convince friends to work on the farm, shuffle our freelance work, and rent a temporary apartment one block away from Callie, Jace, and Zadie.
We are there for the midnight feedings, the clean ups, the diaper changes. I am the first person Zadie smiles at, even if Betty insists it’s just gas. We go on long walks with the baby through tree lined streets, to give Callie and Jace temporary peace. We buy them a freezer and Betty fills it with food.
When we leave three months later, I feel adrift. I try to love the farm like I did once, but instead feel overwhelmed by the sheep, by the mice we finally need to break down and buy a cat to deal with.
Betty, usually the picture of efficiency, spends hours staring out the window in our study, and then just as we’re about to breakdown and move to Boston, we get a call.
There’s always been a cabin on the property that we’ve called a guest house. It’s a little further from the road than the main house. It was run down at one point, but we fixed it up a few years ago, for visiting friends.
It’s very basic, with a kitchen that’s smaller than some closets, and only a half bathroom. But the appliances are all new and there’s running water, and electricity, even slightly spotty wi-fi.
Betty and I move into it while Jace and Callie take over the house. Jo moves in with her aunts Toni and Veronica who live on the same property.
Zadie knits us all together. We’re in and out of the house, and so is everyone else. Jace has taken to hanging a “go away” sign on the front door when they need a moment, and so far everyone’s taken it seriously, except for the farm cat.
It reminds me of when the kids were younger, most evenings involving us all sitting around the same table together. A gift in every way.
Now that same table looks a little different.
I’m doing more of the cooking than Betty these days, who tore her achilles running, and has been hard at work on her next book.
Callie and Jace help cook too, and they sit at the far end with Zadie between them. She’s taken to solids with joy and opinions.
Jo is between Betty and I, talking up a storm as always. Toni and Veronica are there, working on a new magazine. Archie’s taking advantage of the free food, and the baby cuddles, post eating.
On the weekends it’s more crowded, with River and his new boyfriend driving in from the city, tired and already a little under Zadie’s fingers. Chloe, Mia, Toni and Veronica’s daughters, come as much as they can, both stuck in busy jobs most of the time, but happy to take a week off during the fall harvest and pull apples from trees to press into cider.
But most of the time it’s just the nine of us, mostly older, all tired, even Zadie who fell asleep in her bolognese last week.
We talk about the weather and the sheep, the books we’re reading and the music we are listening to. We talk about Zadie’s incredible achievement of the day, which occasionally is sleeping through the night.
The evening hours have become the time of day I cherish most. Most nights after Zadie’s asleep, Jace and Betty and I all write together up in the third floor studio.
I’ve never been religious, but this feels in every way, like a blessing.