Jonathan Foer - Here I Am

“Into what?”

“The giving away.”

I was wrong about almost everything. But I was right about the speed of the losing. Some of the moments were interminably long — the first cruel night of sleep training; cruelly (it felt) peeling him off a leg on the first day of school; pinning him down while the doctor who wasn’t stitching his hand back together told me, “This is not a time to be his friend”—but the years passed so quickly I had to search videos and photo albums for proof of our shared life. It happened. It must have. We did all that living. And yet it required evidence, or belief.

I told Julia, the night after Sam’s injury, that it was too much love for happiness. I loved my boy beyond my capacity to love, but I didn’t love the love. Because it was overwhelming. Because it was necessarily cruel. Because it couldn’t fit into my body, and so deformed itself into a kind of agonizing hypervigilance that complicated what should have been the most uncomplicated of things — nurturing and play. Because it was too much love for happiness. I was right about that, too.

Carrying Sam into the house for the first time, I implored myself to remember every feeling and detail. One day I would need to recall what the garden looked like when my first child first saw it. I would need to know the sound of the car seat’s latch disengaging. My life would depend on my ability to revisit my life — there would come a day when I would trade a year of what remained to hold my babies for an hour. I was right about that, too, without even knowing that Julia and I would one day divorce.

I did remember. I remembered all of it: the drop of dried blood on the gauze around the circumcision wound; the smell of the back of his neck; how to collapse an umbrella stroller with one hand; holding his ankles above his head with one hand while wiping the insides of his thighs; the viscosity of A&D ointment; the eeriness of frozen breast milk; the static of a baby monitor set to the wrong channel; the economy of diaper bags; the transparency of new eyelids; how Sam’s hands lurched upward, like those of his falling-monkey ancestors, whenever he was placed on his back; the torturing irregularity of his breathing; my own inability to forgive myself for the moments I looked away and something utterly inconsequential happened, but happened. It happened. All of it. And yet it made a believer out of me.

HOW TO PLAY TOO MUCH LOVE

Whisper into an ear, listen for an echo.

HOW TO PLAY PRAYER

Whisper into an ear, don’t listen for an echo.

HOW TO PLAY NO ONE

The night I came home from Islip was the last night I spent in bed with Julia. She shifted when I got under the covers. She mumbled, “That was a short war.”

I said, “I just kissed the kids.”

She asked, “Did we win?”

I said, “As it turns out, there is no we .”

She asked, “Did I win?”

“Win?”

She turned onto her side and said, “Survive.”

HOW TO PLAY “HERE I AM”

A clause near the end of our legal divorce agreement stated that should either of us have more children, the children we had together would be treated “no less favorably” financially, either in life or in our wills. Despite all the longer thorns, and there were many, this one dug into Julia. But rather than acknowledge what at the time I assumed was the source of her distress — that because of our ages, having more children was realistic only for me — she attached herself to the issue that wasn’t even there.

“I would never, in a million years, remarry,” she told the mediator.

“This doesn’t concern remarriage, but rather having children.”

“If I were to have more children, which I will not, it would be in the context of a marriage, which is not going to happen.”

“Life is long,” he said.

“And the universe is even bigger, but we don’t seem to be getting a lot of visits from intelligent life.”

“That’s only because we’re not in the Jewish Home yet,” I said, trying at once to calm her and to create a bit of innocent camaraderie with the mediator, who shot me a confused look.

“And it’s not long,” Julia said. “If life were long, I wouldn’t be halfway through it.”

“We aren’t halfway through it,” I said.

“ You aren’t, because you’re a man.”

“Women live longer than men.”

“Only technically.”

As ever, the mediator wouldn’t take the bait. He cleared his throat, as if swinging a machete to clear a path through our overgrown history, and said, “This clause, which I should say is entirely standard for agreements like yours, won’t affect you in the event that you don’t have any more children. It merely protects you and your children if Jacob does.”

“I don’t want it in there,” she said.

“Can we move on to something genuinely contentious?” I suggested.

“No,” she said. “I don’t want it in there.”

“Even if that means forfeiting your legal protection?” the mediator asked.

“I trust Jacob not to treat other children more favorably than ours.”

“Life is long,” I said, winking at the mediator without moving an eyelid.

“Is that some kind of joke?” she asked.

“Obviously.”

The mediator cleared his throat again and drew a line through the clause.

Julia wouldn’t let it go, not even after we’d removed what wasn’t there to begin with. In the middle of a discussion of something entirely unrelated — how to handle Thanksgiving, Halloween, and birthdays; whether it was necessary to legally forbid the presence of a Christmas tree in either’s home — she might say, “Divorce gets an unfair rap; it was marriage that did this.” Such out-of-context statements became part of the routine — at once impossible to anticipate and unsurprising. The mediator showed an almost autistic patience for her Tourettic eruptions, until one afternoon, when splitting the hairs of medical decision-making in the event that one parent couldn’t be reached, she said, “I will literally die before I remarry,” and, without clearing his throat or missing a beat, he asked, “Do you want me to put in some language legally codifying that?”

She started dating Daniel about three years after the divorce. To my knowledge, which was greatly limited by the kindness of kids who were trying to protect me, she didn’t date very much before him. She seemed to relish the quiet and aloneness, just as she’d always said, and I’d never believed, she would. Her architecture practice flowered: two of her houses were built (one in Bethesda, one on the shore), and she got a commission to convert a grand Dupont Circle mansion into a museum showcasing the contemporary art collection of a local supermarket oligarch. Benjy — who was no less kind than his brothers, but far less psychologically sophisticated — would increasingly mention Daniel, usually in the context of his ability to edit movies on his laptop. That humble skill, which could be learned in an afternoon by someone willing to devote an afternoon to learning it, dramatically changed Benjy’s life. All the “babyish” movies he had been making on the waterproof digital camera I got him two Hanukkahs before were suddenly brought to life as fully realized “adult films.” (I never suggested that the camera should stay at my house, and we never corrected his terminology.) Once, when I was dropping the boys back at Julia’s after a particularly fun weekend of adventures I’d spent the previous two weeks planning, Benjy grabbed at my leg and said, “You have to go?” I told him I did, but that he was going to have a great time and we’d see each other again in just a couple of days. He turned to Julia and asked, “Is Daniel here?” “He’s at a meeting,” she said, “but he’ll be back any minute.” “Aw, another meeting? I wanna make an adult film.” When my car rounded the corner, I saw a man, about my age, in clothing I might wear, sitting on a bench, no reading material, no purpose but to wait.