Facing the Darker Side of Parenthood

As Pumkin’s arrival looms, I have been wrestling with a concept that I would have thought I understood, the very notion of parenthood. I grew up with parents, everyone I knew had at least one parent, and I’ve observed parents in the world. But fitting myself into the role of parent has proved fascinating to me. Not difficult or particularly scary (on most days), just fascinating to begin to self apply a term that has always so clearly meant “other”. So it is not terribly surprising to find myself reevaluating what it means to be a parent in the first place. In the past my concept of parenthood has stopped at the generally pleasant image that films and books tend to display. But as I get ready to assume the mantle, I find myself staring down other, less appealing aspects of this role. And this thought process has changed the way recent news, both local and family, has affected me.

Parenthood: Rejected

About two weeks ago, the local news reports near my home were abuzz with the story of a newborn that had been discovered in a dumpster, umbilical chord still attached. She was left there for hours, but somehow managed to survive. Normally this would have saddened me, but I would have moved quickly on and not given it much more thought. But this time it struck me and continues to strike me two weeks later. For one, the dumpster in question is less than 2 miles from my front door, right across from the Schnucks grocery store to which I occasionally make milk runs. But even more haunting to me was the fact that this child was born 10 weeks premature when our own Pumkin was 10 weeks from term. This idea took hold that all this time that Pumkin has been inside Moonshot, growing and getting ready for the world, this baby had been inside its mother, only a short walk away from us, growing and getting ready for the world as well. Their paths seemed so similar. But then this other child was born early, casually wrapped in plastic and thrown into a dumpster with the trash. Meanwhile, Pumkin’s home is being lovingly prepared for his/her arrival. It all seems so unfair and random. After spending so much time and effort getting ready for our child, I try but fail to understand the mindset that could allow someone to carry this child for 7 months, give birth, throw it way, and then just casually go to work. But that’s exactly what the mother did. The idea of this Pumkin from another vine entering this world so clearly unwanted continues to haunt me.

The happy ending to this story is that the child has several offers to adopt, so I have confidence that she will be ok in the end. I keep checking online for further details, but have found no recent news. I can’t help but wonder though, how the lives of Pumkin and this little girl who until two weeks ago was sharing so many of Pumkin’s life experiences will continue to diverge from here.

Parenthood: Exploited

During my nomadic days after I graduated college, I spent about 6 months living in the Miami area (Davie, specifically) with my cousin, Zilla. He is the only child of my Dad’s brother, my Uncle Goldwing, and he is perhaps the most infuriating person I have ever spent time with. In fact, he prides himself on this fact. He spent vast amounts of time trying to make me explode, just to prove that he could even get under the skin of someone as laid back as your narrator. It took him three months…but he did finally evoke a tantrum that involved me pounding the hood of his car and screaming obscenities in a crowded parking lot…but that’s another story. Zilla is a walking contradiction, a homophobic, homosexual, gun toting, web junkie with a fear of heights, a severely bad back, a love of corny jokes, and a knack for getting himself into the most bizarre situations. If ever I am asked to write a memoir, some of the best and most interesting stories will involve Zilla. Despite his love of aggravation, I thoroughly enjoyed my time with him.

As I was preparing to continue my city hopping by trading Florida for New Orleans, Zilla began the process of adopting a child. He explained that he no longer wanted to be alone and that he felt he had a lot to offer a child. Since he didn’t like babies, he was willing to adopt an older child, a child statistically much less likely to get adopted. He went through the hoops required for adoption and shortly after I was settling down in St Louis, Zilla adopted an 11-year old son, “Brian.”

Over the last 6 years, I’ve stayed in touch with them through email and their occasional visits to Kansas City family functions. Things seemed to be going well. I often disagreed with Zilla’s parenting style, but I disagree with lots of people’s parenting style, so I didn’t pay too much attention. Brian seemed happy, Zilla seemed happy, and I was content to leave it at that.

A few weeks ago, I received a call from Jet. In a tone laced with foreboding, he asked if I had checked my email. The tone was the same one that had hidden behind my Uncle Jerry’s voice when he called to tell me about the death of my cousin Denny, a call too recent for me to miss the similar emotion in my brother.

“Why?” I asked “What happened?”

“Zilla’s been arrested,” he replied. “It’s all over the news in Florida. Apparently he’s been having sex with Brian and a whole bunch of other kids. I… You just have to see the footage.”

I rushed upstairs to find the email from Uncle Goldwing that Jet had described. It contained a painfully short letter from my uncle and a list of links to various Florida news sights. What unfolded from these sights was a nightmare of press coverage of my cousin’s arrest for having sex with his adopted son and other teens, filming it, and sharing it online. Phrases like “160 state indictments for child pornography”, “4 federal indictments”, and “life in prison” swirled in my head. Video of my aunt, Zilla’s mom, breaking through a line of reporters to get into Zilla’s house to be with her grandson and mug shots of a haggard Zilla kept playing in my mind even after I looked away. Sitting in the quiet of my upstairs office I watched from a distance the chaos that had engulfed my family. The events I was reading and watching had occurred almost a month ago. My uncle, unable to face the family with what was happening, had opted to suffer in silence for the first month. I felt helpless. I Googled every possible combination of my cousin’s name and various rephrasings of his alleged crime. The reports I found offered no new information, but I couldn’t stop. Like the inability to pull my eyes away from the television after September 11th, I couldn’t escape the notion that somehow, if I just kept looking, there would be different news or I’d catch some small detail that would help me make sense of it all. My uncle’s email had apologized that he “had no words of wisdom to explain any of this,” and I shared his loss for words as I wrestled with the horrible reality.

Even now, three weeks after that first email, I am still hard pressed to put my feelings on this matter into words. For the first several days I kicked myself for not recognizing the signs. I convinced myself that I should have known, and maybe I should have. Zilla had several traits that I should have paid closer attention to in retrospect. I’m not talking about his being gay. I still contend that his being gay had very little to do with this. I have a fear that much will be made in the press as this story continues about the fact that a gay man was able to adopt a young boy who he later molested. It seems like such a cliché that various groups will try to draw media attention to that angle. But that’s not what I mean when I say I should have known. Zilla had other issues.

I knew Zilla likes young men. Not illegal young as far as I knew, but young. I made my peace with this fact by reminding myself that most men I know, myself included, find their eyes wandering toward young women. This culture bombards us with images of 18 years old in various levels of undress, so I wasn’t too afraid of this similar trait in Zilla.

I knew Zilla likes some freaky, freaky porn. He delighted in showing me his latest web findings and particularly enjoyed it if he could make me turn away laughing, my face a mask of disgust. But even here I can’t throw stones. I myself have enjoyed the odd round of “Who can find the most disturbing Internet porn” with various friends. So, while it was clear Zilla was clearly more attracted to sexual taboos than I was, it didn’t seem like cause for alarm.

And finally, I knew that Zilla was, deep down, a sad and bitter man who often made himself feel better by bring those around him down. As when he pressed so hard to make me angry, he did so because he, himself, is an angry man and it made him feel better to watch as Mr. Reasonable blew his top. It justified his behavior.

I know many people who share variations on these character traits with Zilla. So the issue isn’t any one of them, it’s the combination that should have made me worry more. And I did worry, but obviously not enough. Before I left Florida, as he was going through the paperwork to adopt Brian, I was quite direct with my fears. I asked him if I should be worried that a guy with a taste for young men was about to adopt a boy. He responded with what seemed to me to be a reasonable level of disgust and explained that this was entirely different. I accepted him at his word and shoved it to the back of my mind. And even today, I believe that he meant it at the time. However, I clearly should have been reexamining the issue as his son, now 17, grew older. But, I was unable to believe such things in someone I knew. These are supposed to be the actions of horrible people whose faces are shown on TV, not by my cousin. Well, now my cousin is one of those people on TV and we’re all left trying to make sense of it.

I keep thinking about my uncle and aunt. Uncle Goldwing lives in New England with his wife, so he is somewhat removed from the chaos. But Zilla’s mom is in the middle of it. The press hounded her while she tried to juggle her split responsibilities to her son and to her traumatized grandson who she is now raising. But the distance does not shield my uncle from facing the same dilemma my aunt is going through as they both are forced to balance their love for their son and their disgust at what he has done. I cannot imagine.

Over the last eight months, Moonshot and I have spent many conversations imagining what Pumkin will be. Will he be a musician? Will she be a doctor? The possibilities are infinite. Once Moonshot brought up the question, what if Pumkin grows up and does something horrible? I waved the question away but now find myself facing it again. I’m sure my Uncle Goldwing had grand dreams of what his son would grow to be. And I’m sure that nowhere did a life sentence in a federal prison factor in.

So, lately I’ve been thinking a lot about some of the scarier aspects of being a parent. I’m facing the idea that there are people in my neighborhood for whom the birth of a child was not something to celebrate but something to hide beneath a pile of garbage. I’m facing the fact that there is a member of my family whose base urges and weaknesses were greater than their desire to shelter and protect the son for whom he took responsibility. Their crimes, it seems to me, are related. They were unable, for whatever reason, to put the needs of their child above their own. Unable to accept the overpowering responsibility that is unconditional love for a child. But I am also facing my uncle and the concept that in the infinite possibilities open to my child’s life, a very few have the potential to display the cruel side of the burden that is unconditional love.

There is no question for me…no dilemma to resolve concerning my role as parent. I will love my child to the best of my ability and protect him from as many of the world’s ills as I can. I will put her needs above my own and do my best to learn from the examples of parenting I have before me…both the good and the bad. But I’ll accept this new role as parent knowing that I am accepting a burden that many cannot handle. And I acknowledge that in return for the exceptional joy of raising a child, I am opening myself to the possibility of all sorts of pain that wouldn’t otherwise find me. But for my Pumkin…I am ready to face these risks.