The In-Laws

On New Year’s Day, while Sam napped in the backseat, I sat in the front waiting for him to wake. We were outside of my father in-law’s house where my in-laws had begun to gather to celebrate the day. I busily texted New Years’ greetings to my friends who lived far away and then I leaned my head against the car window and imagined where I would spend New Years if I was on the other end of those texts—at the 5 Spot eating brunch with Phyllis recounting the previous night’s misadventures. My head was so full of years past that my eyes had a hard time adjusting to the scene before me: The snow layering the rooftop; my sister-in-law and her husband hurriedly ushering their girls from their car into the house. When this millennium began, if I had seen them on the street, there wouldn’t have been a whisper of recognition between us.

Now, we are family who happen to live across the street from each other. My husband Dave bought our house years before we met and he bought it because it was across the street from his family: His older sister Lisa, his brother-in-law Matt and their two girls—Caeley and Sophia. He rescued it from auction, gutted and reframed it, intending to make it into his bachelor pad. When we met, it was still gutted.

The summer we were married, Matt, Dave and I worked hard to get it prepped for drywall. The day before our wedding, I swept, vacuumed, and wiped away as much of the drywall dust as possible. I put a blanket down on the bare floor, an aero bed on top of that and candles along the fireplace. This was to be my surprise to him: Even if it wasn't ready to move in, we would have our first night as husband and wife in our home. I figured I had everything we needed. But then Matt, our best man, left the reception early, and went to our house to install a toilet.

Dave and I crossed the threshold of our new home and right behind us trooped in Lisa and the girls who were on their way to join Matt in the bathroom. It wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.

It only took a little while for Matt to scoot his family out the door. As Lisa left, she gave an embarrassed laugh and said, “I guess you don’t want to spend your wedding night with your sister.”

When I didn’t have to creep around the backyard and was safe and warm inside (Matt had remembered to leave us toilet paper), I laughed at the previous scene. It had a sort a Screwball Comedy ring to it, so to speak. But to be honest, I worried about what it might bode for my future.

No one who knew me at the beginning of this millennium would have pictured me living “happily” across the street from my in-laws whoever they turned out to be. I tend to be overly clannish when I’m not being Greta Garbo-ish—I do so like to be “alone.” But regardless of my peculiarities, the in-law relationship isn’t exactly without its innate difficulties. You are instant family yet family seems to be the antithesis of “instant” unless you are a newborn. You might hope for friendship but shared interest and values aren’t guaranteed even with your spouse let alone his/her family. You are expected to participate in the very inner sanctum of someone else’s rituals and relationships yet even the Masons let you in on the rules before you head off to the meetings. There’s a reason so many Dear Abbey columns begin with “My mother-in-law/my daughter-in-law”.

I know my in-laws put up with me because I do love their kids: the two across the street and the rest. I’ve loved the trips to the maternity ward to meet Jim and Ann’s cuddly newborns. This particular in-law relationship—the in-law Aunt, I had written into my experience.

My Aunt Julie taught me how to be a good “aunt in-law” by being a good one. She baked bread in the morning and then made fried baloney sandwiches with spicy mustard in the afternoon. She was always game for a hand of 500 Rummy. And then when my cousin Brette was a girl, Julie let me tease and spray Brette’s hair, then dress her in “new wave” clothes as if she were my own renegade dolly. Julie was different from the rest of my family but it was her difference that made her dear.

For the first year or so I was married, I would tell myself—focus on the kids, the rest will come.

And it did. With every successive miscarriage, my mother-law-law, a retired nurse, would arrive at my hospital bedside, gently nudge her son aside, cradle my face in her warm hands, and look me in the eyes until I felt loved down to my bones.

Even with that, I’m sure that my in-laws probably thought I was difficult, prickly, and obstinate. And I must admit I’ve never had such a sudden and profound need to run across the street to do laundry as I have had at a few of the birthday parties—small living room, a cacophony of kids, and not a glass of wine in sight.

But then came Sam.

When he became mobile, one of his favorite destinations was the sun-porch to yell for the girls across the street. He’d toddle to the window, climb up to the sill, beat the screens with his small fists, and with a Marlon Brando intensity would yell, “Aeley” and “Ophie”. And then as he got his feet under him, he would run at Lisa in that wheeling, head first way that made me think he’d smack his head on the pavement. He had complete trust that Lisa would be there to scoop him up and she always was. His absolute trust in her made me look from him to her and there I saw the love that wasn’t just written into her experience but into her family.

He is her brother’s son, the continuation of her family, hers. And suddenly I felt a little less anxious. No matter what happened to me or Dave, there was someone who would take Sam in as her own, not as a charity case or even out of sense of duty or out of friendship to me but for whatever may come. And for an anxious new mom there is no better gift than someone loving your baby with that kind of devotion.

I realized I had arrogantly believed these relationships were about me, had something to do with my preferences, my likes and dislikes. Sam and Lisa had their own thing going on and I could get on board or not. How could I resist such easy love?

In an unlovely sense, it’s a little like Matt installing that toilet—it wasn’t in my plans, but wow what a relief.

On New Years day 2010, Sam awoke from his nap. Even before his eyes were open, he was freeing himself from his seat belt, asking if his cousins were inside, and excited to spend this day, this year, this decade with our family.

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Speech Therapy

Perhaps I should have known it was coming when Sam said to me, “the gelagen seet got caught in the acheen.”

One day while picking Sam up from school, Miss Melissa, Sam’s teacher at the Mouse House, stopped me before I wrangled Sam out of the door. She stopped me to tell me that she thought Sam needed speech therapy along with some occupational therapy (to hold his pencil properly). Sam is young for preschool just making the cut off with a December 22nd birthday so I had already decided to wait a year before sending him off to kindergarten (plus, I don’t want him going off to college at 17 years old).

Miss Melissa didn’t know any of this and I was going to tell her after she finished talking but she was geared up. I wasn’t worried about what she was saying as much as I felt for her. I could tell that her favorite part of her job wasn’t telling a mom that her Perfect Patty is imperfectly pronouncing her p’s and q’s. She had the forced calm of someone at street level with a bullhorn gently trying to talk someone off a ledge. Maybe it was because of that and because she was telling me all the services would be free and provided at the school that I suddenly felt like the author David Sedaris’s mom. Whenever a teacher came to her home to tell her about David problems, she promptly offered the teacher scotch after scotch. I almost said, “Well Dear, if it doesn’t cost anything and I don’t have to drive anywhere, bring it on. And by the way, do you drink Dewers?”

And maybe I’m a bit cavalier about it all because my friend Shannon’s son Conor has been going to speech therapy for years and it seems such a fixable problem. Recently she asked Conor’s speech therapist if her daughter Emma could get speech therapy too. Emma sounds as if she grew up on the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port. But the speech therapist told Shannon, “Oh we don’t do Rs until the age of 8.” I guess Rs are much more sophisticated and perhaps a bit more optional than other letters. If you roll the R in Regatta you might not get asked back to Martha's Vineyard.

I knew it would be easy to get Sam to comply just by saying, “Conor has a speech therapist too” (Conor being the arbiter of what is permissible—in Sam’s head). I began to wonder and worry though when my brain had started decoding. How often is he misunderstood or not heard? I decode so quickly and very rarely need to say to Sam, “what was that?” or “can you say that differently?”. When he had said “the gelagen seet got caught in the acheen” it sounded exactly the same to me as “the skeleton’s feet got caught in the machine.” Ouch.

The Republic of Imagination

Sam doesn't know it yet but he’s been living inside of great works of literature. I can’t help doing it; he seems to draw my mind to the words and images of what I’ve read.

Before he was born, I imagined he was baptized in the River of Oblivion--Lethe. Those words from the Aenid coming back to me

…at Lethe's stream they are drinking the waters that quench man's troubles, the deep draught of oblivion . . . They come in crowds to the river Lethe, so that you see, with memory washed out they may revisit the earth above.

And then later, while his eyes were so fresh with forgetfulness, Sam seemed to roll, toddle, and walk through this world in a dream. It was not time for the life of imagination because the world was hardly real for him. When we took a walk to the post office or to the corner and I pointed to the trees, I was reminded of One Hundred Years of Solitude:

The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.

Sam seemed to inspire these literary allusions and yet I had to tuck away those literary references and proceeded on; wondering if and when we could visit together what Azar Nafisi call "The Republic of Imagination."

But then, most recently he made some developmental jump. My literal boy seemed to find his Avatar (I mean by Avatar an embodiment or personification)—a knight. He created shields out of lids and every stick he picked up on our walks was his sword. His Aunts and Uncles bought him a castle last year for his birthday and this year he’s been given Merlin, Vultures, and Elfin Princesses as gifts. When I awake in the morning, I hear him moving the characters around the castle making up stories for him. We watched The Knight Story and he dressed up in his Halloween knight costume to joust with Heath Ledger.

For 15 years, I've owned a Greek Mythology book for children—never reading it, but keeping it for the day I could share it with my child. Lately he seemed ready for Medusa and Apollo. As opened this book, so long in my possession but so newly opened that the binding cracked, I felt something open up inside of me as if it wasn’t his imagination that might be allowed to emerge but mine too. I've dreamed about sharing this with someone and my moment had arrived. But as all things with Sam, as soon as I get too self-absorbed, he changes direction. As I began to read the first paragraph, I felt a foam sword being swiped along my shoulder. Sam warned me, “I’ll cut your neck off.”

If we were going to enter the "Republic of Imagination" together, I may be the tour guide, but I needed to rethink who would be holding the passports.