being heard

I've wondered about which words would be good to use when it's conversationally natural to mention to Isaac why his mother isn't in his life. If he asks, for example. He knows who his dad is, so where's his mom? He very reasonably will wonder sometimes, so it might make sense to say something about it. It's also going to be natural to just point this out sometimes, even if I'm not asked, because it's a big part of the explanation of why he has to go back to his grandparents' house on Sundays. "If you're my dad, why aren't I living here?" he might wonder. So I thought for a while about what the right words would be, and last weekend I had a chance to try them out.

When deciding on what to say, I figured obviously whatever I say has to be comprehensible, and I'm happy to report that I don't think this criterion will ever be difficult to satisfy. When I started having him at my apartment on weekends, I underestimated how much of what I say he understands. I had fallaciously inferred that his ability to understand me would run roughly parallel with his ability to speak coherently. His speech (i.e. spoken recognizable English) is limited to some exclamations (e.g., "Oh no!" and "Uh oh!") and vocabulary referring to common objects (e.g., "boots," "bus," and "apple"). Here's an important noun, since he's going to be living with me:

For some objects, he'll use the word, but without all of its phonemes. I've had a handful of a-ha moments where I realize that some word (e.g., "no") is actually being used to refer to a completely different idea (e.g., snow). "Owl" refers to an owl, but also a towel. When he stands on his stool next to me in the kitchen while I ("we") make dinner, he competes with me for the spatula, which he refers to only as "Pah." He's got a ways to go in terms of speech development. But it was a mistake to assume that his ability to speak reflected his ability to understand what is spoken. 

If you ask him where things are, he can usually point them out, even if he doesn't actually know how to say what he's pointing at. When I first started taking him on weekends, my dad (to Isaac, "Farfar") came over and gave me Isaac's favourite bedtime story, Big Joe's Trailer Truck, and told me that he can say "Joe!" So when I started reading it to him, I asked him, "Where's Joe?" and he raised his hand and drew an invisible circle around him with his index finger. Same thing on the next page. "Where's Joe?" this time noticing Joe in a new location. Then I wondered what else he could point out. At the kitchen counter, when I asked him where the spatula, whisk, and brush are, he could identify them all. Next time he had a bath, I asked him where the sheep was, the fox, the squirrel, the snail. He knew the names of all his bath toys, even though he can't say them. It was clear he had learned a lot more than I realized. This meant, I figured, that he was likely to remember any terms I teach him. On the Sunday evening of that weekend, after I got home from dropping him off at his grandparents' place, I ordered the first three books in the Where's Waldo? series, which he now loves. 

In addition to understanding terms that refer to objects, he also understands requests and instructions. He can put things back to where he found them if I say, "Can you put this back, please?" Once he took the spatula and left it somewhere in the apartment, and when I needed it and realized he had run off with it, I said, "Go get the spatula!" This turned out to be a much more efficient method of finding it than if I were to look around for it myself. I thought he had put it in his room, but it turns out it was under a pillow in front of the sofa in the living room. He knew what I was telling him to do, and he knew why: I needed the spatula. I believe now that he understands anything I say that's expressed in simple, plain English.

He can't engage in conversation yet, but he seems intent on playing the conversation game, even though he doesn't have the words for it. I've recently tried talking to him as if he can respond to the same social cues that an adult can. I start conversations with "Hi," and if he says "Hi" in return, I keep going: "How's it going?" At this point the conversation immediately degenerates into gibberish, but I'm happy that he at least knows it's his turn.

In addition to comprehensibility, I think it's also important that anything I say about his mother is true, and these two criteria together making finding the right words a bit challenging. I knew for sure I didn't want to use some crap like "She's in a better place." She's not in any place. She no longer exists. You have to exist to be in a place. Definitely nothing like, "She's in heaven" or "She's with God." There is no heaven, nor a God. These are nonstarters. Indeed, it would make me a proud father to learn it was my son that exposed the truth about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny to his schoolmates.

So what is true? Well, as I said, she doesn't exist. That means she isn't in the world. How about that? "She isn't in the world." A bit too abstract. What's a world to a 2-year-old? Maybe something simpler: "She doesn't exist." Same problem. What's existence? Even if those statements could be understood, a truthful response to the follow-up question "Why?" involves an explanation with some very heavy concepts (e.g., existence and its privation, terminal illness, and death), and this just isn't the kind of explanation that he may be seeking, which is one that focuses less on these darker concepts and more on why our situation is unusual.

Last weekend, I had settled on "She had to go." Superficially at least it described what happened in a way that seemed simple to understand. She was diagnosed with stage 4c cancer, and death was deemed unpreventable. There wasn't anything anyone could do about it. That means she was in the world, and by necessity, she had to leave it. She was forced to leave the world.

It was also something Isaac should be able to understand. If not now, soon. I impose necessities on Isaac all the time. If he wants me to read him a story, he has to put his other books back in his Montessori bookshelf first. I don't just tell him what he has to do. I also explain the principle. "You can't just throw all your books all over the floor. If you're not reading it, you have to put it back." He also has to sit on the potty all the time, and he has to poo in there. When it's time to get groceries, he has to put on his boots, his jacket, his gloves, and his hat. He has to get strapped into his stroller, and if he gets a chance to walk on his own, he has to stay on the sidewalk and stay off the road. If he wants bathtime to end, he has to pull out the stopper. If I can refer to his mom, say, in a picture, and tell him she was my wife, "She had to go" could communicate that she's gone by necessity.

"She had to go" might also beg the question, but not in the same circular way that "She doesn't exist" does. But "Why?" in response to "She had to go" can be interpreted, not as "What earthly circumstances made her have to go?", but as "What metaphysical circumstances made her have to go?", which can truthfully (and trivially) be answered with "I don't know." In this sense, I don't know why she had to stop existing, in the same sense I don't know why any past event, though it might not have occurred, had to happen. I'm exposing a metaphysical position here: No event has to happen. It's not strictly speaking necessary that the sun rises tomorrow. But it is necessary that the sun rose yesterday morning. In other words, necessity becomes an attribute of an event after it occurs. I guess what I'm saying is that we don't really have any idea why things happen in the particular way that they do, especially when something could have happened in one particular way or in another particular way, and both of those possibilities both appear to be consistent with all other past events. If Ale had not died, no one would argue that her existence defies the laws of reality. However, since she did die, her lack of existence has become a necessary condition for those who continue to exist. She had to go, and because she went, she now has to be gone. If I'm asked why, I'm being asked to explain the mechanism by which one particular possibility became reality instead of another. No one knows that because nobody understands that mechanism (which some call "God"). "I don't know" is an honest response, and when Isaac is older and able to talk about it, maybe I can unpack it for him.

Since last weekend, I've had some other ideas of how I could put it. "She couldn't stay" seems like it might be even better because it better expresses that she didn't want to go. But when Isaac was over last weekend, an opportunity arose, and "She had to go" was locked and loaded.

Isaac seems to be highly receptive when he's in bed and ready for sleep. I was surprised once by how effectively I was able to calm him in the middle of the night once by simply explaining his life circumstances and mentioning each of his grandparents. It was a Friday night and the first night he had slept at my place in a while. I woke up to the sound of Isaac crying, but it wasn't what you might call a normal cry. It was closer to screaming. I came into his bedroom and turned the lamp on, but the sight of me appeared to do nothing for him. I tried saying "Isaac, it's okay", "Relax", "Calm down", and "Shh," but nothing worked. I went and grabbed a ready-made bottle of milk and offered it to him, but he didn't want it. I felt and smelled his diaper, but he wasn't in need of changing. But he was inconsolable. Then it got worse. It sort of looked like he was being startled over and over again, and each jump twitched his whole body into a different position. He was moving as if everything he was touching was on fire. I thought he must've been having some sort of panic attack. He woke up, maybe from a bad dream, looked around, saw a different place, saw a different person, and just lost it. So I started to just calmly explain the situation: "Isaac, you're actually home now. I'm your dad. This is actually your room. You're just not used to it because you haven't been able to live here permanently. You've mostly been sleeping at your grandparents' houses. But right now, they're home at their houses and they're sleeping." It was working. He was calming down tremendously. Now I figured this probably had more to do with the sound of my voice, which tends to soothe him when he's crying for one reason or another. But something happened that made me reconsider. I continued: "This weekend you're going to stay with me. But very soon, you're going to see your mamama, your papapa, Farfar..."

"...and Nan!" he interjected, his intonation excitedly rising above mine. He finished my sentence.

"That's right!" I said. "Exactly!" I was excited, too. Ignoring for now that he shouldn't really be interrupting people and that it's actually kind of rude to finish people's sentences, I was impressed. Granted it could be that, since he hears "Farfar and Nana" all the time, he was merely completing that phrase. But even if that's true, he probably still understood that I was telling him about his grandparents and that I was doing so because I wanted him to feel better. That means he probably understood that Dad knows what I care about and Dad is here to help me feel better, even if he didn't understand every detail. This was an achievement even if his comprehension was minimal.

In a few moments, he was speaking his usual pleasant gibberish again and happily accepted the bottle of milk. He drank it and fell back asleep. 

It could be he's more receptive because nighttime is storytime. He gets comfortable in fresh pyjamas, with all his stuffed toys, and cozies up next to me while I read him Big Joe's Trailer Truck or Big Frank's Fire Truck. We'll sometimes read two or three books from front to back. He might be conditioned to pay close attention at night.

At some point last Saturday Isaac got his hands on a few pictures I have on display in the hallway. One of them was a picture in which I'm holding him when he was less a few months. I asked him where his dad was, and he pointed me out. I didn't expect him to recognize himself when he was a baby, so I volunteered that information. "That's you when you just a few months old, you cute Pochi!" The two other pictures on that shelf were of me, Ale, and our friends, one taken when we went on a ski trip to Mont Tremblant and one taken when we went biking along the Humber River. He got a hold of those, too. I was actually hard to recognize in them, either because I was too far in the background or because there was too much gear obstructing my face. So I pointed myself out. "That's me."

"Should I point out Ale?" I thought. He knows what she looks like—his grandparents have pictures of her all around their apartment, and he spends most of his time there now. And I figured he must also know that she, at the very least, had a special relation to me. I remembered one time when I picked him up from his grandparents' place, after I called him over to get his winter clothes on, he stopped on his way to look over at a picture, placed right at his eye level, of me, next to Ale, holding him when he was just five weeks old. I wondered if I should have said something about it, but he didn't look at it for long, and I like to try to get back on the subway on the same transfer, so I was a bit in a rush. But I'm pretty sure his grandparents had explained the who's who of that picture. Probably more than once. I figured he'd probably be interested to see that I've got a few pictures of her myself.

"That's your mom," I said.

No response.

Later that night, when the lights were out and he was about to go to sleep, he started whimpering, "Farfar." 

I had no plans to see my dad that weekend. "No Farfar this weekend, sorry." A tad harsh. My sister deals with this sort of thing nicely, using the phrase "Back soon." Apparently it's a good consolation phrase when her son's upset that someone's left or someone isn't here. So I started explaining, "You're not going to see him tomorrow, but you'll see him soon. He's part of the family. He's your grandfather." I thought I'd just remind him of everything again. "Farfar's one of your grandparents. So is Nana. And papapa and mamama, they're your grandparents too. And I'm your father, your dad." And here I just felt it was right to fill in the blanks: "And your mom," I said, and after a pause, "she had to go."

He put his arms around me and gave me a hug. I was perplexed! Isaac doesn't really hug me like that. The only other time he did that was after he (with my guidance) put on a VHS copy of Fantasia and I explained to him what was going on in The Sorcerer's Apprentice segment. I didn't know why he hugged me then, and I can't say I know for sure why he hugged me this time, but apparently he heard something and felt inclined to hug me.

Then he turned over and went to sleep.

Usually when he falls asleep, it's a cue to exit and do things I don't otherwise have time to do when he's awake. But this time I stayed where I was and stayed there the rest of the night.