“Perhaps it takes courage to raise children.”
— John Steinbeck
There were these days when I would pull the kids in my garden wagon. Down the street to the church preschool under the electrified blue summer morning. Or beneath the canopy of autumn blaze rustling in the breeze. Three kids in the cart and I was the horse, my strength on display for all the world to see. If you had been driving down the road right then, you would have likely saluted our image, but only up in your head. Smiling at the scene, you might have told yourself that this was a wholesome little shot/ these kids and their dad/ easing down the uneven sidewalk/ passing over the gargantuan tree roots surfacing up through the aged cement.
At some point on these walks I had to cross us over to the other side. The responsibility of the move wasn’t lost on me. There’s this delicate nerve that dangles like a high voltage wire above the life of a parent. In order to move through the world with a child in tow, you must learn to ignore the fear that comes with each distinct harrowing possibility. Every slide in the park/ every free run down the frozen foods aisle/ each time you head out in the car with kids buckled in their car seats/ it all requires a spell of sorts to be cast upon the grown-up. Otherwise the possibilities of true reality can stop you dead in your tracks. Every innocent moment with children is leashed to a gossamer thread of chance. An endless array of horrors and tragedies lurk around each bend.
Where the narrow strips of grass along the sidewalk melt into the street I would check both ways, looking out for the farm boys in their wild rides. Biting my lip, I’d listen for them to come rumbling around the bend at maddening speed, but they rarely showed up. Then I would pull us out into the street like a river, the raw shards of panic urging me faster than I ever really needed to go .
We always reached the other side, emerging by a neighbor’s holly bush.
“We made it!,” I’d exclaim to the kids. But I guess it was more for my sake. They already had absolute trust and faith in me. I was unbreakable in their eyes. Back then, I would drag the wagon behind me, the veins in my arms bulging on a hot July morning, and I would glare into the eyes of danger. And each kid back there, two little boys and a little girl, was grinning ear to ear, feeling good about the world, feeling safe in the arms of love.
As it should be.
And as it rarely remains.
Nothing back then was simple and that includes raising the kids. As much as I wish I could say that there were longs stretches of smooth sailing, that was rarely the case. Almost from the get-go, my three kids found themselves thrust into the midst of a complex and damaging divorce. Nothing, for the longest time, appeared to be what it truly was, and therefore I believe that I was forever under the impression that nothing happening was actually real insofar as real usually goes. The broken family was true enough, I could accept. But beyond that, there was a lot of unrealized emotion and psychological reaction that I just didn’t even really recognize let alone know what to do with.
I struggled, as a single dad, in privacy, while I portrayed myself as honestly as I could in my writing and on social media. The depiction though was murky. Such attempts at self-expression often are, it turns out, when the creator of the narrative is quite broken inside. And that is what I had become.
Broken. Broken by a lack of understanding. How had our marriage come to this when there was a baby on the way?
Broken. Broken by a swarm of little atrocities that were attempting to add up outside my window. Why does so much of this not feel right?
Broken. Broken by the role I found myself playing that I had never imagined myself playing at all. Was I an ignoramus in our family? Or was I now beginning to sense something I wasn’t meant, by design, to perceive?
And broken. Broken by the everydayness and the everythingness that divorce can bring on for certain types. Having no real experience with the dynamics of waking up one morning to fend entirely for myself with kids, I suppose there was a lot of insecurity that came over me. I was no longer the husband in a beautiful family. I was now the single dad emerging from a kind of wreckage no one wants to talk about.
To this day, few have ever really asked me what happened. It’s staggering in a way. People want to like your photos and your silly videos in the feed. But at the end of the day, there is very little room in most people’s world for the shock and pain of your divorce.
Why? Because it hurts too much to think about that shit. We are all crossing the street all the fucking time. That alone is enough to make us crazy. We don’t need to rub your fresh hot blood all over our skin to understand, man.
Take your little broken heart and get the fuck out of here.
Milo, formerly Blake, formerly Violet (although that child is fading now, with time), walks somewhere deep within my bones.
They strut across the church parking lot out behind the house, right now, big construction worker headphones on, the Bluetooth pouring music I don’t know at all into their head. I watch them out the kitchen window and I see their various smiles explode and then disappear within the course of any given instant. Arms in the air, the kid stims, arms upward, fingers pointing and then curling and then maybe pointing again at a sky above that never ends. An outer space none of us can grasp at all.
Autism is such a part of Milo that the part of me that once wondered about the mirror image of the kid/ the same child but without autism/ has weathered over time, quite naturally, in order to dissipate and drift. There’s no longer any unanswerable questions or whatever. There is only this. The life. Us. Them. Me. Everyone else, and all of us together. Everyone else and each of us apart. Structuring a monumental love around Milo isn’t easy for me. Within each passing of them by my shoulder, I feel a longing that I no longer think will be met. The kid has bright eyes and a wicked smile, their sense of themselves is stoic and well-defined. I hear them speak of the passions that they hold dear to them and I want so badly to join them in all of that somehow but anymore it seems impossible. I’m not on their radar much these days. There is an aura of invisibility around me when they are near and I can’t help but blame myself so much of the time. Even though I guess that isn’t exactly fair either.
In the past, Blake (or Violet) would bring up the times that I yelled at them. And if it wasn’t specific just to them, then I was yelling at all of the kids/ reading them the riot act conjured up by the broken parts of me they didn’t deserve. Having three children, 4, 2, and an infant, all to myself was something that is too difficult for me to explain. I don’t mean that to sound condescending or anything, but the truth of the matter is that if you have never been a single parent to some kids that age all at once, then you just aren’t going to get it. People mostly aren’t meant to get it either, I suspect. Divorce doesn’t usually happen at a time like that, when the kids are so young. But in my case it did. And there were times when I felt detached from my own reality, unable to comprehend how I was in that situation or what I was supposed to do to deal with it.
Look, a little kid shitting themself is one thing. But a little kid shitting themself in Walmart while another kid disappears around the end of an aisle far away and a baby is crying in your cart by the paper towels you have elected to buy (instead of microwave popcorn/ there’s just not enough loot) is something entirely different. You deal with it, I learned, as if all life depends on the outcome. You succeed because failure is not an option. I mean: how can it be? I would talk myself out of the ocean of anxiety bashing all around me in order to breathe enough to find order in the chaos. I had been walking a tightrope up until then, frazzled but steady, as I attempted to move us through the store, get what we needed, and hopefully look at the Halloween stuff for fun before we checked out. But I knew by then that nothing was guaranteed. So much could go wrong with my plan. And so much almost always did.
Day after day, week after week, I mixed my absolute love up with impossible panic. At once dedicated and loving but on edge and tenuous, I became a version myself I still cannot fathom let alone believe. Once, not long ago, I’d been a guitar player in a minor-league band. Now here I was, a grown man struggling to survive in the single-dad world (half the week / every week). I was damaged heavily by my own perspective of my experience. And I was damaged even more by the way things I had little control over were continuing to come down.
Milo, later, would mention a time one morning before school when I towered above them and told them to “Stop fucking up.” This was years ago and yet they still bring it up sometimes.
And I feel an axe in my face when they do.
I watch them walking back and forth out back/ sometimes hurrying up in an excited burst of jogging/ their face stretching and gasping like there is a hard wind blowing into it/ and I see my face in their face/ I see my limbs in the shape of their limbs/ and I feel so torn/ so unsure/ so certain/ so evolved/ so horrendous/ all at once. The pride I know in being their dad, it feels twisted and contorted by things both real and unreal. The love I have for them like fire from the furnace/ I have to pass it around/ it feels like/ to let everyone have a look at it/ spit in it/ hold it up to their own fucking face and let it flash hot in their own eye when it’s not theirs at all/ because its mine. Mine. Mine. Mine. My heart. My love. My story. My take. My version. My world.
To this day Milo has never said I love you to me. It isn’t because they don’t love me. I know they do. But love makes them cringe. Hugs make them uneasy. Expressing solid caring towards another human being seems to feel too risky, too uncertain for them to wander out in all that. And it may be the autism, I know. Hell, anyone would likely think it probably is.
But it might be other things too.
It could be the sense they got when they were so young and seemingly aloof but actually insanely dialed in. This sense, perhaps, of how much love can hurt. How much it can fuck with you and fuck you up. Even so, I want to tell them that it’s always worth it. The point of being alive is to feel real pain so that the beauty, when it shows up, overpowers your senses, and conquers — with joy — all the miles of your road.
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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin.
