Though I sometimes worried that skating was an accelerant for Sean’s preteen yips, there was no denying he found peace on his board, a place that made sense, where he was in full control, with no parents or teachers setting expectations or conveying their disappointment. And Leo? When he dropped into a deep bowl or popped a perfect kickflip or costarred in a YouTube video that he shot and edited himself? He wasn’t the shortest kid, his size didn’t matter, and the board and the park defined him in ways that nothing else could.
Skating made them happier than any activity, so the boards came along wherever we went as a family, tucked awkwardly beneath our table at a restaurant, crammed into the car trunk, squeezed into overhead train or airplane bins. Like the stuffed animals they’d only recently semiretired—Poly the polar bear for Leo; Twiggy the yellow bunny for Sean—the boards could never be left behind. “Skate trip” and “skate vacation” entered our vocabulary.
One weekend I took the boys north to Vancouver on Amtrak. We dumped our bags at a cheap hotel and hit the streets. I videotaped them skating through meth-head sections of the city’s Chinatown. At a gritty skate park splayed beneath highway overpasses and train tracks, I filmed Leo, on his first try, landing a frighteningly huge full-speed ollie off a five-foot ledge—a ledge taller than he was. Had he missed, he and his helmet-less skull would’ve sampled Canada’s touted health care.
After nailing his flying ollie, Leo coolly rolled past me, flashing #1 fingers—“First try, Dad!”—then fist-bumped his brother. Later, as I added a soundtrack and posted the video to YouTube, feeling proud of our skate trip adventures, our quirky father-son togetherness, I realized, as Mary once put it: What choice did we really have here? I kept buying shoes and boards, filming and photographing them, sanctioning this sport that kept us together, even if something about the skate-vs.-school mismatch nagged at me.
By now, Sean and Leo had created their own personal fight club. It didn’t take much—“Dude, don’t look at me like that”—before they were entangled on the floor like two octopi. Boy fighting was a constant in our life. As in every. Single. Day. From their twos to their teens, the same screams and crying, the same weapons (plastic swords, boxing gloves, kitchen implements, fists), and often the same script . . .
Get off of me dawg, Jesus . . . I didn’t mean to punch you in the mouth I meant to punch you in the neck . . . What the hell’s wrong with you bro—goddam!
You started it . . . It’s not my fault . . . Get off me, bro . . . I’ll beat your ass . . . Ow, that hurts . . . Cry about it . . . I can’t breathe . . . Ow, OW! Mom, Dad!
Some fights took on a new edge. One night we watched a Glee episode that tackled the topic of bullying. I told the boys how kids had picked on my sister, called her retard or ’tardo, how I’d always despised bullies. It seemed like a good chat, but soon Sean was chasing Leo around the house, squirting him with a turkey baster, tormenting him until Leo cried.
I finally intervened and smacked Sean atop his head. Mary and I rarely resorted to corporal punishment. I could’ve counted on one hand the number of times I’d actually spanked them. So a swat on the head got Sean’s attention. Furious, he grabbed his skateboard and ran from the house. I found my boy an hour later, half a mile from home, outside a dumpy doughnut shop. He’d skated there and was sitting atop his board in the rain. I hugged him, he got in the car, and we drove home in silence.
I remembered drives like that with my parents, nothing to say, the car filled with a cloud of teenage rage. As a dad, I hated such shitty moments. I hated being the enforcer.
Leo, meanwhile, seemed torn. He wanted to support his angsty brother, but he also wanted family peace. He was learning to play the middle. The peacemaker.
For his eleventh birthday, we took Leo and friends to a paintball place, where I accidentally shot him in the neck (he was furious) and Mary shot me (accidentally?) in the crotch. That night, we let Leo stay out late, and when he got home I spied a text on his cell phone: “was that ur 1st kiss?” I interrogated Sean, who told me Leo had played truth or dare with two neighbor girls. A week later, more cell phone spying revealed that Leo had been texting both girls, one of whom got mad when she spotted him with the other.
His reply: “I’m with both of you.”
Leo was like that at home, too: his brother’s defender when Sean needed him; conciliator when Mary and I needed him. Leo adapted to whoever needed him more. He volunteered to set the table, fill water glasses, wash dishes, take out the trash. He sought out household jobs but also lobbied like a union rep for more pay. He’d later call it “chores for cheddar.” One night, as Sean flopped in homework-aversion agony on the couch, Leo asked me and Mary, “How about I make you guys a martini?”
He’d seen us mix plenty over the years—more so in recent months. Manhattans, too. He surely knew they had magical, family-calming qualities. Mary and I exchanged looks: Is this wrong? I handed Leo Hemingway & Bailey’s Bartending Guide and told him, “Vodka, not gin. And not too much vermouth.” Leo’s martinis became a semiregular predinner event. I videotaped him one night, pouring and shaking like a tiny Tom Cruise in Cocktail, and edited together a Vimeo clip I called “Leo the Bartender.”
But . . . was the intensity in our household getting to him? Were Sean’s battles against homework, chores, and parenting, and my increasingly shrill and shouted responses, doing some damage?
One night Leo and I talked about the possibility of a new middle school for Sean, and I shared my concerns about them drifting apart the way my brother and I did when we’d ended up at different high schools. “That’d never happen with me and Sean,” Leo assured me. “It’s just . . . I just want him to come home happy. I want us to be happy.”
I hadn’t quite realized that we’d become un-happy. Another night, after mixing martinis—olives for me, a twist for Mary—then helping prep and clean up dinner, with Sean complaining about an assignment in an overly dramatic British accent (“It’s too haaaahd”), Leo pulled Mary aside and asked if they could have “a private talk.”
Mary suggested a walk. By now she’d become a world-class neighborhood walker. As they strolled down the street and across the playground at Leo’s school, Mary waited until Leo was ready. “I feel like a ghost in my own house,” he said, then talked for thirty straight minutes about school, friends, teachers, girls, skating . . . and death.
“I just don’t understand what happens,” he said.
Leo also, for some reason, told Mary he was worried about divorce.
“Are you and Fudge-luff okay?” he asked, using the nickname the boys had given me.
The name came from Leo’s toddler-era mispronunciation of father, which had sounded like fah-zhah. It evolved over time into a term of endearment that sounded like Persian cheese, fuszhe-luv, then Fudge-luff or Fudge Love or Fudgie. Mary became Mumzhluv, Mumslo, Mums Loaf, Mumzie, or Mum.
“Mumslo?” Leo asked. “Are we going to be okay?”
When two of Sean’s classmates got expelled for smoking pot in the bathroom—and one of the pot smoker’s friends was arrested for bringing a handgun to school—that’s when we decided it was time for a new school. We switched Sean from his public school teeming with a thousand students to a private school with sixty kids and a dozen teachers, crammed beneath a bank in the International District.
Personally, I worried that the choice of schools might not matter, that all teachers were overworked, underpaid, and generally ill-equipped to get through to kids who viewed teachers through the same lens they viewed cops. But Sean was game for a change, and his application questionnaire spoke to his need for a new scene:
When are you happiest? “I am happiest when skateboarding.”
When are you most proud? “I’m most proud of being myself.”
What do you like to do with your free time? “Skateboard. Period.”
Use five adjectives to describe yourself. “Hyper, Active, Anxious, Clueless, Bored.”
Mary and I hoped a small private school would nurture Sean, help him feel better about himself, and as Mary wrote in our portion of the application, “build confidence and trust, and reengage him with a community so he can start learning and enjoy school . . . and hopefully help him reconnect to that core person inside.”
As I watched my wife (an A student in her day) spend an hour completing the parent section of the application, I realized: she is as worried as I am . . .
“At his core, Sean is a thoughtful, intelligent, creative, curious, and loving person,” Mary wrote. “Someone who knows what’s right and wrong and wants to do the right thing; someone who has ambitions to excel at things (like skateboarding) and create things (like videos) and explore the world around him.”
Sean’s new school let him bring his board, let him skate in the parking lot at lunch, even offered to let him build his own lesson plan around skateboarding. He could study its history and culture, the marketing and economics of today’s skate scene. We briefly felt like we’d won some academic lotto for our school-wary son.
But Sean? He still preferred not to. Bit by bit he rebelled against the most lenient academic institution in Seattle.
“I’m seeing another side of Sean,” the earnest principal told Mary, after initially assuring us that he’d “dealt with lots of kids like Sean” and “he’ll be fine here.”
The end came quickly. Sean developed a rivalry with a student who was bullying another kid. One day, in defense of the victim, Sean took justice into his own hands and hid the bully’s iPhone and sneakers. Teachers called a schoolwide meeting to get to the bottom of things. Sean initially pretended that he knew nothing about the missing iPhone. But the evidence crowded in on him. He grew angry that he was getting in trouble, not the bully. And then he lost it, declaring the whole “community concept” bogus.
“This isn’t real life,” he told the gathering of students and teachers, then turned to the principal: “Your methods are flawed!”
In our subsequent—and final—meeting, the principal told me he’d never had a student stand up to him like that. “I’m not sure what to make of Sean,” he said, with a mix of what I read as admiration and disappointment and, I think, fear. “I’ve never met anyone quite like him . . .” He suggested we consider another school for seventh grade.
In a follow-up e-mail, one of Sean’s teachers tried to ease the pain of our failed private school experiment: “I want to be sure you both know that I really came to love and appreciate Sean in the short time we had together. On Friday he came to say good-bye . . . and we had a connection in that moment that was piercingly tender and tearful. Thank you for the time with your beautiful son, and thank you for taking a stand for him as his parents, making the tough calls, and doing courageous work.”
Courageous? That’s not how it felt. I had hoped that a small private school might do some heavy lifting for me, make my kid care about learning. Of course, middle school can be a downer for any kid, but in Sean’s case we worried that the transition from hippie-hillbilly Asheville to a gritty big city was more jarring than we realized.
One night, Sean pulled Mary aside for a talk and told her, “It’s all Daddy’s fault, you know.”
“What’s Daddy’s fault?” she asked.
“Everything.”
I was glad one of us, with her walk-and-talk therapy sessions, was getting through. But I also worried Sean was right. He and Leo had grown from toddlers into boys in a lush and magical place called Happy Acres. Then we changed the rules, yanked them from their comfort zone, across the country, and forced them to grow into teens in grunge city.
Reaching the end of our first Seattle school year, a year after our move west, felt like wobbling across the finish line with a flat tire and no gas. We decided to pack the boards and head back east for a weeklong stay with Mary’s parents. We tooled around Asheville, visiting the boys’ friends and mine, day-tripping past the playgrounds and landmarks of their childhood, including the house where we’d almost lost Sean. As we pulled up to the same spot where he got nailed by that silver Corolla, the boys looked up at the house—“our swing is still there!”—while I looked left, at the grassy spot where Sean says he died and saw God.
At downtown’s Food Lion Skatepark, the boys skated with a former grade school pal, and I watched the three of them, all pale and bony arms, skinny-fuzzy legs, in their tank tops and required helmets, gliding into the same bowl where Leo had first learned to drop in, the place where their passion for skating was ignited.
That afternoon we drove out to Happy Acres. The warm air and bouncy light brought it all back, the memories of our off-the-grid place (which we still owned and rented to tenants), this strange homestead in the misty mountains where my little men had lived half their lives. No wonder city life in Seattle had fucked us all up some.
On the way back down the hill, we passed the turnoff where I’d taken the call from my dad just two years earlier.
“Neal?” his shaky voice had said that day, and I’d known in an instant . . . my mother was gone.
Her death began twenty years earlier.
I was living with two friends in Philadelphia, working as a stringer at the Inquirer, paid by the story, no benefits, but a dream job. I sat beside the Inquirer’s mob reporter, worked with reporters and editors who had won Pulitzers, who had written books. This was the start of my writing career. I bought a car, got a credit card, wore a tie. I covered murder trials and elections. I saw my first dead body, scored my first A-1 story. I was twenty-three. My writing life—my life life—was about to begin.
Early one morning the phone rang, and my roommate banged on my door.
“Neal, wake up, it’s your dad!”
In a quavering voice—the same one I’d recognize twenty years later—my dad said that he’d come home to find my mom crumpled and bleeding on the basement floor. She’d fallen down the stairs and hit her head. They’d airlifted her from our local hospital to a head trauma unit in Allentown. She was in a coma. She needed surgery. He told me to hurry.
My mom was still in a coma ten days later when her mother, my eighty-year-old Irish grandma, Della, fell down the steps of her apartment in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. My uncle found her, and we eulogized and buried her while my mom continued her deep sleep in Allentown.
On one of my trips to visit my mom, I bought a $600 word processor at the Allentown mall, one of my first big credit card purchases. At the hospital, I started writing a short story about a newspaper reporter whose brain-injured mother awakes from a coma and doesn’t recognize him. “Where’s my son? The boy . . . Where’s what’s his name?”
After a transfer to a rehab center in New Jersey, followed by months of physical and occupational therapy, my mother went on to make a slow but impressive recovery. I’d always credit Maura for helping her pull through, for holding her hand during our hospital visits and transmitting some sort of telepathic daughter-mother SOS. Something deep inside my mother’s wounded head must have gotten the message “Maura needs you. Wake up!” She did, three weeks after her fall, and she healed—far beyond doctors’ expectations—but still, there were gaps . . . She was still our mom, still Pat, but an 80 percent version. She stopped shy of a full recovery.
Seven years after my mother’s accident, I was living in New York with Mary when I received another early-morning phone call, this time from my brother.
My sister had passed out. Jeff and my mom were driving her to the hospital. I frantically dug my old BMW out of the snow on Riverside Drive, a few blocks from the cathedral where Mary and I had married a year earlier. During an excruciating wait for the windows to defrost, I flashed back to our wedding. My lone regret about that otherwise beautiful April day was that I never danced with my sister. My mom later told me that Maura had been waiting for me to ask her to dance, a memory that tormented me.
I raced an hour west on I-80. At the hospital, my dad arrived a few minutes after I did, and we awkwardly embraced, probably our first hug since I was a toddler. Standing outside the ER, the doctor told us Maura had had a massive stroke.
“She won’t survive this,” he flatly declared.
They got her settled in a room and we all sat watching the monitors, stroking her hands, her hair, her face. I pressed my cheek against hers and whispered in her ear, telling her how much she meant to me, how she inspired me, empowered me. From my sister I learned what it meant to be compassionate, tolerant. I could tap into that superpower when I needed a jolt of strength. Without her, I’d be . . . normal?
I begged Maura to stay alive a little longer, at least until Mary could get there to say good-bye. And Maura did it, she waited. Hours later, Mary arrived from the TV commercial she’d been shooting, nervous and confused, too new to my weird family. She hugged Maura and said good-bye and I loved her for that. Within twenty minutes Maura’s heart slowed further, as did the machine blips, slower and slower until she was gone.
Sean was born a year later, and relatives came to our new house in New Jersey to check out this kid with the spiky hair and goofy grin, and I’d hold him in my arms and think how much Maura would’ve loved being an aunt. And my mom? Oh, she would have been such a cool grandma. But she never really got the chance.
She and my dad moved to Florida after Maura died, and she began acting strange, wandering from home, arguing with neighbors, showing signs of dementia that doctors attributed to her head injury. She slid backward, from 80 percent, to 70, and on down. Mary and I moved once more, from New Jersey to Maryland, where Leo was born. My mom came to visit, and I’d find her in the bathroom talking to herself in the mirror, talking to Maura. I was afraid to let her hold her new grandson and would make her sit down first, then carefully hand her bubbly baby Leo.
Back in Florida, walking down the street, my mother fell and hit her head. Another coma. She was hospitalized for weeks, the start of a terrible decline that lasted a decade, the last half of those years in a nursing home. What should have been golden days of sunshiny retirement for my parents instead became a series of hospitalizations, injuries, illnesses, meds. My dad kept working to cover the bills, and I think to keep himself sane. My boys never got to know their grandmother, only the childlike shell she became.
When my mother died and my dad had called me that day in North Carolina, I’d pulled over and parked beside a cornfield and cried, choking sobs that took nearly an hour to subside. Then I went for an hours-long hike in the rain.
At her funeral, in the church where I’d once been an altar boy, with her coffin parked in the same spot Maura’s had stood a dozen years earlier, I walked to the pulpit and spoke about “vivacious, life-loving Pat . . . a strong, independent woman . . . funny, witty, sarcastic, irreverent.” I talked about the Pat I knew before her accidents, the one who gabbed with strangers, who devoured fat romance novels, who loved to cook, who loved thrift stores, tea, chablis, who devoted herself to Maura and others like Maura.
More than anything I wanted Sean and Leo to hear who their grandmother had been. I called her “a quiet hero.” Behind me sat Father McHugh, who’d also helped us bury Maura, the good man who’d kicked me out of high school—something I joked about in my eulogy—who’d been a constant in my family’s life for decades.
I choked up only once, when I mentioned my dad, whose quiet strength and devotion to Pat over the years had humbled me.
Pat was buried beside Maura, beneath a tombstone preengraved with her name, and my dad’s name.
After the funeral, I gave Mary and the boys a tour of my hometown. It was the Fourth of July weekend, and as we walked through the village and along the boardwalk we caught the tail end of the annual waterskiing show, the same show where Don and I had performed. We later explored town, and the flashbacks went pop, pop, pop. Here was the stationery shop where Don and I shoplifted pricey pens. There was the playground where I chugged my first beer, choked on cigarettes. Here was the beach where I’d kissed my first girl. There was the trail where I fell down laughing, tripping on mushrooms with Dennis and Dave. And here was the street where I cruised atop my first skateboard.
Now, two years after losing Pat, a year into our new life in Seattle, with my kids entering their middle school years, I desperately wanted to call her, beg her to clue me in to the mysteries of raising of two boys. Pat used to send me letters at college, and one day I found a few buried at the bottom of a lockbox, including the one where she gave me shit for some test I’d apparently decided to skip. “I guess I’m upset that you would just give up without giving it your best shot,” she wrote.
“But this is your life, Neal T,” she added, in her very Pat-like blend of motivation plus Irish-Catholic guilt. “Do what you think is best. And drive safe.”
I also found in the lockbox a worn-out newspaper clipping she’d sent me, a hokey poem called “The Man in the Glass.” I remembered that back in college I thought it was silly, but for some reason I’d saved it all those years. As I held the frayed clipping in my hand, it seemed like she was reaching out to me, reminding me of something . . .
It isn’t your father or mother or wife
Whose judgment upon you must pass
The fellow whose verdict counts most in your life
Is the one staring back from the glass