Lying in my sister’s familiar bedroom, I fell asleep at last. When I woke again, it was into a homesickness that felt physical, as its symptoms had been physical for seventeenth-century mercenary soldiers who’d fallen ill from being so far from home, the first to be diagnosed with the disease of nostalgia. Though never so acute, the longing for something I felt divided from, which was neither a time nor a place but something formless and unnamed, had been with me since I was a child. Though now I want to say that the division I felt was, in a sense, within me: the division of being both here and not here, but rather there.
I’d spent my early twenties thinking and writing about this ache. I’d tried, in my way, to treat it in the first novel I wrote, but in the end the only true cure I ever found for it had also been physical: first intimacy with the bodies of men who’d loved me, and later with my children. Their bodies had always anchored me. When I hugged them and felt their weight against me, I knew that I was here and not there, a reminder renewed each day when they climbed into my bed in the morning. And to know that I was here was also in a sense the same as wanting to be here, because their bodies created such a powerful reaction in mine, an attachment that didn’t need to question itself, because what could make more sense, or be more natural? At night my husband would turn his back to me and go to sleep on his side of the bed, and I would turn my back to him and go to sleep on mine, and because we could find no way across to the other, because we had confused lack of desire to cross with fear of crossing with inability to cross, we each went to sleep reaching for another place that was not here. And only in the morning, when one of our children slid into our bed, still warm from sleep, were we repaired to the place where we were and reminded of our strong attachment to it.
Facedown in my sister’s bed, I tried to reason with the anxiety seeping into me. I knew it not only from the many work trips I’d taken away from home, but also from when I dropped my children at school on mornings when they found it hard to say good-bye, when I would have to peel their hands off me and wipe the tears from their cheeks and then turn my back and go out the door as the teachers were always instructing us to do. The longer the good-bye stretched, the harder it became for the child, so they said, and what was required in such moments, if one wished to make it easier, was to detach with a swift pat and go quickly on one’s way. Around us there were always children who seemed to have no trouble with this daily procedure. They didn’t experience parting with their parent as a rupture or cause for distress. But neither of my children had an easy time of it. When my older son was three and began to attend preschool for a few hours in the mornings, he was so constantly distraught at separating that by late October the school psychologist called my husband and me in for a meeting, attended by his teachers and the head of the school. Behind the psychologist, colored paper leaves taped to the window fluttered in the updraft from the radiator. When he cries, the psychologist informed us, it’s not the normal crying of a child. So what is it? I asked. To us—and here she looked gravely around at her colleagues to gather their support—it seems existential.
I’d argued with her. Argued for my son’s happiness and well-being, and against a despair that surpassed the circumstantial. You should see him at home, I told her. A child brimming with joy! Full of humor, full of life! To support my claim, I drew from a deep well of anecdotes. But later, after the meeting was adjourned, the psychologist’s comment continued to get under my skin.
The difficulty of parting had become easier with time. My son grew to love school, and there were long periods when he had no trouble at all with good-byes. But the fear of separating never fully left him, and even now it still happened that from time to time he was thrown into a panic at the entrance to school. While he pleaded with me not to make him go, I could remain calm and talk him down. But after half an hour of this—once he had exhausted himself, finally submitted to the fact that there was no choice, and went wiping his eyes through the doors, and I’d gone the opposite way without looking back—sadness would engulf me. It could take me hours before I was able to concentrate on my work, and when it neared the time to pick him up, I would leave far earlier than I needed to and hurry the whole way. And though it would be easy to say that I just felt for my son, it seems to me that if I’d examined myself more closely all those years, I’d have had to admit to the likelihood that it was in fact my anxiety and loneliness that came first, and my sons’—the oldest’s, and then the younger one’s—that echoed it, because in some corner of themselves they understood that it was only in their presence, attached to them, that I could feel truly here, and that it was because of them that I stayed.
I called home on Skype. My husband answered, and then the boys’ faces bobbled into view. Nothing had died since I’d been gone, they told me; none of the remaining ants in the ant farm, or the mealworms, or the guinea pigs, or our dog, who was old and blind, though they themselves seemed to have grown or otherwise changed in my brief absence. And mustn’t they have? Every day, they were replacing the atoms they were born with with those they absorbed from their surroundings. Childhood is a process of slowly recomposing oneself out of the borrowed materials of the world. At an ordinary moment that passes without notice, a child loses the last atom given to him by his mother. He has exchanged himself completely, and then he is all and only the world. Which is to say: alone in himself.
My younger son told me about the story he’d written the day before, concerning a volcano with a square stuck in its stomach. He had a problem, my son explained (the volcano, not the square, for the square, at least, was dead). Some soldiers had come to him and instructed him to go to the Storm of Dawn. Had I ever heard of the Storm of Dawn? Well, in the center of the Storm of Dawn is a tiny dot that is the Storm of Doom, and that, my son informed me, is the hottest place in the world.
Behind him, I saw the familiar view of the blue kitchen cabinets, the window, the old stove, and remembered the feeling of evenings after the boys had fallen asleep, or mornings when I got back from dropping them off at school, when I’d tried to detect, again, the presence of the other life.