Velveteen Father An Unexpected Journey to Parenthood

"Mommy," he said. In the summer after his third birthday, Erez started asking for his mother, or at any rate for something he referred to by that name. "I'm going outside to find Mommy," he informed us one day, quite jauntily, as if he were announcing a trip to his toy box. And then, as an afterthought: "Where is she?" Of course he could not reach the deadbolt yet, and anyway he was not quite sure what the word "mommy" meant. But he knew that his friend Aaron had one and that his friend Rosalie had two. And that he didn't have any, at least not in the house. It was, Andy tells me, among Erez's first sounds-"ma"-just as it is for most children. "Ma" is the sound of first recourse, of merely opening the lips. It is the name that is there whether you speak it or not, "the invisible breath between every line," as the poet James Merrill put it. But for Erez, the bleating syllable lacked a referent. Andy was his father; he had no mother; no one came when he uttered the world's oldest word. Very soon after he started speaking it, the sound naturally fell into disuse, until it was hijacked several months later as the name for his favorite stuffed animal, a black-and-white cat even now called Ma'am-from the sound he had learned cats make, we assume. He had no mother, but of course he did. Andy often told him the story, or part of the story, in the dark as Erez lay curling for sleep:One day I walked from work and took the subway train to the bus and the bus to a plane, and the plane took me far away to another state, where a woman who was able to grow you inside her but could not take care of you was looking for a daddy to love you for the rest of your life. And I was that daddy. And I took you back to the plane to the bus and the bus to the subway-well, actually, this time, we took a cab-and brought you here to Brooklyn to be my son forever.Which perhaps explains Erez's mania for transportation, his every-night dreaming of trains. For a while he asks a few times a week: "Where's Mommy?" Other times he says definitively: "Daddy is my mommy." This seems a piece of wisdom, but it is the wisdom of the stopped clock, correct twice a day. In the category of family relationships he is apt to say anything. "Mommy?" he says to a passing stranger. "Mommy?" he says to a woman whose child has just called her that. Or at television time, this: "Let's watch Grandma Yankees!"-inexplicably having altered the title of the musical Damn Yankees to suit some subterranean agenda. Wallace and Gromit, characters in a favorite video, have similarly turned into Wallace and Grandma. And I sometimes get turned into Uncle-a term someone must have used in his presence, or even deliberately taught him to use. But I'm not his uncle, any more than Gromit (a claymation dog) is his grandma. I'm his . . . well, no wonder he's confused. He finds a picture in the drawer of a flea-market dry sink-a drawer so rarely opened by adults that it still contains news clippings and liquor bills from the man who owned it decades ago. What a party Sink Man threw in May of 1963! Here is an order for twenty-five bottles of wine plus an assortment of spirits and thick green liqueurs. But suddenly it's 1967 and here is a letter expressing sorrow over Sink Man's recent "tragedy": "I hope that time will enable you to overcome your present sadness. Fortunately, you are still very young so that much of your life is before you." The condolence-is it possible?-still reeks of pipe tobacco. And here is a photograph. But before we even see what it is, Erez has torn the tiny picture in four. This is not surprising; he shreds, juliennes, or otherwise dismembers almost anything he particularly likes. Playing cards and the pasteboard sleeves of videotapes are helpless in his path; pop-up books may be totally harvestedGreen, Jesse is the author of 'Velveteen Father An Unexpected Journey to Parenthood', published 2000 under ISBN 9780345437099 and ISBN 0345437098.