Human credentials

Last week I walked down the hall from my office to celebrate a co-worker's retirement. I ate half a piece of cake with some kind of tasty cannoli filling and then decided I would save the other half for after I finished my lunch salad.

But when I got back to my office, I had a missed call from the most dreaded contact I have saved in my phone: "PS 196 Nurse."

The call was one hour old. Nurse Annette had also called my office phone and then resorted to sending me an email. I was officially The Worst Working Mother of All Time.

When I finally got to school to pick up Eli, he deployed that time-honored weapon of our people: guilt. "Why didn't you answer your phone?" he asked in a small, sad voice. "I cried in the nurse's office."

The way that I can tell that Eli is genuinely not feeling well is that he's always really sweet to me when he's sick. "Thank you for coming to get me," he continued as we left school with a citation from the nurse that read CHILD MAY NOT RETURN TO SCHOOL UNTIL FEVER-FREE FOR 24 HOURS in prominent highlighted capital letters. He slipped his hand into mine.

"I care about you so much," he said. "I would do anything for you."

So much of parenting is about sacrifice, about the sleep and sanity you give up for your children's sake. Lately I've been thinking a lot about the things we give up for the people we love. (My pre-parenting-sized clothes, exhibit A.) Should I cope with a lengthier commute so Eli can live in a house with a yard? How much of my hard-earned paycheck is appropriate to part with for summer camp? And so many of the best parenting stories are about those sacrifices, about parents who gave up time and opportunities and endured hardships so their children could be successful at their dreams.

There are so many times as a parent that I think I haven't sacrificed enough, that I haven't given up enough for Eli to have the kind of childhood I dream about for him. But when we have incidents like the Great Nurse's Office Neglect of 2018, I'm reminded that so much of parenting is also inherently selfish: I created this child, and now his soul is designed to love me and forgive me even when I let him down.

I think I live a small life: I go to work, I ride the subway back and forth, I go to the gym or out for a run, I listen to podcasts, I go to book club, I watch Bravo, I sometimes walk to the dog (but mostly Phil walks the dog, and I'm always promising I'll commit to walking the dog more often; you get the idea).

But when something awful happens in the world, I find myself tiptoeing in to Eli's room at night to watch him sleep, and I think, You. You are the best thing I've ever done. 

I mean, who wouldn't feel pretty good about themselves for creating this face?

What could be more selfish than that?

Every so often I think about something David Duchovny said about playing Fox Mulder on "The X-Files" (you didn't know I was going to bring "The X-Files" into this thoughtful parenting blog, did you?): that Scully was Mulder's "human credential," the tangible evidence of his humanity in the world.

Sometimes I think of Eli as my own human credential. He is bolder and more audacious than I have ever been; he's my id, unleashed. He's — to borrow an expression from my other great pop culture obsession — some notes at the beginning of a song someone will sing for me, my great unfinished symphony.

Because if being a parent makes you think about all the things you give up, it also makes you think about everything you'll leave behind. This morning on the subway, I read about the UN's dire new climate change report that says the planet is facing catastrophe by 2040. Eli won't even be 30 years old. Part of the selfishness of becoming a parent is the promise of immortality (another deep thought from "The X-Files" goes "Something lives only as long as the last person who remembers it" — see also "Coco," 2017), but increasingly I find myself in despair over the kind of world we might be leaving for our children and grandchildren.

In "The Shawshank Redemption" (you didn't know I was going to bring "The Shawshank Redemption into this thoughtful parenting blog, did you?), Red teaches us that geology is the study of pressure and time. Something tells me that the same is true for parenting: pressure, and time.

I think we all have dreams that we make sacrifices so we can create a better world for our children, but we also dream that our children might be the ones who save us: Last week I watched too many hours of the Kavanaugh hearing, and after Eli demanded an iPad and milk with his breakfast I ended up lecturing him about his sense of white male entitlement. Because what I really meant wasn't just "It's rude when you don't show courtesy"; it was: Please grow up to be a Barack Obama, not a Brett Kavanaugh. Be as kind and sweet as you are when I screw up. Be someone's human credential.