Raising My Son's Children

Wade is sixty-seven and he makes two lunches at half past seven every school morning and he is good at it now.

He was not good at it at the start. There was a period in the first year where he sent a nine year old to school with a tin of soup and no way of opening it, and the school rang, kindly, and he sat in the truck outside the feed store afterward for about twenty minutes.

He has it down now. He knows which one will not eat crusts and which one only likes the yellow ones. He has a laminated thing on the refrigerator with the days of the week on it that his neighbor made for him.

The children are nine and twelve. They have been with him two years and four months.

Their father is his son.

And here is the thing about Wade's life that nobody asks him about, ever, and he does not blame them for it, because he would not know how to ask it either.

Everybody asks about the children. Everybody. The school asks, the church asks, his sister asks every Sunday, the man at the feed store asks. And he answers, truthfully: the twelve year old is doing better, the nine year old had a hard month, they both went to camp.

Nobody asks about his son.

He is not angry about that. But there is a man of thirty-four somewhere who used to sit on that porch and who Wade taught to drive in a field, and there is not one person on this earth who says that man's name to him any more, and Wade has started to feel like he has buried somebody who is not dead.

I am raising his babies and I miss him, and I cannot say the second half to anybody without it sounding like I am complaining about the first.

And here is where I quit talking about Wade, because you are doing the school run for somebody else's child and it is your own child who is missing, and nobody has asked you about them in a long time.

Let me say the first thing straight, the way a neighbor should. None of this is your fault. You did not raise him wrong and there is no version of thirty-four years where a different father got a different son, and if you have got a night where you go back through it looking for the place you went wrong, that search has no answer in it because there is nothing there to find.

He gently leads the ones who are carrying

Let me set the true thing down first, because you have been carrying everybody and nobody has been carrying you.

You are not the last link in the chain and you are not out there on your own. There is a verse about a Shepherd and it has two halves, and almost everybody quotes the first one and forgets that the second one is about you: And it is the Holy Spirit who makes that land in you rather than merely read well.

He shall feed His flock like a shepherd: He shall gather the lambs with His arm, and carry them in His bosom, and shall gently lead those that are with young.Isaiah 40:11

The first half is the one on every card: the lambs gathered and carried. That is your grandchildren and it is true.

Now the second half. He shall gently lead those that are with young. That is the ewe. That is the one doing the carrying, the one who cannot go at the pace of the flock, the one with something depending on her.

And notice the word: gently. The Shepherd changes His pace for that one. He does not tell her to keep up.

So the one carrying the children is not expected to travel at everyone else's speed, and Scripture is where I stand that rather than my own sympathy, and God's Spirit is not out ahead of an old man on a road, waiting impatiently.

Two griefs, and only one of them gets asked about

Now let me name what is actually on you, because until it has a name it cannot be carried.

You are grieving a living man. That is the second grief and it has no funeral and no casserole and no anniversary, and there is no accepted way to say it, and so it goes unmentioned for years.

Everybody asks about the nine year old. That is right and good and those children need every bit of it. But the effect is that your son has quietly stopped being a person anybody says out loud, and a man cannot mourn somebody whose name is not permitted in a conversation.

So here is the plain permission, from one man to another: you are allowed to miss him. You are allowed to miss him on the same day you are grateful for those children, and there is no contradiction in it, and being sad about your son is not a complaint about your grandchildren.

And more than allowed: you are held while you do it. The Shepherd who gathers those two lambs is the same one leading you gently, and that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it something an old man can lean on at half past seven with two lunchboxes.

And the plain half, the way a neighbor should say it. Real help exists for you and none of it is weak faith. There are family groups for people who love somebody using, full of grandparents doing exactly what you are doing, and you would not have to explain the second grief in that room because everybody in it has it. A counselor for you is not disloyal to those children. And say your son's name out loud to your sister on a Sunday, because it has not been said in that kitchen in a very long time. If he is ever in danger, get medical help immediately, and in the United States he or you can call or text 988 at any hour. There are people awake right now.