Amy Shelf - Counselor at Law

Recently, my husband met with an old friend who has two kids under 3.  She and her partner, a woman, are co-parenting with the biological father of the children and his partner, a man.  I think the plan is to eventually share custody and parenting responsibilities substantially, or maybe equally.  For now, the kids are primarily with their moms, one of whom birthed and nursed them.

This arrangement, certainly not that unusual in these parts, got me and Ken to joking - why not find ourselves some co-parents?  The thought of some weekends off sounds kind of nice, especially if we don't have to go through a divorce to get there.  Clearly, the lack of a biological need for involving other adults has limited our abilities to envision our lives creatively.

Like most jokes, ours about finding co-parents has some basis in reality.  Raising kids is an exhausting challenge, albeit one filled with joy and love beyond anything else.  But sharing our kids with another couple seems at once easier and more difficult than simply co-parenting together.  Sure two more sets of hands, arms, cars for school pickups, people in the rotation for early morning duty would come in handy.  However, for me, sharing decision-making about my kids, and experiencing my kids' relationships with their father, is not effortless.  Ken and I inevitably approach some things differently, and each of us, at times, needs to let the other's ways and means trump.  I know the difficulties of being in a relationship with Ken and it is tough to watch my kids experience those same difficulties without wanting to protect them or being angry at him for making them deal with his shit.  I know that Ken feels that anguish whenever our kids experience me losing my temper, or rolls his eyes, along with the kids, when I insist on more hand washing than he may think is necessary, and on wearing pajamas instead of just sleeping in the shirt that has been on all day.

As difficult as it is not to judge yourself for your transgressions as a parent, it is really, really difficult not to judge your co-parent(s).

Part of what motivates both of us, me and my husband, as we tolerate and support one another in this job share of parenting, is our love for each other and our desire to keep our marriage intact.  We have to accept, in spite of, because we conclude, over and over, that the good outweighs the bad. 

Of course, that is the easy motivator.  Without our own relationship, I think it would be more difficult to compromise and let go when our children are involved.  But this is the only way I've done it, so what do I know?

Less immediate, though equally important, is the way our support, or not, of each other as parents imapcts our kids' relationships with each of us.  The more supportive you can be of your child's other parent-child relationships, the better a parent you yourself are being.

But, it takes a village, right?  Our kids need the cousins and elders to lead them and guide them, right?  Or is it that we need the co-parents?

Last night we experienced a perverse but common version of that village truism in action:

Dear friends had us over for dinner.  We love them, our kids love each other, we love their kids and they love ours.  Its been a roller-coaster of a year (or three) for them, we've been rocks and anchors and shoulders for each other and the evening promised some good company and delicious chicken enchiladas.

It all went to hell.   The kids fell apart, individually and in concert, in the most humiliating ways; the food was cold by the time we negotiated seating arrangements, which were the source of all existential pain.  Objectively, the evening was quite unpleasant.  Even subjectively, too.

At one point, when the worst of the evening's misbehavior had passed and all of our children were mostly just mildly whining their way until bed time, my friend turned to me and said, "Thank god it was you guys."

That is it, right there.  The village.  No one took problems off of anyone else's hands.  No one showed anyone else's kid the path to right action or compassion.  No one even made anyone else a drink.  But, we endured together and moved on together and decided to keep loving each other in spite of the fact that all evidence showed we really went wrong somewhere and our kids needed professional help. 

Moreover, we witnessed each other fallible - other parents losing patience, other kids breaking under the pressures of being in school all day and only having the emotional maturity of 7 year olds (appropriate but frustrating). 

It does take a village, even if the village is context if nothing more.  

In September of last year, friends of mine had a baby who was born and then died within a few hours.  These people are really acquaintances, or even sort of more remote - she taught my son and he is someone I've never actually met.  She is warm and gregarious and an east-coaster, so we connected easily.  She is a great teacher, and loved my kids, too.  We like each other, and, by default, I care about her husband.

We stayed in touch, a little, after they moved back to the east coast.  They were on my radar last year, knowing they were expecting in the fall.  I looked at the pictures of her pregnant self on Facebook and felt happy for them.

When I finally received the expected email, its subject line made me draw a breath that gripped my chest: "With life comes death."  Of course, I instantly knew what had happened, even though a hyper-rational cell in my brain produced a voice that tried to convince me that there was the possibility that the subject line was referring to someone else's death, not their child's.  That maybe a great-aunt or their cat had died on the day their son was born. 

He has been blogging - he started writing online when they found out about the pregnancy, and he continues writing still, though his blog has gone from being a parenting blog to being one about baby loss.  There is a community, disturbingly large but inspiringly charged, of people writing about losing a child.  I assume this community is something you can experience off-line as well, though my portal into it is through the blogosphere. 

I check his blog religiously.  He is a great writer and he writes about their pain in a way that often brings me to tears, though looking at her name pop up on Facebook brought me to tears for a good number of months, too.  She is now also a contributor to the blog, and I've come to depend upon their updates and posts, I think for evidence that they are enduring, that someone whose shoes I've seen, and in which I can imagine standing, can survive the most horrible pain of losing a child.  Recently, they took a trip, so didn't post for over a week.  The silence of their voices not appearing on my computer screen really did exist. 

They named their son Silas Orion.  Recently, Orion has been prominent in the night sky.  Until recently, we've had so little rain in California, so the skies have been clear at night.  I see it when I walk to the grocery store for half-and-half while Ken puts the kids to sleep, when I walk to my Sunday night yoga class.  I see it and think of them, of their dead child, of loss and remembrance, of my own fears about my children's lives.

Death of a loved one simultaneously takes that living person from your life and makes the loved one public property.  The accomplishments and personality traits of the dead are released to the world to admire and project onto and turn into something personal.  For my friends, the parents without the living child, their loss has become a public forum - an analogy or allegory or symbol.  Like the constellation, Orion, viewed by thousands upon thousands of us, all of us moved and self-reflective. 

Similar, but different, is the blog they write.  With their writing, they actively share their loss with us.  I wonder if they understand how much we all need it.

I rarely watch TV, really only for sports or when I'm folding laundry.  I don't have, have never had, will never have cable TV.  I have WAY too little self-control for that one.  And for now, anyway, my husband and I own a video store, so we have plenty of good stuff to watch at our finger tips.

Despite my self-imposed boycott of cable, I have watched a few TV series on DVD.  Somehow this feels different than watching actual TV, maybe because I don't have cable so I never have had the chance to watch any of these better series while they were being aired.  Any time I watch TV it is network crap. 

I don't know what I'd do if I was watching these series on an episode-per-week basis; part of the experience of enjoying these series on DVD is that my husband and I get totally cracked-out on them, watching multiple episodes in a row.  If TV is a drug, then a TV series on DVD is a drug with a built-in dealer and ATM card.  (Not sure what that makes us, the video store that hands out this drug with accessories . . .)

In any event, the shows I've enjoyed so far are: The Sopranos (the classic HBO drama, just great), Dae Jang Geum (awesome Korean historical drama), and Spaced (adorable and creative two season British series with and by Simon Pegg).   And the John Adams mini-series, though that doesn't entirely count.

Now we are watching Six Feet Under, about a family of undertakers.  It is great, getting greater as we become more involved with the developing characters.   One fabulous thing about the show is that each episode starts with the death of a person who is, usually, later brought into the family mortuary.   What is fabulous about death?  Well, nothing in and of itself.  But I love the reliability of the plot device, the way it connects me to the "client" whose death and service become a backdrop for, or participant in, that episode's plot.  And I love that I am not spending each episode stressed-out, waiting for someone to die.  The deaths are rarely portrayed in a gory or suspenseful way, even when the death itself is violent. 

When you think about it, we media consumers see such misrepresentative deaths.  There is plenty of opportunity on TV or in the movies to see someone get shot, or blown up, or otherwise violently killed.  Less common is the portrayal of the day in and day out of more ordinary deaths - the elderly man waking up next to his wife who has died in her sleep, the terminally ill patient passing away calmly in his hospital bed.  But, just as most of us are born without drama and heroics (aside from the stunning drama of a healthy live birth, which is nothing short of miraculous),  most of us will die in these fairly unexceptional ways.

Not surprisingly, I find myself thinking about my own work quite a lot as I follow the lives of these characters who also are working with their clients around death. 

It is an incredible honor to be invited into this most intimate experience - death in particular, but also family and money - and I am often astounded by the trust that people place in me.  I know I deserve this trust, that I am kind and will treat my clients and their families with care and respect.  But I also know that many humans have a strong and understandable self-defensive impulse in times of pain and loss.  The impulse that causes people to lash out, be hurtful, be suspicious and, in general, behave unpredictably.

When I see people rise above these impulses - and I do see this, every day - I am reminded of the enormity of effort it takes to be kind and thoughtful in times of pain, to not give in to that desire to punish anyone else who is not suffering.  Kudos to all of you.

Two years ago tomorrow, my dear friend Cayce Lindner died.  His death was a shocking surprise in the worst kind of way.  He was just shy of 40, with two young kids and a wife who is one of my favorite people in the world.  Although Cayce immediately started hurtling into the past, as happens with death, the loss of his living presence is still kind of unbelievable.  He was a big man.

When I found out that he had died, the day after his actual death, I was in my downtown office.  Another friend called to tell me the news.  I remember collapsing in stages - first standing up in shock, then sitting down, then putting my head on my knees, then falling onto the floor.  I called my husband who was with a client not far from my office.  It immediately became clear that neither of us could work and that we needed to be together.  I told my boss what was going on, grabbed my bag and began the 15 minute walk to meet Ken.

As I walked, through a neighborhood filled with some of San Francisco's most down-and-out, my sadness and shock were accompanied by two powerful feelings.  For one, I couldn't believe that all of the drunks and crazy people and heroin addicts I was passing were alive and Cayce was not.  Cayce was, himself, a bit of a binger who struggled to maintain his own mental health, but he had a house and a wife who cooked him vegetables and two unbelievably beautiful children.  His death and the lives of those with seemingly so much less to live for were utterly irreconcilable.  And still are, except now I am used to them sitting side by side, pointing out how the other makes no sense.

The other feeling that filled me as I walked to meet Ken (and stayed with me for days and weeks and even is with me now years later) is an awareness of the unbelievable preciousness of ordinary life.  In an instant, I came to know how much I treasure having a job, making breakfast, even cleaning the fucking toilet.  I don't know why death shows us why the ordinary is so valuable, except maybe that it is the ordinary that defines what it means to be alive.  I mean, when Cayce died I didn't think to myself 'I'm so happy to still be alive so I can still have once-in-lifetime experiences" or "I can't believe I might climb Denali and Cayce never will."  Instead my heart was gripped with "I love this weird, sterile, downtown office so much", and it was the feeling of my palms touching the skin of my cheeks that made life feel worth living.  And as I mourn, on Cayce's behalf, for the things he will never do and see, it is all of the tuesday night dinners he will miss that make me weep.  Even though it is also true that he will never play Coachella or learn to sky-dive.

As we go through life, much of the time mindlessly, we focus on and live for the amazing moments - the rarest experience, the most beautiful vista or vacation - and those things do make us FEEL alive and full of reasons to live.  At its simplest, however, being alive is having days following one another until there are no more days.  Ordinary and mundane in that way, even when any given day is filled with extraordinary things.

Last night I read "The Long-Haired Boy" to my kids.  It is a poem by Shel Silverstein and it made me think of Cayce, who did, in  fact, have a shitload of hair.

I couldnt find the text reprinted anywhere- but here is a recording of a reading with animation.

Sending love to you, Cayce Lindner.

I have two children.  My son, Huck, was born in June of 2001.  The day before my thirty-first birthday.  My daughter, Trudy, was born in February of 2005.  This week we will celebrate her fourth birthday.

Everyone says that your children's childhoods go by in the blink of an eye.  When my children were babies and toddlers I often tried to remind myself that whatever moment I'm in - whether it is laying with my kids for 45 minutes to get them to sleep when I'd rather be watching a movie, waiting outside of the grocery store with two heavy bags of perishables while one of my kids examines some fascinating piece of trash on the sidewalk, or negotiating "one more" of some random thing/task/event/jump/book - I'll want this time back.  I still try to remind myself of the precious, irreplaceable quality of these years with my kids.  Often that mantra helps me stay zen, to remember that the TV, milk,  whatever will still be there but my kids will be different and, if all goes according to plan, gone from my care sooner than I'd like. 

Things are starting to change, however.  The pace is picking up and suddenly it appears as though if I blink I really will miss things.  I feel like we are on the highway onramp, and they highway is the time of my children's childhoods that they will remember.  The rest of it, what has happened so far, is the part that I will think about and long for, that was, in many ways, MY time.   Now the time is shared, and the road feels like theirs as much as mine.  And they cant help but drive fast and wish that I wasnt in the car with them singing along to some song they find incredibly irritating.  Just like the Sprite commercial or whatever the hell it is.

So I try to keep up - to pay attention and make time and force them to sit in the proverbial car on the proverbial highway with me so that I can remain a part of their lives even though, more and more, their inner worlds have nothing to do with me - they have full universes of friends and teachers and worlds of their own making. 

I've long thought that one of the best things I can do for my kids is to have a life of my own.  To follow my passions and make my art and build my career and work on my marriage.  By doing so I set and example for them, and keep myself fulfilled and lower the risk of seeking fulfillment from them (although my heart will always be an open wound, a piece of it running around with each of them).  I've not put a full theory together, but I think my own fulfillment is a component of the foundation to a healthy relationship with my adult children. 

But, BUT, things are going so fast!  I thought that this life-of-my-own stuff was toughest when my kids were babies and by body fed them and my mind was full of nothing but them.  However, back then the balance was easy and clear, and I had a lot more control over when and how I could spend time with them and influence their lives.  Now they have a SAY.  I can put aside all the hours in the week for them but they have shit to do, friends they want to see, books they would rather read.

So now what I have to do is be flexible.  But somehow a different kind of flexible than I had to be when they were babies.  I can no longer rely on their constant desire to be with me, but I will give of myself when they need and want me, and sometimes that means doing things I find utterly boring.  I will sometimes force them to take time with me, even when they don't want to - here the required flexibility is about quality of experience.  I will take for myself when I can, and sometimes when I need to, trusting that I am being there for them more than not, and the more will be the foundation of our adult relationship . . . not the not.