My Son Zachary

He was born weighing just one pound, 11 ounces. Unlike his twin, he was cheated of oxygen. As Zachary turns 16—an age he will never attain mentally or emotionally—his father wrestles with all that love can't conquer.

UNTIL HE WAS 15, Zachary attended the Vanguard school in Paoli, a specialized academic institution for children with severe learning needs. His mother and I had divorced when the twins were three, but we remained close soulmates. We believed in joint custody in its best interpretation, and over the years we established a loose schedule in which Zachary and Gerry generally lived with me during the school week and then went to their mother and stepfather on weekends and for the summer.

I was never an absentee father with either of my boys. I laughed with them and yelled at them when they were being jerks and roughhoused on the bed with them and shed tears when they shed tears. Gerry proceeded in life faithful to the spirit he had shown in the intensive care nursery. He played a mean game of soccer. He hit a backhand in tennis with ruthless vengeance. We even suffered through a season of Little League hell together when I was his coach and had the hubris to think I could somehow calm him down on the pitching mound when he couldn’t hit home plate with a beach ball. He went to Plymouth Meeting Friends and then on to Friends Select, where he is now a high school sophomore.

Through the failure of my marriage to his mother and then the tragic failure of another marriage, our bond remains true and deep. His world is complicated, but somehow he has adjusted to it without rancor or resentment. He is a loving brother to Zachary and to Caleb, who was born during my second marriage. He is also a loving brother to Molly and Matthew, who were born when his mother remarried.

He knows and understands me. He accepts my eccentricities and idiosyncrasies and lengthy bouts of self-absorption to the point where he can pretty much predict them before they occur. In a life marked by wild gyrations of success and failure both personally and professionally, he has remained my longest and finest friend. Like me, he tends not to talk very much. When we’re home together during the week, we can go hours on end without saying a word, except for some guttural chirp to hand over the Doritos. But even in those silences, I am reassured by him. He makes me feel safe.

My love for Zachary has never wavered, but our relationship has evolved into a different place. By the time he was 14, it became clear that he had reached an academic plateau. His basic verbal abilities were strong, enabling him to connect with adults and express his boundless desire for acceptance and friendship. But his ability to perform basic tasks, such as buying a candy bar and knowing what change to expect, was like that of a child of seven or maybe eight.

He was still going to Vanguard, but anytime there was a public performance
for parents, like the Christmas concert, I dreaded having to attend. My heart just tore away when I watched him with his classmates, all of them trapped in the unbreakable cocoons of their isolation. When conferences were held with the various specialists at school—the language teacher and the occupational therapist and the physical therapist and the psychologist—I had trouble listening. The terms they used to describe him, the medical and educational jargon, washed over me. They were doing a wonderful job, and they were excited because he was making progress, progress that he never would have made at any other school. His reading had picked up tremendously. He was learning to look people in the eye when he talked to them. Using his fingers, he could do simple addition.

But it was all still incremental, still painfully slow. And as they talked, what they unintentionally reinforced to me over and over and over was not all Zachary had done, but all that he would never do. It became clear to me that his memory and map-reading were not signals of hope, but isolated sparks that would never catch fire.

When he was with me during the school week, the silences grew longer and longer. At a certain time in my life, when he paced back and forth from living room to dining room and then up the stairs and down the stairs, or buried himself in the trance of his maps, or stared glassy-eyed at the television set, I would have interceded. But now I let him go, because 1 didn’t have the heart, or maybe the will, to do anything else.

And sometimes when he paced, sometimes when he sat on the end of the couch and watched the television set without a glimmer of recognition, I silently wondered the same question I had wondered so many times before:

Where am I within my son? Where am I?