Isaiah enlisted in the Army today.
I am incredibly proud of him.
I have always told him that I would support him however I can. This is his choice. I support it.
I am incredibly conflicted as I do so.
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“It’s your fault,” my dad tells me,”that he has no direction.” And maybe it is. I mean, probably it is. I’m his mom. “Blame the mother,” as Freud taught us.
And the father, I wonder? How does that figure in?
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When I look at my son, I see a 19-year-old young man. But I also see a million moments from all those 19 years, compressed into the Now. I see him as I saw him after he slid out of my body, covered in blood, cord still attached to me. I see him on his first day of school. I see him on the day he graduated from high school. I see him as a Tyrannasaurus-loving toddler, holding his arms close to his body to mimic the Rex’s short limbs, his hands clenched with just two fingers sticking out. Roaring. I see him in that moment when I had to tell him his dad had died. I hear his wailing cry in response. All this haunts me.
He is all those things at once: the newborn, the toddler, the teen, the man. It’s sometimes hard to reconcile.
It’ll be harder still with him in uniform.
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He is my son. He is not and never has been a marionette that I can control — make walk and talk and pick a college or pick a career that suits my dreams.
He is mine. And yet he never was. He is his own person. I have to honor that, as painful as it can be.
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My maternal grandfather was knighted for his service during World War II. (He was in the Royal Air Force and helped develop radar.) He died when I was two — I have no memory of him whatsoever — but his ghost certainly hovered over the childhoods of my brother and me.
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Although my dad never served in Vietnam (he'd injured his leg so badly that he was ineligible for the draft), most of his peers did. Those ghosts haunted us too.
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If I had to make a list of the accomplishments I’m most proud of, in addition to having Isaiah of course, near the top would be convincing my little brother to leave the Air Force Academy (circa 1994). Oh how I pestered him with my pacifism— sending him letters, mix-tapes full of Vietnam War-era protest music, a copy of Leo Tolstoy’s Letter to a Non-Commissioned Officer.
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I took a class in college (circa 1991) on non-violence. It was taught by the university’s chaplin. We learned about the history of pacifism, non-violent civil disobedience, and anti-war activism in the U.S. — all the things left out of the histories I’d been taught before, both in school and at home. Sure, there were figures I knew: Gandhi and MLK obviously. But there were so many other names I’d never heard of.
Our class was visited by Father Phil Berrigan whose "Plowshares" group had an office near campus. That visit, his story shaped less my politics than much of the future of my academic work and my activism, which has dealt with questions of bodies, politics, poetics, performance, as well as the continuum of the street and the theatre, violence and non-violence.
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I named my son Isaiah. The Biblical reference made his dad's parents (fundamentalist Christians) grin. But it was really a nod to the line that Father Phil often invoked: “and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” Amen.
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His middle name is Tolstoy, a nod to anarcho-pacifism — well, that and the fact that much like experience reading War and Peace, I found myself thinking midway through a very, very, very long labor “Will this ever end?!”
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You can try to name your child in ways that reflect your hopes. You can raise them in that spirit. That’s what I tried to do at least — reflecting my hopes, and admittedly, my politics.
But I know now that even though you can help craft their character, when you set your child out into the world, it is into their own story. It’s a story that they write for themselves. Isaiah started a new chapter today, and my heart both swells with pride and breaks a little for it.
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Updated 10/4/2012: The U.S. Army can't have my son. They won't have my son. They won't take my son. Why? Because he has on file a history of depression, dating from 2004 when he first visited a psychologist to help him cope with his father's cancer and his death. The recruiter called Isaiah today to tell him that his application to join had been rejected. Once again, my emotions are incredibly conflicted here...