Page 336 - A Little Life: A Novel

children, this never would have happened; I felt that I was being reminded
of how foolish and stupid I’d been to not recognize what a gift I’d been
given, a gift that so many people yearned for and yet I had been willing to

send back. I was ashamed—I would never be the father my father was, and
I hated that he was here witnessing my failings.
Before Jacob had been born, I had asked my father one night if he had
any words of wisdom for me. I had been joking, but he took it seriously, as
he took all questions I asked him. “Hmm,” he said. “Well, the hardest thing
about being a parent is recalibration. The better you are at it, the better you
will be.”

At the time, I had pretty much ignored this advice, but as Jacob got sicker
and sicker, I thought of it more and more frequently, and realized how
correct he was. We all say we want our kids to be happy, only happy, and
healthy, but we don’t want that. We want them to be like we are, or better
than we are. We as humans are very unimaginative in that sense. We aren’t
equipped for the possibility that they might be worse. But I guess that

would be asking too much. It must be an evolutionary stopgap—if we were
all so specifically, vividly aware of what might go horribly wrong, we
would none of us have children at all.
When we first realized that Jacob was sick, that there was something
wrong with him, we both tried very hard to recalibrate, and quickly. We had
never said that we wanted him to go to college, for example; we simply
assumed he would, and to graduate school as well, because we both had.

But that first night we spent in the hospital, after his first seizure, Liesl, who
was always a planner, who had a brilliant ability to see five steps, ten steps,
ahead, said, “No matter what this is, he can still live a long and healthy life,
you know. There are great schools we can send him to. There are places
where he can be taught to be independent.” I had snapped at her: I had
accused her of writing him off so quickly, so easily. Later, I felt ashamed

about this. Later, I admired her: I admired how rapidly, how fluidly, she was
adjusting to the fact that the child she thought she would have was not the
child she did have. I admired how she knew, well before I did, that the point
of a child is not what you hope he will accomplish in your name but the
pleasure that he will bring you, whatever form it comes in, even if it is a
form that is barely recognizable as pleasure at all—and, more important, the
pleasure you will be privileged to bring him. For the rest of Jacob’s life, I

lagged one step behind Liesl: I kept dreaming he would get better, that he