My son was just 6 years old the first time we took him in for surgery. The miraculous fractalization that transfigured a tiny clump of cells into our baby boy had also trapped a certain type of skin cell in his middle ear where it didn’t belong. In this tiniest of the body’s canals, the skin cell grew and, like a towel soaked in acid, began dissolving anything it touched.
First, it dissolved my son’s ossicles, the tiniest bones in the human body and the tuning fork that carries sound from the eardrum to the cochlea. Silently it advanced, glomming on to and consuming the drum itself, masking its brutality by conducting enough sound that our son passed his hearing tests. Then it wrapped itself around the facial nerve running through the middle ear.
At our son’s birthday checkup, our pediatrician pulled away from the otoscope she had stuck in my son’s ear, then went in for a second look.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. But I’d get him to an otolaryngologist.” She said it so cheerily, I almost missed her meaning. Only later did it occur to me that she’d been keeping her voice chipper so as not to scare my son.
“But it isn’t urgent?”
“Mmm. I’d say it is, yes. Definitely.”
The name for this monster is cholesteatoma. It’s rare enough that even many physicians have not heard of it, but I now know the name like I know my children’s. There is no easy way to remove it except by drilling through the mastoid region of the skull, behind the ear, and meticulously plucking out every cell of it. The cholesteatoma isn’t cancer, but it is, undeniably, a resilient bastard. But then—I learned—so is my son.
The first time one of your children is seriously ill or hurt, you pass through a portal into a new world. Fear envelops you, but also transforms you. You learn to recognize fear in its purest form—hot and metallic. It sits on your chest like a breastplate, ignites pilot lights in your eyes. You sleep on the trundle next to your son, in case he needs you. If necessary, you’d sleep on a stone floor. You jump each time your child stirs. You talk to God as if he were your best friend.
But also, you learn, as you did the moment your first child was born, that all the mani-pedis and blowouts don’t change the mammalian truth of your existence. It isn’t merely that you would walk in front of a subway train to save one of your kids—child’s play. For the first time, you understand that you would rip the face from any adult who would intentionally hurt them. You would do it gladly. Go ahead, you think. Try me.
So many young women today throw around words like fierce to describe female law firm partners and corporate executives, which only proves that they don’t know women in those roles very deeply. If they did, they’d know that succeeding in any corporation requires a steady diet of tongue-biting, of demonstrating your own flexibility, of harmonizing your views with those of the C-suite, of minimizing yourself and sucking up.
If you want to see fierce, visit a pediatric hospital. For a glimpse at the apex predator, enter a pediatric cancer ward. There is no group more fearsome than the pride of women who guard their children there. Good luck trying to dislodge any of them with flattery, bribery, or force.
People who talk about the decision to have kids get so many things so wrong, which probably explains why we’ve done such a disastrous job selling parenthood to others. We make raising kids seem tedious and trivial, thankless work for meager benefit. Life’s messiest and most tiresome burden.
Partly that is the fault of a culture that celebrates women who Eat, Pray, Love their husbands and family away. We valorize these deserters, buy their books and fantasize about daily yoga and training for triathlons. We envy their knowledge of the best spots for boba and their ability to pronounce açai correctly. By some puzzling law of nature, the most obnoxious, least representative members of any group insist on speaking for it.
We parents are too busy hectoring our kids. Say thank you, brush your teeth, do your homework. Put your underwear in the hamper. Did you email your teacher? Pack your calculator? Check your brother’s closet? We are tired and worried, sometimes scared, and we comprise the great and silent army on which this nation depends. We don’t have time to chat, much less to promote parenthood effectively. We slept through our workout. We skipped our break to rush a forgotten lunchbox to the school. We are raising this civilization’s future. Our job is more profound than we can easily convey.
No one is afraid to bring kids into the world because of election results or climate change. That knocks the weather vane backward. You don’t decide against procreation because you’re mothering Mother Earth. You obsess over the planet because you don’t have children.
If you love your kids the way most parents inevitably do—with aching necessity—you struggle to keep track of the picayune. You hold your child and think: This week, the planet will have to take care of itself.
We sit in hospitals’ too-upright chairs and achieve silent communion with mothers and fathers the world over. We never wonder why we exist. We couldn’t bear to be anywhere else.
That first time our son was wheeled into the operating room, his frame was so small and slight, it barely made an imprint under the sheets. It almost looked like there was no body under the long swath of hospital white. I forced a smile and wave, as if I were seeing him off to school or baseball practice. For once, I became what I seldom had ever managed before: a phony, a liar, a peppy sort, whatever he needed me to be—upbeat and optimistic—when it was all I could do not to collapse under the fluorescent lights, a pathetic pool on the sheet vinyl floor.
The good news with a cholesteatoma surgery is that if the surgeon manages to collect all the cells, the patient may never need another surgery. But that’s harder than it seems. The cells are round and sticky, but also tiny and pearlescent, hard to spot inside the ear’s narrow, livid recesses.
That first surgery lasted five and a half hours. First the surgeon plucked out as many globules of cholesteatoma as he found. Then he implanted a tiny titanium prosthetic replacement for the ear bones and fashioned a functioning eardrum from a gossamer of skin.
For that surgery, and every one since, my husband and I brought siddurim, Jewish prayer books, to the hospital and prayed facing east. In other circumstances, I would have felt terribly self-conscious doing so. It helped knowing that our surgeons were Catholic—that if they wandered into the waiting room and saw us, they would recognize the form. They would have done the same for their own.
Days after that first surgery, our son returned to school with a plastic ear cup elastic-strapped to his head. Underneath, shiny surgical tape formed a protective half-moon around the incision site. Hours after I had dropped him off, I found myself wandering the aisles of Costco, buying him hoodies and tube socks he didn’t need, my face hot with tears.
Our son went to a boys’ school, a decision I suddenly regretted. The other boys would almost certainly make fun of him. How many could be counted on not to knock into him? It was all I could do not to call my husband repeatedly, with nothing to say.
When parents talk about having a child who is ill or struggling, nonparents often take the wrong message. They think, Thank God I was spared all that pain. If I can’t order up the precise specifications for my child, the condition in which he emerges, the choices he’ll make, if I can’t be assured that he’ll skirt the dangers that await him, maybe it’s better not to have children at all.
Those of us who know the airless terror of the 10 steps between the second you first glimpse your child’s surgeon through the glass doors and the moment he’s standing in front of you, delivering the verdict—we don’t think this way. Each time one of ours is ill or in pain, we think, Thank God I am here for him. We sit in hospitals’ too-upright chairs and achieve silent communion with mothers and fathers the world over. We never wonder why we exist. We couldn’t bear to be anywhere else.
Three weeks after my son’s first ear surgery, in the carpool line, my son clambered into my car. His ear cup was gone. So was the surgical tape and gauze. I gasped.
“What happened?”
“I gave it to Enrique,” he said, a boy in his class.
“You did what? You mean the cup?”
“No, the bandage. Don’t worry, Ema,” he said, referring to me by the name for mommy in Hebrew. “He’s really happy. He wanted it.”
I quickly texted the other mother an apology, half-frantic over what she would think, her boy coming home with my son’s gruesome bandage, soaked with blood and teeming with microbes. A wave of queasiness passed through me.
She texted me back, full of mercy: a laughing emoji. Boys, she didn’t have to say.
Boys, making friends. Ignoring a danger or staring it down. Not squeamish about bloody bandages because the universe didn’t want them to be. Boys, preparing to be men. Handling themselves in the world.
My son now towers over me. He needs a shave. He runs miles and miles and comes home sweaty. He rips through the contents of our fridge and pantry. Only when he smiles, as when he sleeps, can I almost see the sandy blond lashes and Superman sheets, a sliver of moonlight on his cheek.
Reprinted with permission from The Free Press.
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A perfect description of parenthood! The narcissism permeating our culture robs many of this most fulfilling part of life.
Love reading this. We mothers never quit worrying about our children. When my older son was diagnosed (no need to say what), I cried and prayed. He’s doing well, picture of health, but it ended his career as a pilot. He has moved on to another profession and amazes me all the time. He’s a hard worker, the best father anyone could be, and a great husband. My admiration grows each year. He manages his condition by never slowing down, still running marathons when he has time to train properly. I still pray for him and my other son every night, always will. My two sons are my true blessings and they have been so good to me. I’m blessed with grandchildren as I continue to be amazed, grateful, and loved. I thank God daily for these blessings of motherhood.