The Velveteen Father: An Unexpected Journey to Parenthood - Softcover

Green, Jesse

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0345437098 ISBN 13: 9780345437099

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 2000

Synopsis

Being a parent was not a high priority--or even much of a likelihood--for acclaimed journalist and novelist Jesse Green. Yet when Green, at the age of thirty-seven, fell in love with a man who had recently adopted a baby boy, fatherhood suddenly fell into his lap. Now in this warm, humorous, deeply personal book, Green recounts the unexpected journey he and his partner traveled together on the road to parenthood.

In becoming the father--or rather one of the fathers--of Erez, Green faced challenges familiar to all parents, from the first bath to the first tooth, along with a host of dilemmas unique to his situation. As Green discovered, even in blasé New York City, reactions to his unconventional family ranged from the funny to the frightening, the unaccepting to the all-embracing. The Velveteen Father is a moving record of the transformative effects parenthood can have on people who least expect to become parents-- and of how we are repeatedly made anew by the love of children who need us.

About this title

About the Author

Jesse Green is a much-anthologized, award-winning journalist and a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine; his articles have also appeared in The New Yorker, New York, The Washington Post, Premiere, GQ, Philadelphia, Mirabella, and Out. His novel, O Beautiful, was called "one of the best first novels of the year" by Entertainment Weekly. He lives in New York City.


From the Hardcover edition.

From the Inside Flap

nt was not a high priority--or even much of a likelihood--for acclaimed journalist and novelist Jesse Green. Yet when Green, at the age of thirty-seven, fell in love with a man who had recently adopted a baby boy, fatherhood suddenly fell into his lap. Now in this warm, humorous, deeply personal book, Green recounts the unexpected journey he and his partner traveled together on the road to parenthood.

In becoming the father--or rather one of the fathers--of Erez, Green faced challenges familiar to all parents, from the first bath to the first tooth, along with a host of dilemmas unique to his situation. As Green discovered, even in blasé New York City, reactions to his unconventional family ranged from the funny to the frightening, the unaccepting to the all-embracing. The Velveteen Father is a moving record of the transformative effects parenthood can have on people who least expect to become parents-- and of how we are repeatedly made anew by the love of children who need us.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

"Mommy," he said.
In the summer after his third birthday, Erez started asking for his mother, or at any rate for something he referred to by that name. "I'm going outside to find Mommy," he informed us one day, quite jauntily, as if he were announcing a trip to his toy box. And then, as an afterthought: "Where is she?" Of course he could not reach the deadbolt yet, and anyway he was not quite sure what the word "mommy" meant. But he knew that his friend Aaron had one and that his friend Rosalie had two. And that he didn't have any, at least not in the house.

It was, Andy tells me, among Erez's first sounds-"ma"-just as it is for most children. "Ma" is the sound of first recourse, of merely opening the lips. It is the name that is there whether you speak it or not, "the invisible breath between every line," as the poet James Merrill put it. But for Erez, the bleating syllable lacked a referent. Andy was his father; he had no mother; no one came when he uttered the world's oldest word. Very soon after he started speaking it, the sound naturally fell into disuse, until it was hijacked several months later as the name for his favorite stuffed animal, a black-and-white cat even now called Ma'am-from the sound he had learned cats make, we assume.

He had no mother, but of course he did. Andy often told him the story, or part of the story, in the dark as Erez lay curling for sleep: One day I walked from work and took the subway train to the bus and the bus to a plane, and the plane took me far away to another state, where a woman who was able to grow you inside her but could not take care of you was looking for a daddy to love you for the rest of your life. And I was that daddy. And I took you back to the plane to the bus and the bus to the subway-well, actually, this time, we took a cab-and brought you here to Brooklyn to be my son forever. Which perhaps explains Erez's mania for transportation, his every-night dreaming of trains.

For a while he asks a few times a week: "Where's Mommy?" Other times he says definitively: "Daddy is my mommy." This seems a piece of wisdom, but it is the wisdom of the stopped clock, correct twice a day. In the category of family relationships he is apt to say anything. "Mommy?" he says to a passing stranger. "Mommy?" he says to a woman whose child has just called her that. Or at television time, this: "Let's watch Grandma Yankees!"-inexplicably having altered the title of the musical Damn Yankees to suit some subterranean agenda. Wallace and Gromit, characters in a favorite video, have similarly turned into Wallace and Grandma. And I sometimes get turned into Uncle-a term someone must have used in his presence, or even deliberately taught him to use. But I'm not his uncle, any more than Gromit (a claymation dog) is his grandma. I'm his . . . well, no wonder he's confused.

He finds a picture in the drawer of a flea-market dry sink-a drawer so rarely opened by adults that it still contains news clippings and liquor bills from the man who owned it decades ago. What a party Sink Man threw in May of 1963! Here is an order for twenty-five bottles of wine plus an assortment of spirits and thick green liqueurs. But suddenly it's 1967 and here is a letter expressing sorrow over Sink Man's recent "tragedy": "I hope that time will enable you to overcome your present sadness. Fortunately, you are still very young so that much of your life is before you." The condolence-is it possible?-still reeks of pipe tobacco. And here is a photograph.

But before we even see what it is, Erez has torn the tiny picture in four. This is not surprising; he shreds, juliennes, or otherwise dismembers almost anything he particularly likes. Playing cards and the pasteboard sleeves of videotapes are helpless in his path; pop-up books may be totally harvested of their pop-ups within minutes if left undefended. Now he hands over the remains of a woman, taken in a photo booth in what seems, from her hairdo and Peter Pan collar when reassembled, to be the late 1950s. She is young, a bit bulbous, smiling through lipstick; she has not yet had a child-and would she ever get to, before her "tragedy"? For she is the wife (or so I imagine) for whom Sink Man threw such a bibulous party, whom Sink Man lost not four years later.

"Mommy?" Erez says, dropping the bits merrily in my hand.

Edition details

• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0345437098
• ISBN 13: 9780345437099
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256