Far from the Tree

My son sleeps a lot. Even curled up inside my body, he’s as still as water on a wind-dead night. I fret over his lack of movement and press the bell of a stethoscope against the underside of my jutting tummy until I can hear his heartbeat. At the end of the day, when I finally slow down, he wakes up and rolls around, like a squirming animal caught in the coils of a snake.

Two weeks after his due date, with my baby still disinclined to move, the midwives give me medication that causes my uterus to clamp down around him. I feel like a giant seed pod being forced to expel a bean. It doesn’t work. Thirty hours later, a surgeon cuts this dozy kid from my body. He wails on cue, then drifts off again into slumber, waking long enough to sniff around for food and push meconium out of his rear end.

I expect to slowly lose my mind to sleep deprivation, at least for the next year. But that never happens. Our son is mildly astonished by the snowflakes landing on his face the day my husband and I bring him home from the hospital during a snowstorm, but he doesn’t cry. He soon realizes that any sound he makes is answered promptly—with a grin, a snuggle or the delivery of my breast to his mouth—so he doesn’t make a big deal of being loud about his needs, settling instead into what strikes me as an unnatural contentment.

I am 10 years older than most of my mom friends, the ones I make through birth class and prenatal yoga. Their crying babies don’t rattle me, maybe because of my age, or simply the years spent working in emergency rooms. I’ve learned to move through distress without giving in to my own, at least in the moment, because that’s a time waster. But the bottom line is I don’t lose my mind as a new mother, because my baby is chill.

My friends tell me the crying is making them so insane that they fantasize about dropping their babies in the woods to be raised by coyotes. I feel guilty that I can’t commiserate, like the homely girl who listens enviously as her beautiful friends grouse about unwanted attention from boys. I think to myself, I’ll take some of that, if you’ve got too much. My son doesn’t seem interested in me, and so doesn’t complain, as though he accepts my regular feedings out of courtesy. I crave for him to be demanding of me, to give me the legitimacy of being the one who can soothe his distress. But he rarely has any. More than once, I find him sleeping soundly next to a small pile of vomit.

I start to pathologize my baby’s calm nature and propensity for sleep. I’m confused that he doesn’t seem excited by the world. Wondering if he’ll eventually be diagnosed with an untreatable cognitive dysfunction, I look for ways to challenge his sensory skills. I organize outings with other new moms to hike through cedar forests, where we let our toddlers grip branches bearded with moss. We wait for each other when someone’s child fusses or wails. When I pull him from the backpack, my son responds to the commotion by looking into the distance rather than at the source, or even at me, as though he is seeing apparitions. Some amiable West Coast mamas tell me he’s an “old soul,” as though somnolence is some sort of spiritual disposition.

He never takes to crawling. Like a stubborn cat, he refuses to rise up on hands and knees when I place something he wants out of reach. Eventually, he opts to scoot his body forward with his arms, as though he’s not aware of his legs. The day he discovers walking, he waddles over to his scooter and spends the next year rolling through the house on four wheels.

Around the age of six, he finally mimics other boys who are testing their physicality on each other. But my kid has the density of pottery clay. Like his dad, he is born with thick thighs and bones filled with lead. He doesn’t float in a pool. He can knock over other kids with a body slam. He can fling them around in circles because they have lanky limbs and bird bones. Some love this and some get injured.

We beg him to stop using his body at the expense of others. When he complies, I think I’ve done my job as a parent. After several years of the gradual muting of this boy energy, I wonder if I’m responsible for its extinction. What emerges from his room at puberty is a young man who would rather sleep than explore his surroundings. He is an infant all over again. My workplace equanimity evaporates at home.

I grip my fist as I watch the tears trickle down his cheeks during his first blood draw. I’m checking to see if his cells are normal in their quantity and morphology, that his thyroid is functioning, his kidneys filtering properly, his liver metabolizing. I want there to be no organic reason for his slowing down after briefly becoming what seemed normal. There isn’t. He is healthy, as healthy as a child can be when he eats too much sugar and other worthless food I stupidly buy because he holds my hand sweetly in Trader Joe’s and makes all sorts of promises if I’ll get him two bags of spicy chips, instead of one.

As a teen, he moves only when necessary. He gives up on soccer and swimming, goes to jujitsu when we insist. During the pandemic, he conducts his social life over an app called “Discord” which sounds like a terrible way to have relationships. But I hear him on the other side of his door, busting into laughter, slapping his desk, shouting into his headphones with a voice that breaks into different octaves. I remind myself that he will conduct his social life on his own terms, now that I am well past scheduling his play dates.  

Some days he fits the diagnostic criteria for depression. But then, some days so do I. Normal is better understood now as points of light upon the spectrum of diversity. When I see a boy his age playing basketball, running around a track, even skateboarding without a helmet, I wish my boy would do the same. I catastrophize that my son’s fondness for sitting in the dark will kill him before it kills me. But he comes out of his room, tells me his Fun Fact of the Day, gladly plays a game of chess with his grandfather, then watches World War II documentaries with me and calls me Boomer, even though I am Gen X by a year. We laugh. He gives me the kind of hugs that groan.

I come across the word xenogenesis, a biological noun meaning “the generation of offspring completely and permanently different from the parent.” It also means “birth of the foreign,” which seems to define how I feel about my kid. He is as foreign to me as outer space. I suppose xenogenesis doesn’t literally apply to my son. He didn’t come out with a snout and hooves. But he is different enough from his father and me that we scratch our heads and wonder if they transferred the right embryo.

Once I pass menopause, I have coffee with a new friend whose children are so grown up, they live in other countries. When I tell her how weird I find my son’s lethargy, joke that he is xenogenic, she tells me that kids are the way they come into the world. Her son catapulted from her body after a few hours of labor. He hasn’t stopped moving since. He once set off solo into the New Zealand wilderness and tumbled off an icy waterfall. The only reason he survived was because his mother had given him a satellite powered emergency beacon to carry on his adventures. She accepted who he was.

Suddenly my son’s torpid disposition makes sense. He has always been a creature who rests during the day and comes alive at night, even before he took his first breath. He has chosen locomotion with the least amount of energy expenditure. I want to pull and kick and shout him out of this passivity, but I begin to realize I have only ever been a witness to his development, not the director of it.

When he starts his junior year in high school, he transfers to the community college to finish his credits. He begins to shower more than once a week and tells me he wants a better deodorant. When he asks if I’ll buy him a set of dumbbells, I run for the car keys and disregard my pledge to resist buying anything I can’t find at Goodwill. The pressure in my chest begins to let up. He registers himself for driver’s ed and announces one day that he’s moved his allowance to his investment account so he can buy an undervalued stock.  

I get back to attending to things I’ve neglected while consulting therapists and books on parenting. I unsubscribe from podcasts on childhood development and raising a well-rounded kid. The bathroom finally gets painted, and I help build a deck off the back of the house. I pull more weeds. I buy an unlimited membership at a yoga studio and work on my breath. My son and I wander our small orchard and gather the apples that have fallen far from the trees. They make the best compost.