Anna Martin
From The New York Times, I’m Anna Martin. This is the Modern Love podcast. Today’s story is about the love between a parent and a child and what happens when that child grows up to be a parent. It’s called “A Time to Put Aside the Armor,” written by Ariel Saber and read by Edoardo Ballerini.
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Eduardo Ballerini
On a recent cross-country visit to my parents in California, I came down from my old childhood bedroom, still bleary with jet lag.
I was startled by the sound of a boy’s laughter from my parents’ room. I tiptoed to the door and heard my father’s low voice, and more of those high-pitched giggles.
When I was a boy, this house was a battlefield. I clashed most often with my father.
Growing up in Los Angeles in the 1980s, I wanted to be one of those postcard-perfect California boys with the golden hair, the spray of freckles, the surfer’s unflappable cool. But certain facts of ancestry had made that impossible.
My father was an olive-skinned man born in the mountains of Iraq, a fish-out-of-water immigrant who mutilated English and couldn’t get his clothes to match. I felt embarrassed when kids from school saw us together. At one point, I even stopped calling him “Abba,” or Dad. The sound we most often exchanged was silence.
But when I opened the door on that recent visit, I saw a dark-haired boy, my 6-year-old son Seth, laughing with my father. There they were in a kind of Norman Rockwell pose: My father, 70, riding a stationary bike in his pajamas, part of his low-intensity morning exercise regimen; Seth, also in pajamas, perched on the bike’s frame and clasping my father’s shoulder for balance. Seth was counting aloud as his “Saba” pedaled toward the day’s calorie-burning goal, tracked on the bike’s handlebar display.
“Three more calories to go, Saba,” Seth said, beaming.
“Seth, you are a real inspiration,” my father said. I sat down to watch their banter, my father with his soft accent, Seth with his bright, all-American voice. Why hadn’t I noticed sooner how close they were?
The last time we’d seen my father on our turf in Washington, I’d heard glowing reports about the hours he and Seth spent ambling around Capitol Hill, or even just watching TV in my parents’ hotel room. But I took these accounts as I might a babysitter’s, as blandishments meant to assure parents their children were in good hands. Our 10 days in California, however, were different. There, for the first time, I had the evidence of my own eyes. I had evidence that is far harder to ignore.
When Seth woke up each morning, he crept into my parents’ bedroom to see if his sabba was awake. My father greeted him with a booming, “Good morning, America,” and spent afternoons teaching him knucklebones, a marble game my father had played as a boy in the riverbanks of Kurdistan. But it seemed to translate well enough to wall-to-wall carpet.
Determined to be at his grandfather’s side, Seth insinuated himself into routines I’d long ago written off as unbending. Every night before bed, my father eats a grapefruit at a cluttered tray table barely big enough for one. Now Seth was hustling a chair up to the other side and helping my father carve and eat his bedtime snack. On Saturday mornings, Seth went with my father to synagogue, touching the Torah scrolls with a borrowed prayer shawl and sitting through services with a patience I could never muster.
In my father’s eyes, Seth walked on water. Where my wife and I saw bullheadedness, my father saw resolve. Where we heard shrieks, my father heard a clear, beautiful voice.
And double standards — or new ones, anyway — abounded. When I was young, my father pickled at the mere mention of restaurants. He told me they were money pits when we could eat my mother’s leftover meatballs in the fridge, and the fact that there were no restaurants in Zakho, Iraq when he was a boy. But as soon as Seth hinted at a hankering for, say, pizza and brownies at a certain restaurant, my father was making plans for lunch on the town.
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“Yea, Saba,” Seth would cry out in that clear, beautiful voice.
I looked at my dad, and saw a man enjoying a kind of second chance at fatherhood. Here was a young boy who adored him. Why were they such a pair when my father and I, at least in my memory, were such a mismatch? The two of them were separated by an even greater gulf of years and culture, but they coasted where we stumbled.
At first, I wrote it off to the simpler protocols of grandparenthood with its premium on uncomplicated gestures of generosity and love. It was true, too, that after four decades in America, my father had changed. My American-born mother had brought a passing acceptability to his wardrobe. His English had improved. He is now a long-tenured professor at U.C.L.A. And enough time has passed since his impoverished childhood that he allows himself occasional meals at restaurants, even if he still double checks the bill.
But something about this explanation seemed too easy. In a book I’d written about my father’s life, I focused on our conflicts, on the post-modern Los Angeles boy being raised by the pre-modern Kurd. Had I, in the heat of storytelling, become too invested in a certain narrative of my childhood? Had I blinded myself to other happier moments? After all, a way with children is not something a person suddenly acquires in his early 70s. If Seth craved my father’s time, might I once have, too?
Since that visit, a few childhood memories have pecked at me. They come when it’s quiet and I’m alone, when the defenses built up over a lifetime lower just enough to let in a hazy light — the summer mornings at the U.C.L.A. pool when my father taught me how to hold my breath underwater, the two of us smiling at each other through goggles and blue water; the nights he lifted my floppy bones from the car after some colleague’s dinner party and carried me to bed, both of us fully aware that I was only feigning sleep.
The afternoon on that bridge at Yosemite National Park when he held my hand, and we leapt together like those older boys, into that big river.
My father assured me recently that there were more times like those, many of them. He told me that when I was Seth’s age, we played and laughed, just as the two of them do now.
I want to believe him, particularly now, with my son drawing the three of us closer. But the memories of conflict, of rebellion, of trying to define myself against who he was, it all throws off so much glare that I can make out little else.
There is, no doubt, a sanctity to a child’s relationship with his grandparents. But I suspect that another reason for my son’s easy adoration of my father is that Seth is young, his love of family untested by peer pressure, by stabbing self-awareness, by the world. He is at an age where even I — the father who probably yells too much, who is tighter than absolutely necessary with chocolate-chip cookies and TV — I can do no wrong.
He recently asked my wife to buy him a button-down shirt and tie so he could look just like Daddy. He races to me with his box of magnets when I come home from work, tugging at my sleeves for help with a science project. We recently unbolted the training wheels from his bike. And most afternoons, he calls me outside to see some new trick.
I savor those moments, but worry now that Seth will scarcely remember them. Perhaps memories of early years were never really meant for sons, for whom growing up requires a kind of forgetting. Perhaps they’re really for fathers to wrap ourselves in when our sons begin that long, slow fade into adulthood.
Watching my father with Seth has let me roll back time. It has shown me a version, at least, of who my dad was before I turned away from him. But it has done something else, too.
The other evening, on a long weekend when my wife and daughter were out of town, Seth and I went to the second-floor bedroom to look out the window at people milling at a metro stop across the street. The sun was sinking behind the row houses. And the lengthening shadows lent the scene an air of mystery.
“Hey, Seth, let’s pretend we’re detectives,” I said impulsively. I rooted through a drawer for an old pair of binoculars and handed them to my son. We were both now lying across the bed spread on our stomachs like cops on a rooftop stakeout. “What do you think those people over there are up to?” I said, taking the binoculars back.
“Tell me, Daddy.”
“Well,” I said, “We’re too far away to hear what they’re saying. But what can we tell about them from their clothes, from the things they’re carrying, from whether they’re walking alone or in a group?” We uncovered vast criminal conspiracies, a forbidden romance, and two or three good deeds. And then I realized that it was nearly two hours past Seth’s bedtime, on a school night.
“Can we play detective tomorrow, too, Daddy?” said Seth, eyes wide as I tucked him in.
“That was kind of fun, huh?” I said, as much to myself I realized as to him.
Alone downstairs later that night, I felt surprised at how easily I’d given myself over to Seth’s world. I’m usually too preoccupied with work, with the notifications on my phone, with all the loose ends that seem to demand tying. I’m usually full of excuses.
But tonight was different. Seth was the only thing in the world that mattered. And I knew that, for reasons ancient and new, I owed it to my father.
Anna Martin
When we come back, a Tiny Love Story about a woman who takes a DNA test and makes a huge discovery about her family.
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Ricki Lewis
I’m Ricki Lewis, and this is my Tiny Love Story.
I’m a geneticist. At a conference where I was presenting, I spit into a tube for one of those D.N.A. tests that are now all the craze. How fitting but surprising to discover not one, but six half siblings.
I grew up with one full sister. Our parents, now deceased, never mentioned a sperm donor. I suppose that’s how they quietly managed infertility in the 1950s. More than half a century ago, an anonymous man from Brooklyn gave us the gift of life and, years later, each other.
Anna Martin
Hey, Ricki. How are you? It’s great to talk to you.
Ricki Lewis
Great. Nice to meet you.
Anna Martin
I have so many questions about your story. I think we should start by going back in time a little bit. So you take this DNA test at a conference. And then you go home. Were you anxiously awaiting your results?
Ricki Lewis
No. Unlike most people, I forgot that I even took the test, because when you walk around in an exhibition, you’re just trying to get free chocolate and t-shirts and things like that. I didn’t even think about the fact that they took my DNA. So no, I forgot all about it.
Anna Martin
How did it come back on your radar again?
Ricki Lewis
It took me two years to even remember that I’d taken the test. And that was when my half sister contacted me. And what she wrote was: AncestryDNA says we’re close family, maybe first cousins. My maiden name is (blank — I don’t want to say her name.) Sound familiar? I grew up in Brooklyn.
She initiated this back-and-forth. And I contacted AncestryDNA right away and told them I was a geneticist. So they sent me all the technical papers.
And I was sitting right where I’m sitting now. And I literally fell off the seat, because when I saw the data — and I get chills even telling you this. When I saw the data, I knew we weren’t cousins. I knew we were half siblings.
Anna Martin
And was this half sibling, the one who emailed you and kicked this whole thing off, the only half sibling that you found?
Ricki Lewis
Oh, no, that was the beginning. The next one fell out of the sky on January 24. I guess that was 2019. And I immediately looked her up on Facebook. And I burst into tears, because it was like looking in the mirror to see the second half sister. And she felt the same way, an instant connection. And I think I stopped counting after seven, because I couldn’t take it anymore.
Anna Martin
Wow. Seven.
Ricki Lewis
Yes.
Anna Martin
What else did the results tell you?
Ricki Lewis
I knew it came through my father’s side. And it was just staggering. I was so confused, because I knew my father didn’t have an affair. That was never even a question. So we started thinking up all these crazy things, like maybe our fathers were identical twins separated at birth.
And it was the second half sister who still had an elderly relative. It was a woman in her mid-90s who remembered that there was an artificial insemination involved. So that was a fact that we had. So if my half sister number two knew she was from a sperm donor and half her DNA matches mine, or a quarter of her DNA matches mine, then we were the products of a sperm donor.
Anna Martin
How did it feel to process that news?
Ricki Lewis
I don’t even have the words to describe how you feel when you find something out like this. It changes who you are. It changes your picture of who you were. God, when it dawned on me that it was a sperm donor, I was just stunned. Who would think this would happen to a geneticist? It’s crazy.
Anna Martin
All of these revelations, these discoveries, does this change how you view your parents?
Ricki Lewis
I knew my mother had a couple of miscarriages. And of course, I wasn’t aware of any infertility. But clearly, in retrospect, they had a fertility problem.
And I don’t think my mother or my father even knew that this happened, because I was very close to my mother. And we both knew I was going to be a scientist when I was four years old. And when I became a geneticist, I think she certainly would have said something to me. And she didn’t.
Anna Martin
It’s sort of shocking to me that that would occur without the consent of a couple. Yeah, I’m sort of blown away by that.
Ricki Lewis
I’ve created a narrative that I can live with. And that is that my parents didn’t know, because being a woman and having had many gynecological exams, when you spread your legs and they put the sheet over you and they put that whatchamacallit lobster thing up you, you don’t know what they’re doing. How hard would it be to take a little pipette and just squirt someone’s sperm up there? And then bingo, a month later, my mother would have been pregnant.
I mean, now we say it’s paternalism, and it’s shocking and horrible. But in the context of the times, it maybe wasn’t that bad. I wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t done that.
Anna Martin
How does it make you feel that this sperm donation was likely hidden from your parents?
Ricki Lewis
I’m OK with it. I mean, I’d rather they didn’t know.
Anna Martin
Tell me more about that.
Ricki Lewis
Well, it’s paternalistic of me, but I think it would have really upset them, particularly my father. On the other hand, I have two first cousins through my father. And I love them dearly. And I grew up with them. And I hope they’re not hurt by any of this. I do worry about that.
Finding out that we’re not blood cousins, what does that even mean? It means nothing. Because if anything, I’ve learned from this that your loved ones are who you’re raised with. It doesn’t matter where, or when, or how they were conceived.
Anna Martin
Is a geneticist saying that genes don’t matter?
Ricki Lewis
That’s right. That’s exactly what I’m saying. They don’t matter. It’s the person who you are that matters.
Anna Martin
Ricki, thank you so much for sharing your story with me today.
Ricki Lewis
Oh, you’re welcome.