Jen Parker: HOW A BOY COULD BE • Cleaver Magazine

Third Place, Duality Creative Nonfiction Contest, 2024

Like all good personal essays, this one brings the humility and wisdom of experience to bear on a look at a past self, with sympathy for that self. The boy of the title is two people: one imagined by the narrator, the other left to us to imagine, which we can, painfully. This is a sad and lovely work. —Clifford Thompson, Contest Judge

Jen Murphy Parker
HOW A BOY COULD BE

I never wanted Lew to die. Of course, I didn’t. I would have died for him. I would’ve died if he died. But that didn’t mean I could understand how he was supposed to live. Or that I had any confidence he’d continue doing so for any meaningful amount of time.

If Lew had died at nine months—something he’d come dangerously close to doing—we would’ve never known his genetic truth. We would’ve concluded that our milestone-hitting, giggling, connected bulb of a boy had been downed by a virus. A fluke, a tragedy. RSV, which he had, blocks and clogs narrow infant airways. It could have killed him. An ICU nurse told me it probably would on the night of his first great emergency. We’d landed in a hospital rooftop by helicopter because of a fifty-minute seizure; a seizure that would’ve been a footnote to the Big Bad Illness of RSV; a seizure that would’ve been considered a small body’s reasonable reaction to highest fever and too little oxygen. We would’ve never known Lew’s small body was hardwired for this reaction, whether he was profoundly ill or not.

If he’d died, I would’ve grieved a different boy than the one he’d turn out to be by living. I would’ve designed an alternate, an Other Lew, that perfect baby ripped from his promising and typical path. I was still so simple then. I knew nothing of how much could go wrong while still living. My happiness binary was still governed by survival: alive equaled happy and, quite obviously, dead equaled unhappy.

I didn’t possess the mental tools to build a scenario in which Lew lived a compromised life of seizures, pharmaceuticals, and disabilities. That outcome was a complicated high rise; I lived in a Lincoln Log cabin I’d playfully assembled on the floor, notched and fitted just so.

If Lew had died as a baby, we’d have been robbed of our scrappy youngest, our along-for-the-ride fourth, the exclamation mark to our family. We were going to be casual about this kid! We’d brought him to In-n-Out when he was just five days old to prove it, well before we thought much of his frequent shivering, well before we knew he had a problem that extra blankets could never solve. I took a bunch of pictures that night, Lew in an infant seat on the floor of a fast food restaurant, at the feet of his breezy, not-sweating-the-small stuff family. I remember feeling so self-satisfied with the discovery that if you acted like child-rearing was easy and no big deal, it was easy and no big deal.

That Other Lew would be the carefree kid eating Fritos for dinner in the bleachers at his brother’s game or roaming the lobby during his sisters’ community theater musicals. I wouldn’t have to watch him—I’d let other kids handle that. I’d know something about kids—stuff rarely went that wrong. The whole enterprise was set up to work. And honestly, it was usually the kids who were helicoptered who did fall, did get hurt, did get caught in whirring blades.

That Other Lew would bike all over town, coming home in one piece every time whether he wore a helmet or not (he wouldn’t). He’d be good at making pasta or a sandwich for himself, and he’d put his plate in the dishwasher every time. He’d do his own laundry, understanding that if you wanted something clean, you needed to clean it yourself.

He’d barely have a curfew in high school—he wouldn’t need it. He’d have so much freedom, he’d never buck up against us. Some nights, he’d come early just because he wanted to, squeezing in between us on the couch, bigger than both of us, always forgetting his size.

He’d watch his siblings file out the door for college, one every few years. He’d readjust to a different energy in the house with every departure, until, as a sophomore in high school, he’d be the last kid home. Craving lost noise, he’d have friends rotating through our door. Half the time, they’d stay for dinner, covering topics that would surely scandalize other parents. But he wouldn’t care what his friends said in front of us. He’d have told us most of it before.

Things like school and sports would come naturally to him, but he wouldn’t be an asshole about it. He’d glide through his education as if he had wheels on his feet. And his hair, knowing life should be fun, would stay blonde.

Later, in relationships, he’d be a teddy-bear kind of boyfriend, sensitive and nonplussed by anything a girl could throw at him. He’d run to the store for tampons, but first ask what absorbency she preferred; or if she wanted those sport ones, even though he’d think sport-variety feminine protection was a marketing hoax for certain. He had two sisters. He knew living was a sport in and of itself.

Sure, he might be a little territorial at the dinner table, but not in a jerky way. It would just be another endearing thing about him, scruffy and adorable at our giant Nora Ephron Thanksgivings. We’d laugh about how he’d lean over his plate, how he’d eat so fast. We’d never worry he’d choke.

When Lew survived RSV, I thought this Lew, this coming-soon-to-a-theater-near-you Lew, this normally and excitingly developing Lew, had survived. I was a young-enough mother. I did not yet understand the folly of this kind of daydreaming about any kid. I hadn’t yet learned that expecting anything past the nine months of expecting would prove unexpectedly faulty over and over again.

Isn’t this what we do as parents? We hope and direct and believe we’ve laid our pattern on this freshly created cloth. Unaccustomed to this new and strange kind of sewing, we think as long as we pin and cut and stitch just so, we’ll produce the garment we’ve imagined.

We pretend how this garment turns out is up to us. We pretend this garment is ours.

Jen Murphy Parker is a writer based in San Francisco where she lives with her husband, four kids and zero dogs. She writes monthly long form essays on her substack exploring what exists in the middle—of parenting, of health, of life. Fourteen years into raising a child with severe epilepsy, she’s always looking for the both-ness—the many ways we end up a sum of our best and worst luck and experiences. She holds a master’s from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, and her work has appeared in Hobart Pulp and Heimat Review, among others.