Emotional co-dependence at the zoo

Everyone is born into a family, even if that family is only a mother and even if that mother must give her child away, and then agency endows us with the ability not only to accept a family but also, eventually, to choose one, although I'm not entirely convinced that getting married and having a child initially amounts to anything more than acquiescence to a custom, a custom that, nonetheless, involves a greater element of choice than is involved in simply being born. I don't remember what I expected from getting married and having a baby. I don't remember, actually, expecting anything:  marriage seemed, in the words of my favorite love poem, "a thing to be done." When you're in love and the person you love loves you back, which is itself an intensely terrific coincidence, you get married.

I'm pretty grim. Family's a love cluster, but it's one that exists as emotional insurance. For reasons I don't fully understand, the original love cluster—the birth family—tends to disintegrate. In a way I guess I do understand the disintegration:  I guess there's a baby bird leaving the nest element, and the other clear fact of the original family matter is that parents die. But the disintegration happens sooner than parental death does. Aron talks to his mom everyday; I only talk to mine once a week. Aron talks to his dad at least once a week; I talk to mine, at most, once a month and only see him, at most, once a year, and he hasn't met Graham yet. It truly feels tragic to me that original families don't last, but maybe it's just necessary, in the baby bird way, that their significance starts to fade. I don't think there's an age at which I'm going to be able to accept my parents' death and not feel as a result of it profoundly lonely and emotionally orphaned. I wish each year older would make it a degree easier to accept their passing, but I don't think that will prove true. That's not why I chose to build a family of my own—to help me cope and feel less lonely once my original family is dead—but it has occurred to me since getting married that Aron will be indispensably comforting to me during that time, and I will be for him in a similar circumstance. Jonathan Franzen has a book on writing and literature called How to Be Alone—I, obviously, haven't read it. The idea of a family cluster—which is also inevitably a love cluster, at the very least in the conception of love as robust concern—is part of my emotional composition, but it's difficult for me to explain how the love cluster fits into my emotional makeup. Often I experience the idea as an image:  sometimes moss growing up the length of a giant tree; sometimes ants eating an apple to its core in a time-lapsed fashion; and sometimes simply small groupings of dots—each dot representing a family member—separating before rejoining, dots like on a Wolly Willy.

Aron and I took Graham to the zoo yesterday, which doesn't exactly jive with our animal ethics generally, but at least the zoo pretends to be a moral place by educating its visitors about endangered species, deforestation and boots made from animal flesh. The reptile house in Zoo Atlanta is wild—I often have nightmares of being surrounded by snakes, so this part of the zoo was a nightmare come true. But the morally pertinent aspect of the reptile house is that it's consistently filled with screaming children, and signs on the walls instruct visitors not to tap the glass:  reptiles scare easily and can, when frightened, injure themselves. Maybe noises other than taps don't make it through the glass. I hope they don't—it would make for a pretty unpleasant life if they do, and even though I'm sure every snake wants to strangle me and then eat my face, I still think they deserve nice lives.

Bringing my three-person family to the zoo certainly contributed to animal anxiety. I guess I did some cost-benefit analysis and decided that I valued watching Graham watch animals more than keeping those animals' worlds as quiet and isolated as possible. Life is hard, but seeing Graham catch sight of and smile at a lemur is an easy delight. His eyes open wide, and his eyebrows rise, and it is so exciting and fulfilling to see him appreciate something beautiful.

The aquarium is another problematic place I want to take Graham, and I think it'll be a trip that he can appreciate more than he appreciated the zoo, where he primarily paid attention to the noisy children animals. Graham doesn't follow a pointing finger all the way into a field where a motionless lion lies. But he certainly seemed interested in the up-close, mobile creatures, especially the otters (my favorite!) and the momma and baby gorilla (my other favorite), who spent a lot of time lovingly wrestling each other. It was so cute! I am robustly concerned with the welfare of animals. Visiting the zoo may not be the best way to illustrate that concern, but I think that allowing Graham to admire animals is good for him in a way that will also prove to be good for animals. That's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it.

Graham peed all over himself while in Aron's arms yesterday morning and also, therefore, peed on Aron. We had packed a change of clothes for Graham, who has a habit of peeing on himself (during diaper changes especially), but we didn't pack a change of clothes for Aron, who hasn't peed on himself for at least five years. After our zoo adventure we drove to Peachtree City to see Aron's family. His mom, aunt and grandma were eager to watch Graham while Aron and I went on a mini-date to Starbucks for coffee and Target for a new shirt for Aron. Before our mini-date, Aron showed his mom pictures we had taken at the zoo, and while that was happening, his grandma snuck up to me and pried my fingers apart and forced a twenty dollar bill into my hand. She said, "Use this to buy Aron's shirt." I yelled, "Aron, help!" thinking that he was in a stronger position, being her grandson, to refuse her money than I, being essentially an interloper, was. As soon as I yelled to Aron for assistance, his grandma shouted back at me:  "Shut up, Amy! Are we family? You know I love you."

The nicer people are the more upsetting it is to imagine their deaths, and simply not thinking about death isn't easy for me. A silverback gorilla at the zoo was born a few years before my mom, and now I'm afraid that he might not have many years left. He probably has an amazing doctor, though.

I actually also enjoy being alone. It hasn't happened for more than an hour in the last seven months, and it isn't just because I'm afraid of optimism that I'm going to say that I'm not sure emotional co-dependence of any sort is good for an individual. I think it's good to care about others, but I don't know if needing is good. I don't want to forget how to be alone. As usual, I'm confused.