Fatherload: A Collection: Adoption, Dead Fish, and the True Story of Santa Claus

By Kevin Redman

This book isn't just for fathers, but it isn't for everyone. It might be for you if you've ever changed jobs, moved out of one home into another, or had to explain the dead fish to a three-year-old. It might be for you if you are still enough of a child to ride the roller coasters, go sledding in the winter, or toss food up the air so you can (try to) catch it on the way down. If you go to weddings, if you dread the day your dog may be put down, or losing loved ones, you might want to read this. If you are older than fourth grade and know the real truth about Santa Claus, read this. If you're not sure, have someone else read it and decide for you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Mar 4, 2013
• ISBN: 9781475978735

Kevin Redman

Kevin Redman worked as a local sports writer in Massachusetts for 12 years, winning numerous journalism awards from the New England Press Association, before becoming an English teacher at Tyngsborough (Mass.) High School, where he has worked since 1999. He learned to ski at age 44, has hiked extensively throughout Northern New England, and gets up at 4 a.m. every school day to run his 5K loop. He has degrees from Boston University and the University of Massachusetts-Lowell. Kevin lives in Massachusetts with his wife, his son, and his dog, Yoda. His first book, Father Along, was published in 2013.

Book preview

Copyright © 2013 by Kevin Redman.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

iUniverse books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

iUniverse

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.iuniverse.com

1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-4759-7872-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-7873-5 (ebk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013903374

iUniverse rev. date: 02/26/2013

Contents

Introduction

PART ONE: He Smiles in His Sleep

Prologue

There are no marble columns

The road is littered with dead birds and living cows

We gain a son, but lose our minds

Enjoy your stay in Warsaw

Last chance to have that stroke

Part Two: Sports Writer

Ten Years and Running

A nice ring to this loss

A Mound of Woes

How Bad Can Bad Really Be?

The Things She’s Done For Sports

Ben

Part Three: Teacher

Barbaric Yawp

miraculous barrage duck wave John

Someone Else

A Modest Proposal: Paintball as a Deterrent to Tardiness

Personal Progress, 2005

Personal Progress, 2007

Why Cheerleading is Not a Spectator Sport

A Modest Proposal: User fees

A Modest Proposal: Economic prosperity, individual security

Gatsby quotes essay

Orwell and Einstein

Nobel Prize comparisons: Sinclair Lewis and William Faulkner

Me, A to Z

A Place: Greycourt Park

A Place: Room 101

Hampshire Circle

Part Four: Family

Demolition

A Christmas Gift

I Hate Weddings

The Fish

The Fish: Revision

The Breeze

Coaching John

The True Story of Santa Claus

Introduction

Twelve years as a sports writer. Fourteen and counting as a teacher. Eleven and counting as a father. Sixteen and counting as a husband. Forty-seven and counting as a human being.

As this collection came together, a very helpful editorial comment came back to me: What’s the point? What was the thread, where was the cohesion? If the content is adoption and pets and local sports writing and high school English classrooms and some rambling piece about Santa Claus, can there be a single thread?

Of course.

All this writing, year in and year out, exists to capture the moment, because it’s gone as soon as it gets here. Nobody lives a slow life anymore, and it’s easy to let moment after moment slip through our fingers. Witness the deluge of trivial slop that arises on Facebook as we all try to nail down a moment, any moment (Going to bake cookies now! She did it again!). Digital photography lets us point and shoot at everything. We’ll sort it out later. But there doesn’t ever seem to be a later, just more now.

Writing needs a little more. A little more thought at the front end, to shape it, give it some flavor. Do I want to make my reader laugh? See them tear up a bit? If they’re investing their time, the writer has to reward them. And it takes a little more at the other end, to compel that reader to sit and give their most important treasure over to the writer: time. Give up a few of their moments to read what the writer has to say, whether it’s a high school sports story, an April Fool’s joke column, or the story of a family coming into existence.

So there has to be cohesion in these pages, right? If someone doesn’t know me, or Rose, or John, or anyone else who’s in the following pages, there has to be something in it for them. I looked for it, I spent the effort at the front end, and when I did, a sad picture tried to emerge.

Loss. They’re about loss. Since the day each of us was born, we’ve been losing. Lose one more day off of the lifetime calendar. Lose another company softball game. Lose interest in working here any more. Lose Santa Claus, lose a wonderful dog, lose a big sister way too early, lose any hope of having a baby, and tomorrow, lose another day off of the lifetime calendar.

So, why do I laugh so often? And why isn’t this a sad collection? Why get out of bed in the morning? What can I draw on to explain why this isn’t a sad book? And when all of these individual, disparate pieces come together, the answer is: there’s a payoff for every loss. There’s a return on that payment. What do I get in return for the loss of today from that lifetime calendar? Some days it’s one short conversation with a student, to help them turn the corner with a tough assignment, and get them to smile. Some days it’s coaching a youth soccer team and making a great zucchini pancake and reading a funny post of actual substance on Facebook. Sometimes it’s an eight-hour hike up a New Hampshire mountain on a summer day. Gain the motivation to go back to school and change my career. Gain some insight, years later, that Santa Claus does exist, for me, for my wife, for any other grownup who can figure it out (I’ll help explain that, at the end of this book). Lose a dog? There’s no return on that, except to maybe enjoy those walks in the woods a little more while I have him, to take the next one on the hikes in the mountains, to use that pain to sharpen my own emotions. Lose a big sister? Use it to make a better, stronger family afterwards. Can’t have your own child? How about the staggering payoff of traveling to Ukraine to adopt? Every day is going to come off of the calendar; I can’t do anything about that. What am I going to be able to count off as payment at its end? I can do lots about that.

One of my newspaper stories that comes to me an almost daily basis is the one about John Carson, a high school running standout who suffered a tragic death that shook the entire community of Chelmsford, Massachusetts, in 1987. For a ten-year anniversary story about the event and its aftermath, I visited with his parents. Every parent can imagine the pain, but John’s father said something I’ve never forgotten:

The question is, he said, what are you going to do about it? Are you going to be mad at the world? Be mad at God?

Read that story when it appears later in this collection. You’ll see the goodness of many different people. They couldn’t change that loss, but they could make a choice as to what they would do in response to it.

If every loss can offer a payoff, a trade-in, then what’s even better is, we’re often in charge of what the trade-in will be. Sometimes it’s hard to find, sometimes it’s far different from what we want or expect, and sometimes it’s way too slow to dawn on us. Meanwhile, I try to keep working hard, the way my parents taught all six of their children to do. I try to live up to my responsibilities, because if I let my wife and my son down, I might as well just keep on walking into the sunset. And if I can’t make friends and co-workers laugh, especially at the never ending stream of nonsense in the world that’s out of our hands anyway, and if I can’t help my students do great work and feel better about themselves, their capacity to do great things, and their place in the world, then what? Then I’m just stuck with loss after loss after loss.

I don’t think that was the plan for setting me down here.

Cohesion? Not from Ukraine to softball to a wedding proposal to a dead fish and finally to Santa Claus. But yes, from one type of loss to another, and always to some kind of payoff (as small as a smile, as incomprehensible as a son to raise). That’s the thread, and it’s made of gold.

He Smiles In His Sleep

Prologue

Of all the lousy things. What was I doing choking up on the attic stairway? I only went up there for the suitcases. But one look back at those little street hockey nets, and I’m a mess.

I planned on hope, excitement, and some anxiety over this trip. Maybe even a little fear. But this sorrow? Never. I guess that’s one for my nephew: just three years old, already holding special powers over his Uncle Kev.

The hope and excitement stemmed from my impending fatherhood. After four years of waiting, worrying, and sometimes wailing, Rose and I were going to become parents. We were leaving the next day for Ukraine, where we would adopt a four-month-old baby boy. Four years of doctors telling us there was no medical reason we hadn’t become pregnant. Four years of monthly roller coaster rides (This is the month it happens) and four years of roller coaster crashes. All that emotional battering, plus nine months of staggering paperwork: tax forms and doctor’s notes and home studies, interviews with police, psychologists, marriage counselors, drug and alcohol abuse counselors, even the FBI, who all teamed up to declare that we were fit to be parents. All for the pleasure of a two-week stay in one of the most depressing, impoverished countries in the world.

So there was hope and excitement that our agonizing wait was ending. There was anxiety and a little fear over the trip itself. I mean, I’m thirty-six years old. My exciting days are about a decade behind me. This stage of my life is about enjoying who I’ve become, the people I’m with, and what I am accomplishing. It’s not about eight-hour car rides, jammed into the back of a Volkswagen, or sitting in a Kyiv bathtub for my daily shower: a tepid trickle of water coursing over me, or sitting in a sweat-smelly minivan bouncing along a boulevard near the Black Sea. I didn’t need to flip life over like this.

But then again, I did.

I expected the emotional whirls the day before this trip. I expected to be a lot of things. I didn’t expect to stop at the top of the attic stairway, squeezing the wooden banister hard while I squeezed the tears back in… tears for my little nephew, and a lot more.

The attic was our refuge. If Rose and I were battling madness over our lack of a child, there was always Michael. He and his parents live two miles away; we see each other three and four times every week, at least. Thanks to his daddy and his uncle, Michael loves his hockey. During the offseason, he goes to the videotapes of Bobby Orr and the 1990 Beanpot final (BU 9, Harvard 2, Go Terriers!). He could sing the national anthem (the hockey song) months before he turned three. His Uncle Kev hopes he has the Canadian anthem figured out before kindergarten.

And whenever Michael comes to Hampshire Circle for a visit, he takes a quick right turn inside the front door and heads for the stairs.

Hey, Uncle Kev! How about we go play hockey? he says, having already climbed the first two stairs, the answer a foregone conclusion. Regardless of my own energy level, up I go. One is never allowed to be tired or unenthusiastic around Michael. Not that anyone can resist him, anyway.

So up we go, up the two flights of stairs to the attic. Ours is an old house, built in 1927, on the banks of the Spicket River. It has many old-home charms, like the huge built-in china cabinet in the dining room, or the rounded corner wall at the top of the stairway. Another is the hardwood floor in the finished attic, with short walls blocking off the built-in storage areas under the eaves. That leaves about a twelve-foot wide room running the length of the attic. A couple of years ago, Rose and I picked up two little street hockey sets at a toy store clearance, the best $9.98 ever spent.

The black plastic nets with the red corner joints sit on opposite sides of the room. Since the eaves prevent me from standing fully upright, I get to sit down to the side of one net, where I fire one orange ball and black foam puck after another across the ice. Michael zips around with his own little stick, winging shots all over (he’s got a pretty accurate shot, I have to say), pausing to do a little pre-game player introduction (Welcome to the FleetCenter. Tonight, it’s the Boston Bruins against the Mighty Ducks, he says, in perfect broadcaster syntax), or to drive the Zamboni, or to provide the national anthem. Usually, though, he just fires away. Shoot and chase, shoot and chase.

Score! Uncle I scored! Big hugs on the ice! he shouts, fake-skating over to me and tumbling into a celebratory hug. Sometimes it’s a pat on the head, or a high-five. Once in a great while, he’s the goalie, but he hasn’t quite figured out the concept of stopping the shot. He thinks the goalie’s job is to dramatically flop to the ice, often in slow motion. Once the puck or ball is in the net, behind him, and I give him the Sieve! Sieve! Sieve! chant, he bounces up to come over and hug the goal scorer. That habit needs to be changed if he ever plays for real.

Through all the trials and the tests of the past four years, I always had the attic. I always had Michael to make me smile and laugh, and to talk hockey with. He was the King; when he was around, I was happy, guaranteed.

Now Rose and I were leaving. We would be gone for a total of sixteen days, in Ukraine and Poland. I’d never gone three days in a row without seeing him. He thought we had to make a short trip to some store to get him his cousin, like we’d be back that afternoon. And once we came back, the attic would never be the same refuge. Yes, I knew we’d be coming home with a baby boy. Yes, I knew that Michael would teach John to play hockey, and yes, I knew that this was all going to be wonderful. My head knew all this.

But for two minutes on the attic stairway, it was just so sad. The temporarily abandoned nets, the empty room, the window at the top of the stairs, where Michael always stopped on his way to play hockey to say, Hi, river!

I was leaving something that would not be the same when I came back, something that had sustained me through the hardest time of my life. I didn’t really want to go back in time, though, and I surely didn’t want to delay this hard-won trip any longer.

I just wanted one more hockey game, just Michael and me. Instead, it was time to pack; time to go to Kyiv.

Kyiv. Me. A thirty-six-year-old high school teacher. What the hell was I doing…

There are no marble columns

Kyiv. My imagination can’t quite get hold of it. I can fall back on some mental picture of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, London, Paris. If I never visited a place, chances are that movies, television shows, books, or sporting events could fill in skylines, stories, or images. Tokyo, Amsterdam, Vienna, Sao Paolo, Cleveland. I can see something for each of them.

Kyiv. I’ve got to spin the globe halfway around to get a look at this dot on the map. A city so old, it’s staggering. I read that it was founded in the late 5th century, that it’s 1500 years old (as opposed to Moscow’s prepubescent 850 years). What is that? Did they even have the wheel in the year 500? Wait… I teach Beowulf to my senior students. I can picture huts, crude weapons, crude diet, and since it’s Kyiv, cold weather.

Kyiv must be a magical place, with those strange towers with the oversized, whipped-cream-swirl look at the top. Wolves in the woods and warlocks in dark castles and snow always blowing. Everyone is old; the women all look like kitchen witches, or dried-apple dolls. A city from another dimension or realm, right? Even the airport must be almost magical, with marble floors and dragon sculptures and columns or something. It must be, but I have so little background to feed my imagination. I’ve tried to learn. I bought a book. I found a bunch of internet pages to bookmark. I’m not clueless anymore, but I’m hardly well versed. The most knowledgeable thing I can offer friends is that it’s proper to say, We’re going to Ukraine, as opposed to the Ukraine, that so many say (you don’t say The France, or The Canada, do you?). I also learn that Ukrainians have their own language, and their translation of the city is spelled Kyiv. Got to get used to that.

So I know that much. I sit back as the plane takes off from Frankfurt. Our six-hour flight from Boston and the four-hour layover in Germany are history. We are just about two hours away from Borispil Airport in Kyiv, Ukraine, the country that will change our lives forever.

* * *

To reach this point took so long. Years of doctors saying there’s no medical explanation as to why we can’t conceive. Months of weighing the overwhelming possibilities involved with adopting. Foreign or domestic? Which country? How are we going to afford this? We talk to friends, family, doctors, and priests. We also accumulate the required paperwork over another ten months:

1. Home study by our adoption agency

2. Application to Adoption Committee in Kyiv

3. Letter to Adoption Committee stating intention of parents to retain child’s Ukrainian citizenship until age 18, and willingness to provide information on child’s welfare to Ukrainian consulate

4. Marriage certificate

5. Copies of passports

6. Letter from each of our personal physicians, stating that parents are in good health. Negative reports on tuberculin, syphilis, HIV.

7. Letter from psychiatrist stating there is no mental illness or family history thereof (this obtained after a one-hour drive and one-hour interview with a family therapist)

8. Letter verifying no signs or history of drug or alcohol abuse