Both were my son.
This is the thing that parents are not always prepared for.
His name is Leo, and he is fourteen, and he is growing into something that is not yet finished, and in that unfinished state he is capable of things that he would not have been capable of at nine and that I hope he will not be capable of at twenty-five, and the job I have right now is to contribute something to that becoming, which is the job I have always had and which never stops being complicated.
My name is Ellen. I am forty-three years old and I raised Leo mostly alone, which is a sentence that requires some explanation and some not, because mostly alone has the texture of many different things depending on which year you are in.
Leo’s father is not dead. He is in Portland, where he has been for six years, since he and I arrived at the conclusion that the marriage was not going to produce the life either of us had meant to build. The divorce was not a war. It was more like a tide going out, slow and irreversible, and we had both watched it go and then done the work of arranging what came after with the pragmatic cooperation of two people who still respected each other even though they could not be married anymore.
Leo sees his father four times a year and they have the relationship that fathers and sons develop when the contact is scheduled rather than daily, closer in some ways than it might be otherwise, more deliberate, with the specific quality of conversations that happen because someone made an effort to be there for them.
But day to day, it is me.
And day to day, I have watched Leo become who he is, have watched the reading and the humor and the particular kindness toward lonely kids at parties, and I have believed I knew what I was building toward.
The steakhouse was his idea, specifically.
He had been asking about it since April, when his friend Marcus had been taken there for his birthday and had described it with the reverence of someone reporting from a better world. Leo had a history with good restaurants, not the fancy kind but the kind where the food was taken seriously, where you could tell that what was on the plate mattered to the people who made it, and he was the child who read menus carefully and asked questions about preparation with the same seriousness he brought to books.
