Aaron M. Fortkamp

They say the human body replaces its set of cells completely every seven years. No idea how true that is, but if so, my current body is an actual stranger now in respect to the person I was seven years ago when Alex was born. My cells collectively maintain their identity but they’ve only been trained by their predecessors, their loyalty to the cause is authentic but only because that’s part of their design, they cannot betray, they cannot say hey wait hold up now, are we sure we want to eat that much pizza?, at least, they can’t protest on an individual sort of level, they can’t just be born and be all wtf is this I’m not participating, but they could collectively come together and, assuming their predecessors (who at this point in my life were of course trained by their own predecessors, and they theirs, etc etc) were genuine in their own interest in the well-being and success of this body these newest versions of me could look back on their/our/my complete timeline of existence and make a sort of educated best estimate as to tacking a new course. Collectively. But not just one, and not just because it’s new. It does not rebel. It cannot. Except for cancer cells, probably. Everything else toes the line.

Loyalty oaths aside, though, I am not who I was seven years ago. That person is gone, sloughed off like so much extra Parmesan on the pizza. As far as fresh starts go, I’m feeling it more acutely this seven years than most seven years, in part because my Alex also turns seven today, and in part because I’ve been given a second chance at having a family beyond just myself and Alex. And it feels pristine, a complete reset, or as complete as one could have while still retaining all of the history that led up to it.

I’m not even interested in that person. Kind of done with him, like an appendix. Seven-years-ago me, the dearly departed, cut him out and be rid. I probably should be more invested in him than I am, we still share several life goals, interests, affections. I just don’t feel like there’s much to unpack there anymore. I made mistakes, I went through some trauma, came out of it all relatively unscathed, learned the lessons I needed to learn, many of which were simply information-based, I just didn’t know enough yet, had not acquired the experience or scope or even the basic facts, so I don’t blame myself for lacking adequate perspective. I had a lot of good luck and some bad, mostly did the best with what was offered me. I got married when I shouldn’t have. I know that now. I’m on the verge of getting married again and yes you could say hey dipshit you still don’t know what you don’t know and you could be writing this same thing again in seven more years, but if this is going to be a mistake it’ll be for completely new and unexpected reasons, whereas the mistake I made before was due to reasons both familiar and expected. I knew what that relationship was, our strengths and weaknesses, and were I an outside observer at the time I probably would have nudged me to seriously reevaluate things before taking the big leap, but even if I had had me as an advisor (outside observers were consulted btw, and no consulted outside observer ever advised me to step back from my course, save perhaps one, who if they did so did it with perhaps too gentle a hand) and even if the advised serious reevaluation had taken place (seriously it never really did because I didn’t want to know what I might’ve found, I just tried not to think about it too hard and take the next step and the next one) I still probably would’ve gotten married, because fuck, I was 35, what else was I going to do, just never get married? My options were what, a less than ideal pairing, and…? Imminent darkness? The desolate void of alone? One does not start from scratch willingly at 35, does one. Hey, I might’ve said to my other self, with a dispassionate shrug as I signed the marriage license. At least I’ll learn something.

It’s possible, of course, I’m rewriting history a bit to assign feelings I acquired only at the end of the marriage to the beginning. I’m sure that’s true, to some degree. But there were signs, misgivings. I’ve got none of that this time. Are we perfect, my new fiancée and I, no of course not, but as to there being any question as to whether or not she’s The One For Me, my match, my partner, my pair—no. None. Not a hint of doubt, not a single jot or tittle. I have some doubt in myself, I worry about the brand-new me in seven years, for instance, and whether or not my current cells will be able to pass along the appropriate degree of bliss and awe that she fills me with currently whenever I stop to think about it, about her, about us, for a single solitary moment, it’s boom, it’s there, obvious as a smack in the face. How am I gonna hang onto that? I worry about stressors, namely health and money and the stability of the country, and how they’ll affect us as we get older together, but any of these things are just as likely to become the glue between us as they are dividers. Cleave us together as cleave us apart. But not even apart-apart! Just… less close! How will we hang onto that? But I mean I’m also very aware a) that’s the whole ‘work’ they talk about when they talk about marriage and I don’t doubt we’ll do it, and b) it’s only the measure I’m concerned about, not the very status of, the fact of, the existence.

Anyway. Not interested in that old me, so much. I pity him a bit, but mainly for what he doesn’t know yet. I do also envy him. Seven years ago I got sliced wide open, not in the sense my ex-wife did of course, C-section you know, but emotionally. I was the rawest I’ve ever been during this period, will likely ever be again. As an emotionally… resistant person, let’s say, that was as close as I may ever be in my life to feeling things in real time. Not talking about the easy, obvious, immediate emotions, mmm that sip of coffee makes me happy, ooo that fascist makes me mad, no I can do those. Also not really talking about the complex ones either, I was not grappling with the actual and very present danger of losing my son and what that would mean for me and my wife and our marriage, much less the me in seven years and seven again. But, the in-between emotions that I tend to assume most people handle much better than I do—I had those. I did those, then. I was present, when I was in that NICU. I was there. The place I wanted to be lined up with the place where I was, and I was able to see that and focus on it and pay attention.

There’s my son. Right there. He needs me. And I’m here.

Anyhow. He’s got a birthday gathering today, I’ll be picking up Abbey and my future stepson and we’ll be going to Alex’s mom’s house. Alex, of course, is a completely different person than he was seven years ago, too. He’s put on about 4000% more body weight, is a little over 400% taller, can open both of his eyes no problem. More to the point though, he’s a completely different person than he was even one year ago. His conversational development has really bloomed in the past four or five months. His mom thinks it’s got something to do with spending a lot more time with his new stepsisters, who are fascinated with him and engage with him on his level and invite him to engage on theirs, which is something classmates at school do not have to do and usually prefer not to, if there’s someone more comprehensible for them to choose to be near instead, someone who needs their participation and understanding, which Alex usually does not. 

Abbey’s son, too, has helped Alex’s social skills. More on the base-level Maslow needs, he’s challenged Alex’s assumptions of always having the preeminent place in my eyes, made him grapple with issues of safety and security so that he had to find ways to reassure himself, much like a new younger brother would challenge any only child’s worldview, and before I ever even introduced the concept to him, too, which in fact I really still haven’t, because Alex assumed he was going to be his new brother from practically the first time they were introduced. They’ve had to work through stuff, just to be near each other at first and now to figure out how to play together, and it wasn’t and isn’t always a clean, Sesame Street-level lesson learned. But he tries. He tries for me, I think. Because I ask him to. And I know how hard that is for him, and I am just so fiercely, passionately proud of him for this, makes me want to hit the streets and start punching Nazis, because this much righteous energy should not be wasted.

We’ve made strides in our communication, too. It’s really only been during this past year that at some point I figured out how to break through his at times remarkably dense plastic shield, his isolette of fantasy, as it were, the world inside his head which captivates him most of the time, if not currently reloading it with footage from YouTube. Not that I usually want to interrupt it, that imagination will be his greatest super power as an adult and I want to let it develop as much as possible but sometimes it’s necessary like when I need him to make a decision or we need to adhere to a schedule and sometimes in the past, or a lot of times, I didn’t have a way to do that that didn’t feel overly intrusive, a sort of violence, no matter how gently I tried to break in. Snap the fingers, clap the hands, raise the voice. What is this, the 80s? May as well just give him the back of my hand! But I don’t have to resort to these more jarring tactics anymore. He looks me in the eyes now. I think that might be the big change. He reads me by making eye contact with me, and he didn’t used to, and I need people who really want to know me to know how to read my face. 80% of my non-written, person-to-person communication is through facial expressions, with only about 20% of that being intentional, I can’t hide myself often, which is a whole different problem, but I’m much more accessible if you just look at me, is the point.

I’m trying to be better about giving myself due credit, though, so cringing, I will admit: I’m proud of how I’ve developed as a dad this year. Abbey has been in my life for about a year and I’ve found it much easier to develop my patience since she came along, to sit back and watch where before I would interfere. I figured out how to hold up my hand in his field of vision and just repeat a question if I have to and I’ll add a finger to the tally with each ask, so he can watch how many times I’m asking the question. And if I fill up my hand I’ll say pointedly wow, five times? I’ve had to ask you this question five times?? or Uh-oh, full five fingers, you know what that means, and then I’ll hum the tickle spider theme, threatening a tickle, which I used to call the wake-up spider (it’s just my hand) until he learned how to get out of bed in the morning, but the song I hum has a name I’m sure—hang on, let me look it up, I think it’s—no actually ‘baby elephant walk’ is something else, what is it called… two seconds… it’s like um, da bum, da um, da buh-buh-buh, and repeating… SOMEONE TELL ME PLEASE!!

Anyway. Mostly the change is with him. He’s growing, like literally physically growing, I know, I think like four inches this year, but also as a person, everyday becoming more the person he’s going to be forever, and it’s fascinating to watch him solidify, to congeal, to become. I have him every other week, and some weeks he comes back to me and I feel like I have to relearn who he is, he’s changing so much, so fast.

Do you know how lucky this is? how lucky I am? Last night after his birthday party (it’s tomorrow now) I strolled down my driveway to fetch the garbage and recycling bins and I looked up and the stars were absolutely ablaze and I stopped and looked and saw an especially bright one that turned out to be moving ever so slightly which meant it was a drone monitoring the general area as we tend to have around here and I held up my hand and waved for its attention and then flipped it the bird, and then set off again, strolling along on my merry way. Tonight I actually get a bonus night of Alex because his mom is busy doing something so I’ll get into the car that I own after work and I’ll drive wherever I please which in this case happens to be his mom’s house and if I need gas along the way I’ll stop for it and if I get hungry along the way I’ll stop for food and if I should blow out a tire along the way I’ll pull out the obscenely overpowed little computer in my pocket and report to the insurance company I overpay that I require assistance and in a manner of time that assistance will come. If I want to I’ll take Alex to a restaurant, or we’ll go buy whatever food we want at any of the twelve grocery stores we’ll pass on our way home, and before his bedtime I’ll give him a gummy vitamin in the shape of a worm and coated in sugar to help ensure he is properly nourished despite his erratic and specific eating habits, and he’ll go to bed in a bed with adequate heat and a soft enough pillow and warm enough blankets, and he’s not in a tent, and I’m not in a tent, and I’m not worried about where our next meal will come from, and I’m not building a furnace out of empty tin cans to keep us just warm enough to tell the inside from the outside, and I’m not concerned that a bomb will drop on us overnight because some assholes did something and some other assholes responded and no one even knows anymore which side was assholes first but now it’s assholes all the way down and all of my friends and family and neighbors are either freezing or starving or dying or dead, and if I hold up a middle finger to the wrong drone operator I could incite the annihilation of everyone who’s left. What hope is there in that life. What life is there. Why is this any life at all. Why is it not mine. What did I do not to deserve it.

This country is floundering. It’s true. There’s still freedom enough and resources enough and money enough for us to be able to ignore what’s happening, if we want. We have that privilege.

Current trend on social media is to post nostalgically about 2016, which is ten years ago now, a nice round number, maybe that’s how it started, the roundness, but I think of that year as when everything broke. Precusors to the fall aside (ahem, Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Bush again, and of course Obama on the other side, emboldening the racists including our current dear leader with his confounded… competence—we wouldn’t have a Trump without Obama), that’s when the final straw drifted down and came to rest, we broke at the fulcrum and tumbled in opposite directions and everyone was too distracted to see it, much less to save it, to rescue ourselves. 2016 coincidentally is the year of my first wedding. Clearly we were collectively, as a society, not doing so hot, not making our best and bravest decisions.

You know what though, I wouldn’t have Alex without that failed marriage, and there would be something on the other side of this, too, if we can get there, something stunning, something as yet unpredictable, nigh unfathomable, and I guarantee you that something is worth fighting for. If we’ll fight for it. Tell the truth? I don’t think we have it in us. We could perhaps bring down the individual mechanisms of fascism, one at a time, one branch at a time, and in fact that’s usually what happens to fascists, people just get sick of their shit, until someone gets casually defenestrated and we shrug our shoulders and try another take on democracy again. But I think we’ll be too late, if we are not too late already, too many books have been burned, too many histories forgotten. I tend to believe, in this reality, on this current timeline, the Something Worth Fighting For will never see its day in the sun. Instead we’ll plod along, tramping to work along streets renamed for the failed dictator or his falied surrogates, which after the fall people will occasionally point out and try to get the old names back and there will be petitions that most of us will ignore because by then what’s the point, get it out of my face please, it’s all we can do to summon the energy to go to work to make enough money to buy enough food to summon enough energy to go back to work.

But I’ve been wrong before. Hell, seven years ago I wasn’t even me, before. Maybe, just maybe, someone will finally leak all of the files, unredacted, with all the names legible and culpable and their guilt spelled out in horrid, unconscionable detail, and then? 

Maybe then, heads will roll.