Reade Saunders

You were always free to choose.

That is the part I understand now.

You could choose what you believed was right.
You could choose whom to believe,
whom to stand beside,
which version of your son
made your own decisions easier to live with.

You could call it protection.
Principle.
Concern.
Love, even.

The name hardly matters.

You chose.

What you were never free to choose
were the consequences.

You chose a place in a conflict
that cost you your son.

Not temporarily.
Not because I am waiting for an apology
sufficiently elaborate to reopen the door.

You made decisions about who I was
and what I deserved,
and eventually I believed you.

Not your judgement of me.

Your belief in your choice.

And so there are children growing now
who do not know you.

Two small grandchildren
whose lives are happening
without you in them.

Four more children in my family
for whom you are not Grandma,
not a Christmas visit,
not a voice on the telephone,
not a story being formed.

Just a name.

That was not my revenge.

It was the geography created
by your choices.

And yes, you still see the boys.

For now.

They go where the adults in their lives
tell them they are going.

They inhabit a world arranged by other people,
with histories explained by other people,
and truths delivered already labelled.

That is childhood.

But childhood expires.

One day there will be no handover.
No schedule.
No parent deciding where Sunday afternoon is spent.

They will become men.

And I will not need to tell them
what to think of you.

I will not recruit them
to my version of history
to compensate for having watched others
recruit them to theirs.

I won’t need to.

Because adulthood has an inconvenient habit
of reopening the evidence.

They will remember.

They will ask questions
nobody thought to answer.

They will compare what they were told
with what they eventually saw.

They will know me not as the character
constructed in somebody else’s account,
but as their father,
over years,
in the accumulated evidence of ordinary life.

And then they will decide.

Perhaps they will decide
that you were right.

That possibility belongs to them too.

But perhaps, in the cold light
of a judgement finally their own,
they will understand what happened.

Not because I whispered it to them.

Because nobody will be whispering anymore.

And whatever conclusion they reach,
I will respect it.

That is the difference.

You may continue doing
what you believe is right.

So may everyone else.

I have finally understood
that I cannot stop you.

But freedom is not absolution.

Every choice closes other choices.

Every allegiance has a price.

Every bridge can bear only so much weight
before eventually there is simply
a river
and two banks.

You made your choices.

They cost you me.

They cost you children
you might otherwise have watched grow.

And whether they ultimately cost you
the boys as well
will not be decided by me.

It will be decided by them.

Later.

When the adults have stopped arranging the room.

When nobody can tell them
where they have to go.

When they are finally free
to look back at all of us
and decide for themselves
who we were.

I can live with that.

Can you?