That
said, you will never know if you can do it unless you try.
Three
years ago this month, we were in New York, searching for an apartment and
watching our son start rehearsals for the Broadway revival of “Ragtime.” My
wife and I decided on a combination “what the heck/wait and see” approach to
the entire endeavor, knowing that our lives would never be the same.
And they
haven’t – not for a moment since.
The
first year – as my wife and I readily tell anyone who will listen – was very
tough, even as we wiped a number of things off of our parental bucket list in a
very short time. We spent the time switching off between our girls in Northern
Virginia and taking care of Ben in New York, in essence operating as single
parents.
That
worked for a time, and then we had to look for other options. When Ben moved
into “Billy Elliot,” we hired someone to take care of him for a short time.
Then we split time in New York with another family. Then someone lived in the
apartment rent free in exchange for making sure Ben made it back and forth to
school, rehearsal and the show.
When the
tour started, we called on Ben’s cousin, who was looking for a job. Then Ginno,
another friend who took care of our son in New York, came on board. Nicholas,
my oldest, also has chipped in during his break this summer. Jill and I fly out
every few weeks when we can.
The
performer’s life, especially when that performer is a child on a national tour,
is something of a strange existence for the caregivers. You stay in hotels,
board buses and planes, and find a new set of grocery stores, laundromats, and
eating establishments every one to three weeks. And all the while, you schlep
the child back and forth to rehearsals and the show.
Constantly
you find yourself weighing the benefits, the risks, and the costs. On one hand,
you have an opportunity to do something for your child that few parents get, to
give them the experience of a lifetime at a relatively young age. On the other,
you and your child miss having the day to day to day connection that you get by
being under the same roof. It takes a lot of trust, a lot of hope, and a lot of
juggling.
But
really, life is a juggling act. It just depends on how many balls you want to
have in the air.
******
Over the past several weeks, while
Ben has been in Boston, much of our family time was spent sitting around the
television watching the Olympics. It was easy to get caught up in the drama of
the games, and that night’s events became a point of conversation each evening.
In part, that’s intentional. Dick Ebersol, NBC’s Olympics guru
for the past two decades, says the games are “one of the last events where a
whole family can gather around a television set and spend the night together.”
That’s one reason ratings were through the roof, even though most of the events
were tape delayed.
What I
found particularly interesting were the behind-the-scenes stories that focused
on the athletes’ personal lives. Bookending each event, it seemed, was a story
about parents making tremendous sacrifices for the athletes to pursue their
passion. Gaby Douglass’ story, of moving from her home in Virginia Beach to
train in Iowa, had particular resonance for us.
For some time, I’ve said that
parents of top athletes and working actors have much in common. If anything, we
have learned the art of sacrifice.
******
Last year, a friend of mine asked, “Is it wrong to want my child to have
the fairytale?”
The reference was to the loss of her son’s team in
the semifinals of the local Little League championship. The team had gone
undefeated through the season and into the playoffs, only to lose to another
squad that had less talent on paper but was peaking at the right time.
Sports and theatre, besides being inherently
dramatic, have the fairytale factor in common.
Watching your child deal with a tough loss – either
in a game or in an audition -- is heartbreaking because we want them to have
that moment in the spotlight. More often than not, we rediscover over and over
again that fairytales are just fiction, that “real life” rarely ends the way we
would like.
Still, we try. That’s why we buy lottery tickets
and compete in contests with little scraps of scratch off cardboard, hoping
we’ll be the 1 in 8,373,722 that gets picked. It’s why parents twist and
contort schedules and make them look like the intersections of the interstate
highway system, just so our children can have opportunities we did not.
We’re very fortunate. Our son is living the
fairytale in “Billy Elliot,” but it’s not due to a magic wand. Not by any
means.
And we would never have known if we hadn’t tried.