The Terrible Severance

We went to a Mardi Gras parade Saturday night in Daphne, a little town just up the road. Standing around, bored, waiting for the parade to start, I heard a small voice say “Hi.” I looked down to see a little girl with long dark hair, four years old or so. “Hi,” I said, then looked around for her parents, because these days you can’t help but be wary of being friendly to a stranger’s child—you might be taken for a child molester. I caught the eye of a young woman who seemed to be the girl’s mother. I didn’t see a father. “Alicia, that’s not your daddy,” she said, but she didn’t seem alarmed.

I’m a complete pushover for little girls, and Alicia was charming, but I’m also usually at a loss as to how to deal with other people’s children. My impulse was to snatch her up and swing her around and let her watch the parade from my shoulders, but I thought that might be too much even for an easy-going mother, and contented myself with allowing Alicia to explain a few things to me, such as the fact that the policeman was riding a bicycle. She wandered away after a bit, then returned and got my attention by beating on my legs. I glanced at the mother again.

“Any male…” she said, with a sad smile.

So pretty little Alicia is one of those millions of children being raised by single mothers, growing up with a hunger for the male attention that is missing from her life. And what will happen a decade or so from now, when Alicia reaches her teens and any male takes on an entirely different meaning? God save her.

But there is hope yet for Alicia; she may get through it all without too much harm. Not so, at least not in this world, for the subjects of a story in this morning’s newspaper. You may have heard of the crime: a father, in some sort of fit of anger at his wife, threw his four young children off a bridge at the mouth of Mobile Bay. It’s been in the news for several weeks. It was two weeks or so before all the bodies were found, the last one having drifted all the way to Louisiana.

The father was an off-and-on crack addict and had been described in all the reporting as being of Asian ancestry. I had wondered about that, because pictures of him showed him looking not particularly Asian. This morning’s story went into the father’s background. It turns out that he was born to a Vietnamese woman and that his father was an American soldier.

Luong, now 37, was one of thousands of Amerasian children—the offspring of American soldiers and Vietnames women—who immigrated to the U.S. in the 1980s. Many had been isolated and discriminated against in Vietnam. Luong was 14 whe he moved to the U.S. alone in 1984 after living in Ho Chi Minh City. He stayed with foster parents, but [his wife] said she doesn’t know the parents’ names or where they lived. Most of his early life remains a mystery to her.

—Mobile Register, Feb. 3, 2008

Chances are good that Luong’s mother was to his father no more than a momentary pleasure. At best, perhaps, they had some sort of affectionate relationship; at worst, it was a financial transaction. But it brought a new human life into the world, a soul that had every right to care and affection from two parents.

Sometimes it strikes me as inexplicably monstrous and astonishing that we can effect this terrible severance, treating sex as a casual thing and completely ignoring its biological purpose, pretending that the conception of a new person is only a rare and weird side effect of it. It’s as if we wander the streets with loaded guns, now and then firing them at people we meet, and then are surprised by the numbers of dead and wounded.

It is not just a pragmatic or worldly question. Damaged and abandoned women and children (and of course some men as well) are, in the long run, not even the worst effect of this coldness about sex. If it is true, as Our Lord himself as well as his followers from St. Paul to Pope John Paul II have taught, that sexual congress establishes some sort of spiritual link between a man and a woman, what must many of our lives look like? To engage in sex and then to walk away from the relationship is in some sense to abort a marriage. This, I suspect, is part of that reality of which, according to Eliot, human kind cannot bear very much.

There is no such thing as giving the body without giving the soul. … Man has no organic functions isolated from his soul. There is involvement of the whole personality. Nothing is more psychosomatic than the union of two in one flesh; nothing so much alters a mind, a will, for better or for worse.

—Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen (and thanks to Dawn Eden for the quote)

It’s the tiresome but inevitable habit of most older people and some younger ones to look back at life and see what they would have done differently. I am not about to get confessional here, but if I could change one thing about my life I would wish to have understood and to have lived by the belief that sex, marriage, and procreation are one indivisible thing, and never to have contemplated engaging in the first apart from the second, and without being open to the third: never, in short, to have attempted to give or receive the body without giving and receiving the soul.

I think these truths are more apparent to women than to men, but I’ll leave that topic for another day.