Dear Instant Family

Dear Instant Family

400 women responded to my personal ad seeking a mother for my kids.

Now what?

by Evan Juro

Dear Instant Family

Smashwords Edition

Published by

[Publisher name]

[website address]

Copyright (c) 2013 by Evan Juro

Westfall, PA 18336

ISBN [XXX]

www.dearinstantfamily.com

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Prologue

Part I. Before

1. Loss

2. Prequel

3. Grief

4. Re-entry

5. Signals

6. Response

Part II. The Letters

7. Maternal Instincts

8. The Therapists

9. The Comedians

10. The Achievers

11. Beautiful Dreamers

12. The Memoirists

13. Cyrano Redux

14. Attention-getters

15. Mutual Disclosure

16. The Sympathizers

17. The Flatterers

18. Hit or Miss

19. Indiscriminating Women

20. …Or not to be

Part III. After

21. Blind dating

22. Re-engagement

23. What I learned

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Once upon a time, before young urban professionals – and some not so young – connected on dating sites, they wrote personal ads, placed them in magazines, hoped for the best, and then, with a combination of eager anticipation and dread, opened their mailboxes.

I kept all their letters. At the time, I wasn’t quite sure why. Perhaps I was flattered by the attention. After all, these were women who read my personal ad in the March 25, 1995 issue of New York Magazine – describing myself as a widower and father of three young children – and had decided to respond. Or, I might have saved the letters for practical reasons: if a relationship with one letter writer didn’t work out, I could always contact another. Or maybe the letters had become a collective memento of one of the most extraordinary periods in my life: choosing a new mother for my children and a new partner for myself.

Over time, I realized the letters told a story – or at least the waypoints of a story – I never wanted to forget. They helped me learn about myself: what was important to me, and what I wanted to change about myself. If, as Euripides suggest, we are like the company we keep, then my reactions to these letters helped me understand – sometimes with brutal clarity – who I really was, rather than seeing myself as someone I would like to be.

For whatever reason, I simply couldn’t bring myself to throw the letters away. I certainly had no thoughts of using them as raw material for a memoir. I put the letters in a small carton, then put the carton in the back of a closet. They were beyond my mind’s eye, but never really out of mind.

From time to time, I’d retrieve the carton, pick out a few letters and, smiling to myself, let them trigger my recollections about these women: what they had written, what I had felt at the time, whether I had picked up the phone to call them. Or, I looked at their photographs. It was like leafing through the pages of my high school yearbook, looking at one face after another, and occasionally thinking, Oh yes, I remember her. But usually it was only the image that snapped into focus, not the person. The person had blurred years ago.

I began to see the letters as my personal connection to an extraordinary group of women. They had answered my ad, for the most part, with intensity and earnestness. Some wrote with care and eloquence; some in the most rudimentary language. Yet, they seemed remarkably open about themselves and what they wanted. Most expressed themselves with what seemed like unabashed honesty, even innocence. And although I considered myself reasonably discerning, even a bit cynical, my overall impression is that these women were genuine. Perhaps the phonies were writing to someone else.

I thought back to when I first opened each of these letters. As each woman wrote to introduce herself, I remembered trying to envision what the rest of my life and lives of my children might be like should we connect. At times, the feeling of uncertainty seemed almost paralyzing: if I had the bad luck or poor judgment to respond to the wrong letter – well, that could set off a chain of events in which the children and I would become inexorably entwined with some cold-hearted woman who would make our lives forever miserable. It was like being the hero in the fabled ‘lady and the tiger’ who faces the prospect of opening the wrong door. But then I would console myself with the notion that there were literally hundreds of doors – any one of which I could open. This gave me the comfort and confidence to look ahead to the prospect of an exhilarating future – and begin an adventure I knew I would never forget.

I wondered about these women – who they were, why they wrote – and I began to understand that as unique as each one was, they shared a common desire for a loving relationship and family, and the courage to take some risks to get there. I think it was this courage that impressed me most – their willingness to reach out and tell a complete stranger the very personal details of what they were about and what they were seeking in a man, in a relationship, and in life.

In the pages that follow, I’ve included excerpts from many of these letters; they’re shown in italics. But what they’ve written has not been changed in any way except for names, places and anything else that might identify them. Their words are theirs alone, complete with misspellings and poor grammar.

As I read and reread these women’s letters, I become convinced that what they wrote, and what happened when they did, merited an audience beyond this one lonely guy looking to build a new life and give his children a new mother. That’s why I’ve told my story, and theirs.

Part I

Before

1. Loss

On April 11, 1994, my wife died. She was a vibrant 38 year-old woman, and her death left me quite unexpectedly as a single dad with three children under the age of five. The youngest, my daughter Samantha, was just six weeks old.

After a difficult birth, she came home, and her recuperation seemed unremarkable. She enjoyed being with the baby, as well as the two older children. Despite the lack of sleep, we coped well with our new addition who seemed to adapt easily to the ‘outside’ world.

Then, after a few weeks, Myriam began complaining how tired she was. We went to the doctor, who did not seem alarmed. He prescribed bed rest and some benign medications.

Nevertheless, her condition worsened abruptly, as her temperature rose and fell. Finally, the doctor asked to meet us at the hospital. Tests were taken. We were both asked questions that seemed quite odd at the time: Had either of us recently been to parts of Africa? Had we eaten this or that food? Her doctor admitted her to the hospital, and she stayed two nights.

At the hospital, Myriam’s temperature stabilized but she became more anxious about leaving the baby. Finally, she insisted on coming home. She didn’t want to be away from Samantha, she said, and the doctors agreed that she could return to our apartment as long as everything stayed about the same.

She remained in bed, quietly, the baby beside her. It looked as if the crisis had past. She looked weak, but not in pain. And she was happy to be with our new daughter.

Two days later, her temperature peaked sharply and she seemed exhausted. I called the doctor, who agreed to meet us at the hospital. As we arrived, her strength and vitality seemed to ebb. I sat by her bedside, feeling helpless. Doctors, physician’s assistants, nurses and a variety of technicians kept parading into her room, poked and prodded, wrote on clipboards, asked the same odd questions, and left. When I asked what was going on, they were unfailingly polite, but their responses were non-committal. They offered no answers.

Another day passed. I remember standing just outside her room. Her doctor walked toward me, somber. He suggested I go inside to say goodbye to her. It took me a moment to process what he meant. I walked inside the hospital room and tentatively over to her bed, unsure of what I might say or do. She was sedated, half-awake. There were tubes that led from her arms to hanging bags of liquid. An intubation tube from her mouth enabled her to breathe. This was all new and strange to me. I sat on the side of the bed. She looked helpless, yet peaceful. Goodbye, I said dutifully, yet not really meaning it. I simply couldn’t fathom the idea of her dying. Goodbye, I said again, not knowing what else to say. Finally, I stood up by the bed, took her limp hand, and said, I love you. The room was quiet, except for the measured and muffled sounds of the machines, as if trying to pump life back into her. Goodbye, I said a third time. I called the nurse just outside. She walked in, touched Myriam’s body and said, I’m sorry. She’s gone. I sat down again by the bed, numb, first not feeling anything, then trying to feel something, then not knowing quite what to feel. A sense of utterly finality, of the complete irreversibility of what had happened, overcame me. There was nothing that I, nor anyone, could do to make her better or even bring her back to life. It was over. A strange, deadly virus, never identified, had killed her.

Death, close at hand, was unfamiliar to me. My mother had died long ago when I was 17; my father was still living. And although I had attended the occasional funeral of a cousin or great uncle, my presence at these events was more or less obligatory, and I suffered no sense of loss. Myriam’s premature and sudden death felt very different. It was the unimaginable disaster realized. It enveloped and suffocated me. The morning after she died I remember awakening to, rather than escaping from a horrific nightmare.

I was referred to a funeral home in Manhattan, where we lived. When I called, the manager – in a terribly unctuous tone – asked me to come over to look at coffins. This didn’t seem to make much sense since Myriam had requested that her body be cremated, along with the coffin. I intended to honor that request, even though it violated one of the precepts of our Jewish religion.

The funeral home seemed elegant. This surprised me at first, but after all, this was the Upper East Side, where even coffee shops can be luxe. The manager (or whomever he was) strode out to meet me, put his hand lightly on my shoulder, and – looking as sad as I’m sure I did – talked about ‘my loss’ as if we were old, dear friends. I felt a strange reaction: I