The Complicated Human Heart

An essay about family, love…and heart surgery

“His heart is very complicated.”

I overhear this from my nieces’ bedroom where I’m sitting with the two girls and the young child in question, the one with the “very complicated” heart.

My sister and brother-in-law are on a medical conference call downstairs going over the details of Alex’s upcoming open-heart surgery which will take place in six days. (Yesterday, by the time this is published.)

Alex, at four years old, is mostly unaware of what is going on. His only worry is getting another IV, which has historically been extremely traumatic for him. Little does he know that getting a needle prick is the easiest thing that will happen to him that day.

He looks up at me from the floor where he’s sitting, reading his dinosaur book, and smiles.

Sometimes I worry. Worry isn’t, in fact, even close to what I feel. Panic is more like it. It’s too complicated. Isn’t that what it is? His heart is too complicated?

But the older I get, the more I think all of us have very complicated hearts.

“Well? What do you think of her?”

My nephew Ben, Alex’s oldest brother, has just returned from taking his girlfriend home. They are both 17, and though this isn’t his first relationship, it’s the first one that he seems to be serious about.

“I absolutely love her,” I say, sincerely, a little bit incredulous that he seems so excited to get my opinion.

Ben was my first nibling, born on my 30th birthday. I’ve always felt a special bond with him because of that. And at the time he was born, I was itching to have my own kids, and therefore overjoyed to welcome him into the family. Since I was single at the time, I had no reason to believe motherhood was in my near future, and as such, I treasured every moment with Ben.

I remember hanging photos of the two of us at work and a few people assumed I was his mother. It made me feel so proud that anyone would think I was the mother of such an adorable child.

Seventeen years later, Ben will graduate from high school soon, and here he is in this serious relationship. Sometimes, I can hardly believe how much time has gone by.

But I love watching him develop as a person through this role of boyfriend. He tries so hard to be protective of someone who has experienced a great deal of trauma in her short life, but also to give her space to be an independent young woman.

He sometimes expresses confusion about how to do this — I can see him wrestling with gender stereotypes and his own more nuanced understandings of his own individuality, sexuality, and gender identity. I can see him wrestling with the knowledge that his girlfriend’s heart doesn’t work the same way his does, and figuring hers out is quite complicated.

“Will you help me make a cake this week?” I ask Finn the day after I arrive. I’m trying to give time to each of the kids so they feel they are getting attention during this very stressful time as we all count down to Alex’s open-heart surgery.

“I don’t know,” he says in a dispassionate voice. “Maybe.”

I’m used to this response. Finn will be 15 in a few months, and is solidly in the Leave Me Alone phase that so many teens experience.

It’s an odd thing for me — Finn was always so warm and sweet to me throughout his childhood. He’s always been so perceptive and helpful. I’ll never forget my first Christmas after my partner left me for a younger woman — I had Ben, Finn, and Kai over to spend the night and watch Christmas movies, and Finn offered to help me decorate my tree. I had been dreading that ritual without my boyfriend, and it was as if Finn understood, somehow, that I needed a new one. The memory of decorating that tree with him at a time when I thought it would’ve been such a painful chore will remain in my heart forever.

Unfortunately, trying to bond with him mid-teen years is not nearly so easy.

“It won’t take long,” I say, trying to cajole him into a soft yes. “I brought a cake mix.” I specifically picked out this cake mix for him — Finn loves to bake. I figured he would jump at the chance to show off his skills to his aunt, and with a cake mix, it wouldn’t take up too much time in an already busy week.

“Nah,” he says, immediately. “I like to bake real cakes. I don’t have any interest in cake mixes.”

My heart sinks. I can’t believe I’d put so much thought into this gesture only to have it fail.

“Sorry, Auntie,” he says, shrugging, then leaves the room.

“You wanna go on a bike ride with me?”

Kai approaches me quietly, clearly not wanting his younger siblings to overhear.

“Heck yes,” I say, without hesitation. I love bicycling, and I am thrilled to get an invitation to spend time with 12-year-old Kai.

He’s very different from his bold, loud brothers. Kai is extremely sensitive, quiet, thoughtful…but with a bit of a confrontational streak. At the most random of moments, he might purposefully break something he knows is meaningful to one of his siblings and the second that sibling finds out and loudly objects to this behavior, Kai crumbles into a pile of tears.

I’ve always felt very protective of Kai because of his deeply emotional nature, but at 12, he’s much more interested in his uncles than he is in old Auntie Yael.

I know Kai is feeling a lot of anxiety about Alex’s upcoming surgery, so I prepare for any questions he might have as we pedal along the side streets in his neighborhood.

He doesn’t mention anything about the surgery and simply chatters on about the route he wants to show me. There’s a spot, he tells me, at the top of the hills to west of his neighborhood where you can see all across the valley.

I can see how excited he is, so I try not to complain about how hard it is for me to pedal my 46-year-old butt up some of the steepest hills I’ve seen since I last visited San Francisco.

Finally, we reach the top and come to a stop at the curb, our bikes side by side. It is, as he promised, a stunning view.

We take it in for a moment, then I try to open up a conversation, just in case he needs to talk.

“How are you feeling about everything that’s going on right now?” I ask.

“Fine,” he says, flippantly, then says, “I’m gonna meet you at the bottom of the hill, okay? I want to go fast and I know you probably won’t be able to keep up with me.”

“Okay,” I say, seeing that this is clearly not a time for a heavy conversation. “Just be careful on your way down.”

He puts his feet up on the pedals, but abruptly drops them to the street again, turning to look back at me. “You sure you’ll be okay on your own? You know where I’m going, right?”

I smile. He really is such a sweet, thoughtful young man. “Yes. Don’t worry. I’ll catch up with you at the end of the road.”

He nods, then takes off and he’s out of sight in seconds.

“Look at this drawing,” Brynn yells to me from across the extra long, extra wide driveway. “Can you believe I made this?”

I take a look at her chalk drawing. It’s an impressive fairy tale mural that measures approximately ten feet by ten feet, with Rapunzel, her favorite Disney princess, at the center.

“This is incredible,” I concur, walking its edges and taking in all the details.

She regards me with an almost suspicious look — which is so Brynn. At 9 years old, she’s independent. Tough. Assertive. And though she seeks out validation and compliments, she doesn’t seem to like actually receiving them. It’s a strange little quirk of hers.

I brush her knotted hair that she’s trying to grow out, Rapunzel-style, later that day and tell her it’s such a lovely shade of brown, which I try to say often because she’s the only brunette in her family and I want her to feel confident among a sea of towheads. But she merely presses her lips together and gives me a stiff nod of acknowledgment.

And later, when we play a board game before bed and she wins, I remind her how smart she is. She says, “Meh,” and shrugs.

Sometimes, I wonder if I should give up. I’ve asked her if it makes her uncomfortable for me to compliment her, but she answers with the same disinterest. And her occasional bid for validation tells me she’d rather receive a compliment than not. So I keep up with it, hoping that the positive messages will take root and help her cultivate her confidence.

When we go to bed later that night, she leans toward me and says, “I like your socks.”

I’m floored, but I play it cool. “Thanks.” I pull the blankets over her, an assist she reminds me she does not need, and tell her I love her.

I pick up a few items off the floor before turning off the overhead lights and from behind me, she says, very quietly, “Love you, too.”

“I don’t need help,” Keira says. If her sister Brynn is independent, I don’t even have a word to describe Keira. She doesn’t need anyone and she makes sure to let everyone know that.

She doesn’t want my help with her chalk drawings. She doesn’t want help getting dressed. She doesn’t want help washing her hair.

She’s seven going on seventeen.

Though when it comes to setting the table, making her bed, or cleaning her room…suddenly, she’s “too little” and it’s “too hard.”

When she cries, you can bet she’s trying to win a little sympathy because she thinks genuinely crying is “weak” and something only “little kids” do. And don’t bother saying “I love you” to Keira. She’ll scoff in response.

But when I walk into her bedroom after breakfast, I usually find her playing dolls with little Alex. She hovers over him, making sure he knows how to play along with her game of imagination.

And every now and then, when she thinks I’m not paying attention, she’ll whisper to Alex, “I love you.”

The heart is such a complicated machine. Whether it’s a real heart that needs a surgical overhaul or the figurative centerpiece of human love. It’s so hard to figure out.

How do you understand someone you love? How do you love, at all?

Sometimes, I wonder if my nephew actually has heart defects. Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that he just has different wiring? Yes, a wiring that is life-threatening, but isn’t that essentially what it is? Some quirky, individual wiring?

And don’t we all have that, in one way or another? Aren’t we all struggling with these complicated hearts?

Alex looks up at me again and smiles, then says, “I love you so much, Auntie.”

And despite all the stress of this time in our lives, all the fear, all the uncertainty, absolutely nothing feels so complicated anymore.

© Yael Wolfe 2023

Yael Wolfe is a writer, artist, and photographer. You can find more of her work at yaelwolfe.com.

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