Support Sean and Alyce and Aiden

This is my family. Aiden is my grandson. Aiden has two fantastic parents, Sean and Alyce. And in January, his little sister will arrive. We are all excited, and of course, a little bit nervous. Raising children is a big responsibility.

Sean and Alyce are great parents. Aiden is proof of that. He’s healthy and growing like a sunflower. He’s a happy and joyous little boy with a great laugh. He’s curious and inventive and just a lot of fun. If you’ve seen the pictures I've posted on my Facebook page, then you know how marvelous he is. And we expect the new little girl will be equally charming, adorable, intelligent, and inventive.

While Sean and Alyce are very good at dealing with the usual challenges of adulthood and parenting, a couple of their situations have gotten beyond control — not to mention an economy that does not provide enough resources for the people who do the real work of keeping the world running. Sean’s business is struggling uphill and Alyce can’t go back to work while she’s pregnant and later on, nursing an infant. I’ve been supporting them as much as I can, but their money problems have grown beyond my own resources.

(signed) David Gerrold

This Gofundme is to help them get past the mountain of bills that have piled up as well as prepare for the bills that will come in when the next little Martian arrives. (Children are expensive, especially if you want to raise them right.)

Whatever you can contribute will be gratefully appreciated. Because this is a special effort, all contributors will receive a special thank you from me, a (very short) vignette I wrote, called “The Martian’s Child.” (Someday I might expand it to make it a real story.) As we continue to reach toward our goal , I will send out more thank you stories to repay the generosity of contributors.

Sean and Alyce are working hard, they just need a little help from friends. Please donate if you can. Thank you for considering it. If you can’t contribute right now, please share this appeal. Thanks again.

UPDATE:

Because we've reached our first checkpoint, here's the first half of the story I'm working on: THE MARTIAN'S CHILD. I will not be able to finish it until I get home from Worldcon, but when we hit our next check point ($15,000) I will post the second half.

The Martian’s Child

David Gerrold

Copyright © 2022 David Gerrold

I did not expect to be a grampa.

Ohell, I never expected to be a dad.

(At this point in the narrative, I considered a few paragraphs explaining the above in some detail. It would have meant exhuming several embarrassing episodes from my past that have thankfully been forgotten, mostly because most of the witnesses to those events have fortunately discorporated. The short version, I was suffering from the excesses of the sixties, followed by the hangover of the seventies. I was dealing with my own shit and not dealing very well with any of it. I hereby apologize to all those who survived my fumbles, bumbles, stumbles, and worse. Either forgive me or don’t. Over here, I get to deal with the embarrassing little mind mice that gnaw at the base of my skull at three in the morning, the memories of my mistakes, and that’s my punishment. Right? But this wasn’t one of them. The point is this, considering the kind of person I was then, I could not have imagined someday being a dad, let alone a grampa.)

I mean, it seemed like a good idea at the time. It seemed like a great idea.

I must have been committed to it, because I worked hard for two years to make it happen. I thought it would be a great adventure. I studied, I researched, I read the books, listened to the tapes, attended the seminars, did the trainings, and went to the national convention of the Adoptive Families of America, where I found his picture in a photo-listing album of Children Awaiting Parents—and I was hooked. Committed. Trapped.

He thought he was a Martian.

For a while, I thought he was a Martian.

But he outgrew it and so did I.

I think raising a real Martian might have been easier.

Human children are messy. They’re loud. They’re opionated. They’re stubborn. And most of the time, they smell weird. And then they turn into teenagers.

It remains a mystery to me why we love them so much.

Okay, they’re kinda cute. Some of them are even adorable. Sometimes they’re entertaining. And that seems to be enough to keep most parents from smothering their children with a pillow when they’re finally motionless in their cribs.

But if they belong to someone else, if they are someone else’s experiment in genetic recombination, there is no corresponding connection. Children are unfinished. They are the raw material out of which real human beings, the interesting ones, are constructed.

Except, not all of them.

Look, I’m a curmudgeon. I like to keep the screen door open so I get the warm afternoon air, I like to put a favorite symphony on the stereo. I like to sit in my comfortable chair with the dog at my feet, lost a good book, and living my life according to my terms. This is not too much to ask, is it?

But the neighbors—they had six kids, most of them boys. Regardless of gender, they all liked to play touch football across three lawns—mine in the middle. They weren’t just loud, they were boisterously annoying. They drowned out Beethoven. Worse, they even drowned out Tchaikovsky.

(If you do not understand classical music, let me explain. Beethoven was the John Wayne of symphonies. You didn’t argue with him. Tchaikovsky? He was a drama queen. With cannons. And Mahler, even though you didn’t ask, he wrote soundtracks for movies that hadn’t been made yet.)

The point is, they got in the way of my quiet afternoons.

The dog barked at them. In his language, of course, but his meaning was obvious, “Get off my lawn.”

There was no point in speaking to them in my language. Or any language. These were not the kind of people who listened, let alone cared. They were incapable of consideration for their neighbors. They’d proven that within a week of moving in. It was not just the occasional bit of thoughtlessness, it was a repeated pattern of disassociation from social awareness. It continued in one form or another for six years—at least until the worst of them took an eighteen month to three-year, all-expense paid leave of absence, courtesy of the state of California.

But by then, I’d somehow come up with the idea that I should have one of my own. Despite all of the readily available evidence to the contrary, despite all of the good advice of well-meaning friends who advised me to think very hard about what I was considering, despite the obvious expenses of time and energy, and despite the not as obvious warnings about the expectable damage to my house, my career, and probably what was left of my sanity, despite all that, I remained perversely committed.

Even when the caseworkers warned me of the inevitable consequences, I pushed on. They asked me, “Your life works. Why do you want to adopt a child?”

I said, “I want a family of my own.”

Apparently, that was a good enough answer. I didn’t think so. I thought it was kind of selfish, not very deep or thoughtful, but they qualified me to adopt a little boy anyway.

His name was Sean and he believed he was a Martian.

After a while, I began to believe it too.

He made a Martian wish that I would adopt him. I had no choice in the matter. Martian wishes are one of the most powerful forces in this solar system, (second only to the room-cleaning farts of a determined teenager.)

Look, I was warned. I did it anyway. I have no one to blame but myself. I take full responsibility for everything that happened afterward. The best I can say for myself is that I’ve never had to apologize to the families of the victims. Well, not yet.

But just to be clear about it, there is no narcotic in the universe as addictive as the smile of your own child, nothing to compare with that small hand sliding into yours, or that strange sweet word, “Daddy,” coming from an annoyingly high-pitched larynx.

That’s how they get us. They make us fall in love with them.

Okay?

So that’s how I became a dad. I did not expect it. For the longest time, I didn’t think it could happen. But it did and to show you how well the brainwashing works, I am now convinced that my son is the best thing that ever happened to me.

At the time of this writing, Sean is thirty-eight going on forty. He is not just my son, he is also my best friend in the world—uncompromising, stubborn, and smart in all the right ways.