Sure, I was crying as I walked the dog last night through the chill grayness, struck with the temporary nature of life. This morning I cried in the kitchen, too, because of a song or my thoughts, because of the loose grip we all have on ourselves, the moments constantly slipping away, bits of us disappearing all the time and changing into something new and unknown.

If you are a regular reader, you might have surmised that I am a sad sack, always focusing on events and people long gone but still present in my emotions. If you followed me around for a few days, you might be sure of it, as I break into tears here, punch at the air there, as I growl and curse. But I also dance and laugh so hard that I have to catch my breath, feel the thrill of being alive.

Life is sweet even when it feels like it isn't.

A couple of weeks ago, my son and I were doing our usual evening routine, discussing the day's events before saying goodnight. "I love you so much, I'll love you even when I'm dead," he told me. Perhaps stupidly, I responded in kind, which led to a longer discussion about death and love. It ended, of course, in tears. He wanted me to stay like I was, didn't want me to change. Maybe the pictures we've shown him of his grandparents when they were young have been sobering. They look unfamiliar with their shining hair and the tight, unlined skin of youth. He doesn't recognize them as the people they are today and he imagines what will happen to his father and me, the sagging and bulging, our faces turning into topographic maps, our bodies weakened. But I also think he's mourning the moment, who we are right now, and feels the desire to hold on. He's confronting the painful inevitability of change.

When I was eleven, I felt adulthood looming. Growing up meant a loss of self. I mourned who I was before I was gone. I had already lost so much -- would I forget the perspective of the dependent child, helpless, attached to capricious and sometimes unstable adults? Here's where I start to cry again, with surprising emotion, and I think -- what the fuck? Can't you get over it already, Jennifer? Plenty of people had it worse than you. But the emotions are still here, waiting for permission to leave.

My son has a childhood. He has his father and he has me and we will let him be a child, will protect him when he needs it and will prepare him for adulthood. These temporary moments, the joy he has in playing and being with us, the way the imaginary is real and present for him, all of this will change or disappear. This is what is supposed to happen. But we will do our best to make sure that nothing changes prematurely, that he doesn't worry about us or feel unsafe or take on larger worries. I hope that he will be able to look back at his childhood with happiness, that the preordained loss won't sting too much.

I cry, but the tears are mixed in with joy and sweetness and everything in between. This is life. I am alive.



Image: The boy at his birthday party yesterday, wielding a balloon sword.

Tags: growing up, childhood, imagination, mutability of life, living in the moment, crying

The sky is already darkening, the blue is slowly being blotted out by thick cotton batting, grey and getting greyer. I haven’t written much in the last two weeks and I don’t know where my head is, so I am writing to figure it out, waiting for the rain to fall again and for the words to flow.

In the midst of our trip to New Jersey to visit my father and stepmother (the long flights, the Christmas presents, the one-sided conversations), I realized that I was no longer angry with them. It’s an unfamiliar feeling, a kind of lightness or a shifting of a burden. Of course, this new feeling didn’t save me from the usual visit hangover, a subtle thwack to my equilibrium. My emotions always need time to settle after these visits, though I've gotten better at recognizing that over the years.

It is possible to let go of anger without shedding sadness and guilt and that's where I am today, a little sad and perpetually guilty, replaying conversations from the trip and wondering what to make of them, how to fit them into my new vantage. My stepmother told a story of a breakfast in Bryn Mawr when I was nine or so, a scene at the diner with gleaming chrome and murals of 1940s college scenes on the walls. Apparently I had cut into my waffle with too much force and my plate flew onto the floor. As it shattered, so I did I, started to cry while they tried to comfort me. I didn't remember a thing about it, but I do remember being constantly on edge during my visits with my father, on alert, my guard up. It took very little to shake up my practiced calm.

So what can you do? For the first nine years of my life, my father wasn’t always reliable. He was intermittently present (despite some rosy memories on my stepmother’s part; she’s an optimist and my father’s protector and she wasn't around then anyway). His child support payments were regular, his love was constant, though often from a distance. Everything else shifted around. And then, in adolescence, he failed me. They failed me. How can you tell someone that they can’t make up for the first nine years? Or that maybe they aren’t as safe as they think they are?

You don’t. So I won’t. All I can do is approach them warily, be mindful of the gaps in our experiences, acknowledge their efforts and their love, see how blind the compassionate can be and hope to keep my own sight.

But the guilt, the uncontainable guilt. It's about not being good enough, ever, then and now, and it carries over in ways that can be paralyzing. Once again I'm left with the idea that I still have a lot of work to do before I forgive myself. How do you let go of the feeling of being wrong-hearted from birth?

I have no idea how to go about it. I am open to ideas, though. Suggestions are welcome.





Image: My father, mother, and me, Easter 1971. I know that by writing this, putting it out there on the Internet, I take risks. So they might read it. If it would make a difference in what we talk about, wonderful. If not, well, at least they are reading. And I'm sure they have their own ideas about the past. Perhaps I've got it all wrong. Perhaps.

As for the song, it's going through my mind and feels appropriate in some way.

Tags: guilt, childhood, forgiveness, self-blame, love, parental guilt

My mother sometimes dabbles in jewelry making, takes broken glass from the street or from her experiments with wine bottles dropped against the concrete in her city backyard and makes earrings and pendants with the results. As she’s gotten deeper into it, she has acquired a love of gold, of the supple softness of the metal. It surprises me that the woman who takes the broken, the rusty, the discarded, would flirt with the element of royalty. But lately she’s moved back to pottery, to earth, water, and fire. I know she will return to metal someday.

People tell me that they would like to know more about my mother. Yes, she really wanted to be a horse when she grew up. She writes poetry, makes pots, gathers detritus for ornament. She put herself through school when I was small, owned a house on Smith Island in the Chesapeake Bay, was involved with men who were interesting in divergent ways. In a neighborhood of tight short grass, she let her front yard become a meadow and spent one carless year getting around on a moped. She has always been left-leaning, was even briefly a Communist in the early 1970s. When I was a teenager we would remove real estate signs from former corn and soybean fields in a vain protest against development, would fishtail down country roads with these huge signs sticking out of the back of her battered 1973 Corolla station wagon. Other times, I would roll my eyes when she pulled over at the sight of mayapples in the woods. Fuming in the passenger seat, worried that someone I knew might see us, I would wait for her to dig up a few plants for her shady backyard. After my stepfather moved out of the house, Mom and I traced the outlines of our celebratory forms on the walls of his workout room, poses of joy and freedom, and shared a laugh at imagining how the drawings would mystify him. He wouldn't have known happiness even if he was bench-pressing it, but we understood: happiness was being on the run.

She was an unconventional parent, loving when she wasn't blinded by circumstance or her own sadness, and supportive when she wasn't worried that I would disappear into an unsuitable life. But she also had a fiery temper and a tendency to neglect. Our past together comes in shades of grey, from the light mist of early morning fog to the dark moment before your eyes adjust to the blackout. Would I have chosen a stable, boring parent instead of her? No. After being out of her house for twenty-five years, long independent from her moods and moves, it's easier to say that. I've written through most of the pain, have decided to show the scars of my childhood to the light.

Without those experiences, without my mother, would I be writing today? Is there value in being scarred, in the bittersweet ache of having survived relatively intact? I have forgiven my mother. I still work on forgiving my father. But the largest task is grappling with the effects of their behavior. Sometimes that old pain of abandonment feels a part of me, impossible to escape, something that flows through my veins and arteries and regenerates in my marrow, the cell memory of neglect.

I'm working on it, I'm writing it out. I'm giving it a voice. And slowly, slowly, it's working.

The scars sparkle like broken glass. The light makes them golden, supple, gives them a hue that I never appreciated in the dark. These are who I am, who my mother and I were, what we were capable of, and I’m here, I’m here, I float above the earth. I’ve known life and death. I carry the guilt, I carry the heavy water. I shine with the brilliance of knowledge of the grave.



Image: My mother and me, December 1982. Isn't being thirteen with braces just wonderful?
Most of this is from a recent prompt, Gold.

Tags: forgiveness, self-blame, guilt, child neglect, childhood

My mother wanted to be a horse, she wanted to be a beatnik, she wanted to be an American Indian. How disappointing it must have been as she got older, as her hips emerged and her legs lengthened (barely:  she’s five foot two and slight) to see that there were no hooves, that her skin kept its human qualities, never turned a dusty shade of Palamino. By the time she was a teenager, beatniks were out of style and she had given up on the Indian thing, but she never quite let go of her animal spirit.

Summers when I was a little girl we would drive past the horse farms owned by the Duponts, would pull our rusty Datsun over to the side of the road and tiptoe up to the fences, holding hidden handfuls of Dominos sugar cubes. Two cubes in each flattened palm, we would wait for the horses to whinny and walk over, for their soft lips to graze our hands as they picked up the sugar.

The memory is faded now. I hold the fact of it rather than any sensation, and what I see are long grasses and dark, tall fences, a blue sky with clouds raked across it, the vague sense that we were getting away with something.



Image by Jane Underwood. The image was the prompt.

Tags: I want to be a horse when I grow up, Dupont horse farms, Maryland, childhood, feeding horses sugar cubes, Round Robin, writing prompt

Here was the scene: my four-year-old son wearing a pair of old high heels, a canary-yellow birthday party hat on his head, grasping a sword in either hand. It was another one of his many guises, a funny mix of feminine and masculine, underpinned by the dark potential for violence. He gave my husband a birthday hat and a sword (we have a large supply of both) and they began a battle, two "spirits" hashing it out. Soon after, the kid swapped out the swords for a stick turned gun. If you are my Facebook friend, maybe you saw one of the resulting photographs, which I put up with the heading “The Low Spark of a High-Heeled Boy.” It was one of those annoying isn't-my-kid-clever-and-cute posts. But just look at him. Isn't he?



Every day at preschool, my son dresses up in costume. It might be as basic as a police officer hat. Sometimes he adds bat wings or an elephant nose. At home he puts on his batboy costume and flaps his wings as he takes flight in the living room. Playing with the concept of name and identity, he uses aliases at our Music Together classes. The alias used to change weekly depending on his book-obsession of the moment -- Art Dog, Mrs. Grizzle, etc. -- but now his chosen identity lasts for months. After weeks of singing "Hello to Chipmunk" one of the summer session parents had assumed that was his name. "You know, Berkeley," she said with a shrug after I set her straight. "You never can tell here." Last week he went to class in full pirate regalia, from scarlett hat to skull-and-crossbones vest to sword. "Nobody will know who I am," he told me with a sly smile.

Part of his dressing up and taking on identities, his love of costume, has something to do with shyness. These are ways to be in public with being totally seen. But I also think he has a bit of the dramatic in him. Like all children, he has a rich imaginative life. He makes a set of bike wrenches into a train, builds a boat out of a pile of sticks, creates robots out of spare toys and junk. My son truly believes that if he runs and jumps fast enough, he can fly. I remember flying, too, that heady moment of lift as I raced across my grandparents' family room and landed in the dark green chair in the corner. It happened. I can't deny it.

I worry about the future of his imagination, about the coming imposition of what it means to be a boy. When he goes to school full-time next year he will be immersed in the culture of the group, where rule-happy children and adults start forcing kids into slots. I remember school as a place where creativity isn't valued and anything different is quashed. I want to protect him, to take his imagination and cover it in gleaming armor, to let him know that flying will always be possible.

The change will happen. It is inevitable. But I hope that he will hold tight to his creativity, protect himself when he needs to without smothering his imagination. The further he gets out in the world, the less control I will have. All I can offer is my love and support.

Image: The high-heeled boy at home, October 2009. Photo by Mr. Trinkle.

New selections from the back catalog of the blog in Best and Rarest!

Tags: imagination, childhood, death of imagination, pretending, make-believe, groupthink, school