Melancholic, baby?
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.
The low spark of a high-heeled boy
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!
'Cos I'm a liar
Fact is fiction, fiction is fact. They intermesh. One informs the other until the words themselves become the truth of the writer’s experience, more real than reality.
When I started my
stillbirth
story, I was hemmed in by
fact. I’d show it to my mother and she
would offer corrections to misplaced
fictions, give me her version of events.
Some facts are important. It is not
acceptable to totally make things up, to
frame the innocent, or create character
flaws or strengths where none exist. I
wanted to be fair to my parents, which is
a strange impulse when documenting an
unfair situation, but why give fuel to the
threatened?
Then I read poet and essayist
Mark
Doty’s piece on memoir, in
which he describes his sister’s wedding
dress. It was practical, a two-piece beige
suit with matching pillbox hat. Did she
choose beige as a rebellious stand against
traditional white? Was the choice a result
of parental pressure, the (barely)
pregnant bride denied? Was it a beige suit
after all? Why is his 45-year-old vision
of the dress so strong? Memory is elusive,
impressionistic, sometimes dead wrong.
Facts are slippery. Doty questions whether
these facts always matter in the telling
of one's life story. Aren’t the
impressions real in their own sense, the
memoir a murky middle ground, a product of
the "juncture
of memory and
imagination"? In the end,
imagination wins out.
Or it does most of the time. When I found out
that my mother's Aunt Ruth had a spinal
condition and couldn't wear high heels − one
of her legs was shorter than the other − I
had to rewrite a scene (since totally
excised) from the Florence Crittenton Home
portion of my stillbirth story. The sound of
her heels clicking against the linoleum
floor, keeping time with my infant mother's
screams was almost irresistible to me, a
summing up of institutional efficiency and a
baby's wordless pain. But I had to change it,
especially once I discovered that my mother
was a generally silent baby, calm, and
apparently tearless. The soundtrack of
nothing, no tears, no outward display of
emotion, the image of Aunt Ruth limping as
she exited the building with my stony-faced
mother, was much more compelling than a
newborn wailing against metronomic heel taps.
Here was an infant who was already accustomed
to being ignored, a child who grew up under a
heavy coat of suppressed and private pain.
This presentation of the silent child − from
my mother's memory of stories her adoptive
mother told her
− deepened my
understanding, explained the emotion
underlying her explosive temper, the
avoidance adapted early in life. Though, of
course, this is all my interpretation
informed by imagination and experience.
I’ve started to let go of the hard truth. I
can’t recreate the world of my childhood, but
can remember the feel of it. Does it matter
if the house was truly cavernous, whether the
bathroom had mint-green tile, whether it was
Johnny Walker Red or tequila? It does not,
but the story doesn’t develop without
description, without a sense of the reality
of place and time. Many facts don’t change,
of course, and those facts are the bones of
our life stories, fleshed out with language,
given new life with words.
The events I write about here (outside of my
fictional pieces, and even then the lines are
blurred) happened. When I can't remember
something, I take my impression and create a
reasonable facsimile of reality.
And that’s the truth, Ruth.
***For thought-provoking writing on writing
and a great Julian Barnes quote on creating
fact out of fiction, please check out
this post from Scottish writer Jim
Murdoch's fine blog, The Truth
About Lies.***