Melancholic, baby?

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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.

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Image: The boy at his birthday party yesterday, wielding a balloon sword.
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The low spark of a high-heeled boy

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?

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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.

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'Cos I'm a liar

Sometimes, even when I’m telling the truth, I lie. The little details – the television show blaring from my grandfather’s headphones, the color of the walls, the phrase my stepmother used on the phone? Mostly made up. I create these details out of the residue of experience, out of an impression left by the unfolding of events. Without them the story is flat, expressionless. Boring.

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.

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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.***

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