I blame my parents for my nutty brain, I do. I blame my dad in particular. I've known I bore his thumbprint from the time that I was in my mid-teens; I said as much to mom when we were on an airplane bearing us to the South of Brazil and I was reading Catcher in the Rye, one of the several English-print books I'd discovered at a kiosk in the small, blue-green, dusty airport of Porto Alegre. Having an English book to read, a fresh one, after nearly a year in a place where all the books were in a language foreign to the one you were brought up to know, or in your language but already read in triplicate, a treasure trove. Lands untraveled. All the more exotic because your experiences with the exotic life of a year abroad had formed in you a sense of - what else is there ishness.
And to read such a book, with all its established rebellion, in such a place, at such a time, such a time in your life, and to have traveled a solid wall of days with your parents in tow, the parents who had already worn you thin before a year had drifted between you like a curtain made of rows and rows of frowsy, nubbled fabric, where you could possibly lift a row or two but then, confused, you look for a way through and there are only more layers of the drifting, vague, waving sheets, where the only thing you can make out of your parents are indefinable shapes that shift just when you feel sure you've nearly reached them.
And my mom nodded, she just nodded in agreement when I said, "I'm just like him, I'm exactly like him, aren't I. I don't like to do anything for very long and I'm hyper and also lost to time and space sometimes where you go to fetch me and I'm - gone, poof, and then suddenly all too much there and too avidly participating and too close to everything and wild with remorse and misery for the horrors of it all, of the allness of life, of it, and then all at once I'm happy, happy like a buzzing, joyful thing, lost to the joy, dancing, and it's as if I never lived in a dismal moment not once. And I hate to work, and I hate to commit, and I am loathe to love and to be loved. And I am just like him."
(And maybe I said some of these things and maybe I didn't. Possibly I only said what a middle-class seventeen year old would say in that kind of a moment, to her middle-class mother, on an airplane over the sea, about her middle-class father, and maybe I only said the first sentence, but definitely not verbatim though that seems unimportant, what is important is the quality, the feeling, of such a thing, and that she nodded her assent, her aquiescence, and it was the best and worst part, her nodding, her face in a line, neither joy nor sorrow evidenced there at such a moment.)
What do we want from our children? Why do we want it? Why are we nothing more than rhapsodic when they evince their capacity to live and love and hurl themselves bodily or to refrain from hurling, when they are themselves, complete, perfect in their imperfections?
I know why. (Be wary of the blogger who answers her own riposte, for it is a dangerous row to be jaunting along, woe to the reader who accepts carte blanche such an easy out-and-out.)
It's because we love them so. For the nervous system and blood and entrails tell us so. Our guts ache as we spend our days waiting and waiting for that awful, horrific accident that may never come to pass before our terrified eyes, but it's a lottery, and we worry and we twist our hands as we are twisted by every capricious potential disaster borne aloft on every breeze, and our souls are wrecked, and all we want is for them to survive, survive, survive, and we think we know best, but only because knowing best is safe, and knowing nothing is worst, and knowing something is more worst yet.
Our children - safe! Survived! Alive! To what end, it matters not, so long as we bear them into their adult lives sans an overwhelm of bruises or cuts or scrapes, exo- or intra-skeletal, we needs must witness their transition and where do we stand, how close, how far, when to step back, when to step forward, doe-si-doe, whirl your partner into harm's way because you didn't see it coming, you wack them in the face with a cutting board and cut their eye the night before their fifth birthday and you were holding a giant knife in the other hand as you turned quickly to drop all of the wares in the kitchen sink and you didn't see him coming, and all you can think - OH MY GOD IT COULD HAVE BEEN THE KNIFE as your chest heaves and you coolly examine his face and then spew a lightning-speed lecture at his head of how he can't run through the kitchen because people could be holding dangerous objects LIKE WARRIOR-SIZED KNIVES and GODDAMMIT and then you hold him close and the blood wells and your heart wells in symphony and FUCK IT ALL HOW ARE YOU SUPPOSED TO DO THIS, and you do it, you just do. You are the ferry, where at first the baby lived in a glass tower in your belly and then, after awhile, you paraded him around in the warm cabin and then, after a long while, outside, on the deck, where the wind whipped at you both and he cawed and laughed, delighted, and gloried in the light and the wind and the sharp, bullying, beautiful air, and then down to the landing where the cars were all parked and he ran heedless and you beckoned him back, back upstairs to the deck and the cabin and the high high glass tower, safe, safe, warm, quiet, and he could not come back up the stairs because he would not fit any longer, he could only run about on the landing and then *pop* he was inside a car and it was driving out of the hull of the giant boat and there, there like a bright speck, off, outside altogether, away, away, gone in the distance, shimmering.
And you ask your gut, why can't you let go faster, slower, easier, harder, and you want to. But today, you don't know how.
