Yesterday, Nick got dinner going after the sitter had left for the day and I got in the car and started driving. I needed to look at something different and think about different things. “Got To Get You Into My Life” by the Beatles came on the regular old terrestrial car radio and like any dutiful child of boomers, I knew all the words. I sang “ba ba ba” for the horn parts. It was novel to encounter music I hadn’t personally selected for myself, the way one usually does in shops or restaurants.
Sometimes it feels like I’ve overadapted, like a tree that’s grafted itself hideously to a chain-link fence. Like the truth is that living with young children far from an urban center, with my friends mostly also having young children, that I wasn’t really going out much anyway. It’s hot as balls here lately. Humidity like living in a mouth, and the mosquitoes are murderous. We’re always out and about on the weekend but the days in between, it’s become very comfortable for me to never set foot outside.
We had a neighbor when Desi was two who didn’t leave the house. She stood in the window and watched and waved when she saw us playing in the yard together. A former children’s librarian, she had her husband act as messenger, ferrying books across the street for Desi. She wrote inscriptions in the books and always signed them with her name, then “(neighbor)”. Her husband was tasked with gathering intel so she could personalize her offerings. Did Desi like trains? What about zoo animals?
I always assumed that there was an incident, a singular trauma, that initiated her agoraphobia. But maybe it happened so gradually as to be imperceptible.
***
I don’t deal with much parental guilt but I have occasionally worried about how many care environments my not-quite-five-year-old son has been in. It’s been a Spinal Tap drummer situation: we’ve done small in-home daycare, expensive downtown crunchy childcare center, bleak suburban institutional childcare center, private preschool, a nanny share, and then last fall, he started pre-K at the local elementary.
Despite being a pretty self-assured kid, we have never once in five years had a drop-off without tears and anguish. I knew that he turned it off as soon as we were out of sight, his teachers always confirmed, but it was unsettling. The other kids did not seem to be doing this, I noticed. When I clicked out of those rooms in my cheap ASOS loafers (remember work clothes), I sometimes heard a voice singing “insecure attaaaachmenttttt.” And who could blame him for being freaked out, since we were seemingly dropkicking him through the doors of a different building every week. I throw a private inner tantrum when they rearrange the aisles of the grocery store; I get it.
I was excited for Desi to start pre-K at his new school last fall. If things worked out with Nick’s job, Desi could be in the same school building from age four through pre-adolescence. Nick and I never experienced that for ourselves, due to divorce and the military respectively. Maybe there’s nothing special about being in the same schools without disruption during your childhood, but it seemed nice.
But This Is Spinal Tap, so my son will not be going back to his school for kindergarten. We didn’t pull him out, but school is online. For kindergarten, this is a near-impossibility.
I feel tremendous disappointment for this, not because it’s not the right decision, but because I wish we lived in a world where my son didn’t have to forgo a normal start to his primary education because of widespread political mismanagement of a public health crisis. But the disappointment is mine.
My son, who is white, who is a boy, whose parents have a pile of graduate degrees, whose grandparents all attended college, all own homes, who has an entire shelf of books that are his alone, who has never felt a hunger pang, a heat shutoff, who has no identified delays, who has a passport, whose parents both have professional class jobs that will allow them to take time off, to take flex time, to hire babysitters for the hours they can’t flex….he is fine. He stands on so much generational, class, and racial privilege that I can’t see the top.
It’s not to say that you can’t be damaged by a comfortable upbringing (raise your hand if you’re in therapy!) but when I really look for the evidence that my child is suffering, I do not see it. Of course he would benefit from kindergarten, it’s kindergarten!, but the data point of my family is not a data point of sorrow. There are kids and families being wronged so egregiously in this, and I have transferred my rage on behalf of my son to their behalf where it belongs. Please call your reps and yell at them. I find it to be less boring than meditation.
***
I got rid of 90% of my work clothes. Or, I pre-got rid of them. They are in a donate pile in the breezeway. I want to add more things to the pile. I love the pile. I wish to incinerate the pile. The pile makes me feel closer to something I’m becoming.
This spring, my therapist said something like, we don’t know who we’ll be on the other side of this. That kind of statement is designed in a lab to annoy me, but it occurs to me over and over. I have been confronting all the things in my house, the place that I always am. These things are here for some reason, but I don’t know what the reason is. Who was the person who kept these things across decades? What was she afraid of?
Here are some other things in the pile: items that people have knit or crocheted for me that have never been my taste, shitty children’s books I hate reading and they hate hearing, an entire jewelry box from my childhood containing baubles I would have never thought about again had they not been trucked across state lines 500 miles to my house last month. Shoes with heels. “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” the shiny angel people said to Mary Magdalene as she approached the tomb.
I don’t know why I felt like I had to be material historian of my life. Maybe I thought I needed it. Isn’t it enough carrying it all in my mind? In my increasingly noisy bones?
yr mate,
Evie
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