musings

Wild Things

This afternoon, as pouring rain turned to fat, wet snowflakes (October 18th! Please, universe, no) I took my children to see Where the Wild Things Are. I’ve been really excited for this movie – when we were at Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs the preview made me cry. I’ve been listening to the soundtrack and generally counting days until it came out. I love Dave Eggers, I love Spike Jonze, I love Maurice Sendak. Win win, right?

It did not disappoint. Not at all. I found Where the Wild Things Are to be beautiful, wistful, ambiguous, and full of soul. The wild things themselves were stunning, both otherworldly and deeply human in their expressiveness. The movie left me with many thoughts, but most of all I think it was a melodic riff on the desperate desire to belong. On the fundamental human need to find a tribe.

It was also, of course, about childhood. The metaphor of Max sailing his own craft was gorgeously expressed. There were parallel stories about how we act out because we are scared. The fact that almost all bad behavior has an understandable root cause has been on my mind lately. I am realizing how much better served we would all be by approaching with compassion those we love when they are being childish or having a tantrum or crying inexplicably. Jonze weaves lovely, echoing stories about the way we are sometimes unable to control our own reactions and emotions, and the genuine ways we all strive to cope with and make amends for that.

The movie has both text and exquisite, sensitive subtext. Like Bronte’s madwoman in the attic, the wild things serve as metaphor for Max’s own demons. He is afraid of them, he conquers them with fake bravado, he breaks down and shows his own fear, and finally he learns to understand and empathize with them. It is at the end, after being figuratively reborn from one of the wild things and from his own devils, that Max decides to return home. And what a return it is: I had tears running down my face watching Catherine Keener’s portrayal of an honest, imperfect mother.

I was surprised, in the days leading up to the movie, by the debate that it sparked. After hearing several people say it was too scary and too mature for children, I decided to read some of the commentary. The Newsweek review is thought-provoking. Midway through, the article poses a question that I stopped to really think about:

But what if that intensity, that asymmetry, is exactly why kids should see Wild Things? What if the very thing that makes the movie “controversial” is also what makes it necessary, now more than ever?

The article goes on to muse more generally about the modern-day control we exert over our children and what kinds of losses, intentional or otherwise, this has entailed for childhood. It references an article from the New York Review of Books by Michael Chabon entitled Manhood for Amateurs: The Wildness of Childhood. I read this article this summer but found it even more provocative and wise when I reread it today.

Chabon’s essay is a concerned obituary for the freedom – “the Wildness” – that he enjoyed as a child. He grieves his children’s loss of independence, autonomy, and adventure. His theory – and his descriptions of his own childhood support it – is that only by being given freedom to roam and experiment and, sometimes, get lost, do children develop resilience and creativity. In more abstract terms, he posits that as parents have taken over the navigation for our children the vital lessons they should glean from their travels suffer.

His words rang in my head as I watched Where the Wild Things Are this afternoon, continually sneaking glances at my spellbound children’s faces, lit by the flickering screen.

What is the impact of the closing down of the Wilderness on the development of children’s imaginations? This is what I worry about the most….Art is a form of exploration, of sailing off into the unknown alone, heading for those unmarked places on the map. If children are not permitted—not taught—to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world of adventure, of stories, of literature itself?

I share Chabon’s concerns and also his frustration at the inability to provide space for our children, literal and figurative room for them to grow their own wings, minds, and, indeed imaginations. He notes that even if he let his daughter go ride her bike alone, as he would like to do, there are no other children for her to share the journey with. By definition this makes the experience less rich for her. I know that immersing children in the 2 hour wonderland of Jonze’s movie is of course not even a drop in the bucket of experiences we’d like them to have, but maybe every tiny story helps. Certainly to be thinking about it, while depressing, seems better than simply accepting the status quo of modern day parenting.

Time


Judith Warner’s latest article for the New York Times is an evocative, heartfelt meditation on middle age. This might be my favorite thing she has ever written (and that is saying something). As I read her words I have that overwhelming feeling of recognition, nodding vigorously while I also blink back tears. Warner writes about singing along to the song from Fame with her twelve year old and realizing in a flash of joy and heartbreak that that song, and the words about “I’m going to live forever” now belong to her daughter and not to her. She notes: “The sense of limitless possibility: hers. Vaulting ambition: hers. Anticipation, excitement, discovery, intensity: all hers.”

I’ve written before about how I have this exact feeling when I listen to our old nursery school’s CD version of “Our Turn to Dance.” As Livingston Taylor’s voice sings, buttery and beautiful, I always feel tears rising in my eyes. I know that it is now Grace and Whit’s turn to dance. I don’t feel sadness about that, precisely, but I do feel keenly aware of all that is already gone for me.

Warner then moves on to a beautiful description of her experience of middle age. Her words are a haunting elegy: “This is the cruelty of middle age, I find: just when things have gotten good — really, really, consistently good — I have become aware that they will end.”

I’ve had a sad, skinless couple of days and I am still not entirely sure what is going on, but my reaction to Warner’s writing suggests this may be part of it. I’m so aware of my children and where they are right now, but an integral part of that awareness is my realization of how much has already happened and how much I have missed. My knowledge of my own limited time pulses like a heartbeat in my head, marking every single moment that passes. It is a zero sum game, this life of ours, and with every day that goes by we have one fewer to live. There’s just no getting away from the cruel, inexorability of this.

I watched my mother receive an award from her high school yesterday, and my heart swelled with pride watching her. As I ran to the luncheon (late from a trafficky drive down) I saw 5 year olds and 18 years olds in the same plaid-skirted uniforms (it is an all-girls’ school). And then there was my mother and some of her classmates, still dear friends even all of these years later. So many moments in the human experience seemed to coexist in that single building, and the fullness of it was almost too much to bear.

Warner ends her article with her personal view of the gradual changes in emphasis that define our lives as we move through middle age: “There are trade-offs: intensity versus contentment, exaltation versus peace. And perhaps the best exchange of all: you trade in an idea of yourself for a reality that, if nothing else, can make you laugh.”

It seems to me that to reach that most elusive and extravagant of goals, contentment, we have to fully accept these trade-offs. We have to come to terms with the self now vs. the self imagined. This is, of course, a significant challenge for most of us, one that requires true maturity. I know that I’m not all the way there, personally, but I do believe in Warner’s assertion that there is great pleasure and joy at the end of the effort. So I wake again today with a renewed commitment to that effort. Every day is another opportunity. For as long as we have days.

So here I am, negotiating my relationship to the world in the past and the present. Which parts of the past do I listen to, and which ones do I not listen to? How do I get my gut and the maps to align?

And what do I do when I get to the edge and discover that there is no more map? Or that I have made (yet another) wrong turn?

Oh Launa, thank you. Thank you.

Girls and boys and doors open and closed

Mama at the Elmo Wallpaper wrote a lovely, achingly honest post today about the thought of saying goodbye to the dream of the daughter she had hoped to have. Aidan responded with her own musings on the children we imagine and those we actually have, on the collision between our dreams and our reality.

Both have made me thoughtful. I have one girl and one boy. I admit: I always, desperately wanted a daughter. I am one of two girls, I wrote my thesis on the mother-daughter relationship, I think my own mother is pretty damned awesome…. in short, I really wanted to have a girl. And I think I always suspected that I’d have boys, feared that somehow the universe would screw with my blatant desires. I did not find out the gender of my babies in either pregnancy. But when I was pregnant with Grace I had a strong, visceral sense that she was a girl. Everybody had a point of view, from strangers on the street to my closest friends. Everybody claimed I was carrying a boy. I kept my firm conviction to myself, worried that by voicing it I’d be jinxing myself.

And then she arrived, like a hurricane, and she was a girl. And despite digging my fingernails into the rocky edge as hard as I possibly could, I slid far and fast over the precipice into despair. I remember thinking, in the midst of the deep darkness of depression, that it was crazy that I was sad. I had what I had always wanted: daughter. How could I be sad?

When I was pregnant the second time I had absolutely no idea what gender the baby was. I made the joke about hermaphrodites and said “I just don’t want to have to make a call in the delivery room!” about a thousand times. When he was born, though, I was honestly shocked. That instinctive reaction made me realized I had, somehow, subconsciously assumed he was a girl. My Phoebe was not to be. So he was – and is – my little boy.

My experiences of my children, of course, are wildly different. They were different from the outset. I was so afraid of what would happen after Whit was born that I set up a triple-reinforced belt-and-suspenders set of support systems. I had drugs, shrinks, and baby nurses. Hot and cold running help. And through the blessing of that, and whatever else was different the second time around, I truly enjoyed Whit’s infancy. The truth is that Grace’s babyhood and my ambivalent, conflicted reaction to motherhood gouged deep wounds into me. Though those scars strained when Whit was born, they did not rip open. My experience of Whit as a baby was inexpressably healing. I am still working out the nuances of both experiences and how they shifted, subtly but profoundly, my sense of myself.

To this day, Grace and Whit are very different and my feelings about being a mother to each of them are likewise distinct. I cannot, of course, disaggregate gender from birth order and basic personality and all of the inputs into the particular equation that spits out How We Feel About Motherhood. Of course not. But Mama and Aidan’s posts made me think about it.

I feel very lucky to be able to have the particular experience of being mother to a girl and to a boy. I do have some sadness, however, that Grace will never have a sister. This reared its head for me when my sister had her second daughter. My own sister is so important to me that I grieve the fact that Grace won’t have that particular experience. Of course she will have a different one, and I hope it will be equally, though differently, wonderful. We are off to a mixed start, though when things like this come home I feel hopeful. (an aside: Bouff, this is why you have a second one)
What really struck me about my friend’s posts, though, was the notion of final decisions. Of closing doors and of coming to terms with the ways that the life we have may not live up to the life we imagined. I am terrible at finality. I hate closing off options. You could argue that my professional life is where it is because of I am so damned allergic to actually choosing something. It is clear to me now that a set of choices designed to maximize options does not, in fact, maximize joy and fulfillment. I did not realize that for a long time. Of course when you don’t know what DOES maximize joy or fulfillment for yourself, it’s an easy algorithm by which to make decisions.

As I move inexorably forward towards middle age I am realizing that, despite my adamant efforts, there are plenty of doors that are firmly shut. Plenty of roads that are no longer available. There is definitely sadness in this, but is there also some sense of relief? Some of this is active choice, some of it is sheer chance, much of it is in the murky area that lies between those two polarities. As I’ve written before, my life is exactly as I planned it and also nothing like I imagined it would be.

I believe that every day the individual we are confronts the self we wanted – and still want – to be. There is both intense grief and huge potential in the friction between those selves. This holds true for every manifestation of our selves: lives, careers, families, things fundamental and things frivolous. I think that to accept status quo without challenging it or aspiring to more is a sad fate, but I also think that to chafe constantly at the differences that exist between what is and what might have been is a short road to misery. So there has to be something in the middle. There has to be a way of honoring our lives, in all their kaleidoscope color of joy, beauty, pain, disappointment, humor, love, and challenge, while also remembering that which we dreamed of. May we all find it.

Insides vs Outsides (again)

Perception and reality and the perilous gulf that can open up between them has been on my mind lately. First there was the truth-teller in the form of a classic little old lady on the Delta shuttle. Then there was a post by Ronna Detrick about the power of friendships, including virtual ones. I was interested in her post and we began an email exchange that has made me thoughtful about the ways that in the virtual space we are both unenhanced by and unhampered by the aspects of us that exist in the real world. We are both less whole and more real.

Then yesterday I got my Burning Questions from Danielle LaPorte, in preparation for my firestarter with her. They included a link to her marvelous post about the power of knowing how others view of us. She had me at her first line: To be truly witnessed is a mighty thing.

Oh, yes. I continue to search for my own quiet and private voice, and in so doing I seek explicitly to minimize the import of the world’s opinion. I still, however, believe that being truly seen by another is the single biggest contributor to peace in our lives. I realize there is tension in this: in seeking to pursue a path driven only by my own authentic self, I need to shed, not seek, the input of others. I don’t know that any of us can exist in a vacuum, though, and I still think that no matter how self-realized, independent, and tuned into our own essential selves we are, we all need someone to say: I see you and I love you.

Also, isn’t knowing how we come across important, because we don’t want that to be discordant from how we really are? Is seeking to understand the way others see us a component of self-knowledge or an effort to avoid the work to know ourselves? Of course nobody can see anyone else entirely clearly: our responses to others are refracted through our own identities, concerns, issues, and passions. If we asked ten close friends these questions we’d get ten different answers, but hopefully themes and patterns would emerge.

I don’t know. When I read Danielle’s post my first thought was: my God I’d love to know these answers from some of my dearest friends. And my second thought was: how indulgent and self-absorbed it would be to ask these questions. How embarassingly it would reveal my need for affirmation. Then I thought: of course the answers may well come back not at all affirmatively.

Danielle’s questions are interesting. I truly have no idea how I would answer these for myself, let alone what others would say.

: What do you think is my greatest strength?
: How would you describe my style?
: What do you think I should let go of?
: When do you feel that I am at my best?
: What do you wish I were less of, for my sake?
: When have you seen me looking my most fabulous?
: What do you think I could give myself more credit for or celebrate more?

Even considering posting this has me wincing. Admitting that I am curious how others would answer these questions feels blatantly solipsistic. At the same time, I know several friends that I’d love to provide the answers to. I don’t think I’m ready to ask anyone directly, but I will be brave enough to post this. And if anyone wants to tell me, great. And if anyone finds themselves pensive about the dialog that exists between their private realities and their public impressions as a result of this, it’s worth it.