My sister told me the best thing I’ve ever heard about my nephew. He’s still little, subject to being told “it’s naptime” or “it’s bedtime” and having the blackouts pulled over the still-gleaming day. They were catching a night flight somewhere though, and he was out past bedtime.
“Why is it dark?” he asked as they got into the car. Literally where did the sun go, he wanted to know. The child couldn’t remember seeing nighttime before. Even the most benevolent of us are guilty of hoisting the sun up and down on our children in a vast Truman Show-esque facade. That is parenting.
I had nearly forgotten how to parent this month, the same way you sometimes forget how to breathe, and thinking makes it seem more impossible. There has been far too much going on and I’ve woken up at the wheel of the mother self wondering how I got here, bushes blurring by on the far side of a microsleep. We got a letter from J’s teacher that read “AS YOU ARE AWARE, REPORT CARD CONFERENCES ARE THIS WEEK” and proceeded to inform me that since I didn’t sign up for a slot she “HAD TO CHOOSE A DAY AND TIME FOR YOU THAT I HAD AVAILABLE.” Emphasis mine, but hers, really. I take comfort in the fact this was a printed form with blank fields for my name, child’s name, and conference time; we have all failed. (Jokes on HER though, we found a month’s worth of completed maths homework decomposing in J’s backpack, having never been handed in.)
As is my prerogative as the producer of my children’s reality, I attempted to paint Scout and Japhs (again) in landscape class, on the rationale that the photo of them was taken ~outside~. The idea of the painting was John Singer Sargent cloaking his subjects in flake white, only the subjects are in plastic Disney ponchos. I wanted to render the softness of my kids’ changing faces, and the hale flush of cheek that everyone had in Sargent’s portraits, since they had to be rich to sit for them in the first place. I’m not a terribly good painter, though, and so S and J look trapped in the painting when they’d rather be watching The Loud House.
I’m practically head of the neighborhood watch for adults imposing their reality on kids, but here I was composing their childhood when the Attachment Nerd had explicitly told me to simply bear witness.
Looking to be inspired, I ordered an old copy of Young Children and Their Drawings, by Joseph H. Di Leo, M.D., finding that, rather than a trove of phantasmagoric visions of the young mind freewheeling through its own limitlessness —
— it was a catalogue of adults imposing diagnoses of abnormality onto children.
Take this unremarkable portrait of a family — look at the image, the lifted stick arms, the height of the smiles, before you read the caption.
“Average intelligence but immature concept of body image,” reads the assessment, which blames the adoptive parents of being overindulgent (this was in 1970, Dr. Di Leo should SEE US NOW). The entire book is like this, diagnosing children with psychosis and other ailments (“History of uterine bleeding at 4 months … Vigorous scribbling”) and projecting adult concerns onto the imperfect drawings (“Severe hearing loss. Ears present.”).
If you were to ask an art teacher, they’d tell you what I know, which is that kids make incredible art up until the point they start imitating the way other people draw things. At that point they must spend the rest of their lives trying to get back to the purity of vision they had as 3-year-olds. Worse, they will find themselves subject to our view of them, as all-timer KJM observed in her recent Brooding column.
In the mornings now, Scout is dressed in her overalls, her hair flicked around her ears in a short bob, and she wants to be let out, to get a 5-minute head start on the walk to school from her brother, who still has to be escorted by me.
I undo the deadbolt at the top of the door, which is just too tall for her, but there to remind me each weekday that the day will come when she can loose herself from the house, out beyond my view.
me: Scout, what are you doing in there?
scout: silence
japhs: she’s building a doomsday machine
The best book review may be, as Samantha Irby helpfully suggested, “I finished it.” And one book I have finished this year is Casey Sciezska’s THE FOUNTAIN, about a woman who cannot die. At the open of the story, Vera (the character — is over 100 years old but looks 30-ish) is attempting to drown herself in a creek in the Catskills. She has returned to the area years after figuring out that she, her mother and brother are all immortal; back to find the fountain of youth, or whatever it is that gave her accidental eternal life, taking water samples from all the little creeks and brooks. Her brother Eli shows back up in the area, too, and is working with his girlfriend Lydia to source a cure of kinds for a longevity tech company. The girlfriend, we don’t trust.
After hanging out with them, Vera finds she doesn’t feel as cleanly immortal as before:
“It was unlike her usual deaths and healings. Long, relentless. Tedious. No quick flash of nothing, no freeing feeling of that brief untethering. It was like struggling to swim upstream, against the current. It was like drowning. As both of them watched on.”
LOTS TO SORT, but what a curse to bear witness to history! To draw relationships thin like taffy stretched across a continent. I won’t give more away, just to say that upstate New York has kind of a wild psychogeography with pretty thick underbrush when it comes to cults and storytelling — I’m thinking Samantha Hunt’s Mr Splitfoot (spiritualism in the Adirondacks), Lorrie Moore’s Who Will Run the Frog Hospital (fairytales also in the Adirondacks), and Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle (bokenonism right here in Troy, called Ilium in the book) — some of my absolute favs. THE FOUNTAIN is a great little mystery that builds out non-NYC New York and this particular niche a little further. Solid recommend if you, like me, feel like your brain is a garage door stuck one inch above the ground.
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Related, from last year: “Hikers on Psychedelic Mushrooms Are Rescued From New York Wilderness.” The three-mile loop is “well-marked” and “wildly popular.” So what went wrong? Well:
The hikers left the trail after deciding they wanted to walk in a straight line toward their car.
It got worse:
The hiker who called for help said that the group had taken psychedelic mushrooms and that one was suffering from a “debilitating high,” officials said. Another hiker was hallucinating a bridge that did not exist.
And actually even worse than that:
Forest rangers and members of the Pine Hill Fire Department arrived to find the hikers less than 1,000 feet from the trail. One hiker was in the fetal position and unable to communicate.
The good news is the rescuers were able to find the men’s car keys out in the forest among heavily trampled ferns by a water bottle. “You did not need a tracker to find the route these guys took,” the guy said.
Which reminds me: nearly summer! Come visit <3
Worth a look
