I was a watcher and a listener as a kid. Not birds, not zoo animals, not after you sharpen your pencils sit back down in your seat and put your head down, although I was good at that too. I behaved, always, but that wasn’t the goal. I behaved as a means to an end. I behaved to observe. I was a watcher and a listener, a small, secret sentry.
They watched and smiled indulgently when I drew an imaginary friend and ABCs on my pale peach wall, when I posed in stone archways of churches and in the Dunkin Donuts with bright camera lights melting a chocolate donut that I did not want—such a little actress!
At home, they watched and smiled appreciatively when I asked them over and over, What do you want me to be now? This was my favorite game and their favorite game. I could watch them while they watched me. What do you want me to be? A penguin? A princess? A pony? Tell me what to be. Tell me what to be. Tell me what to be.
I liked that I could give them this. I was good at this.
Kids didn’t much interest me. I was insufferable in their presence—look what I can do! it’s something you can only do if you know how to ride a two-wheeler!—or stilted and anxious. Our neighborhood was virtually barren of kids then, and except for my younger brother, who made some sense to me (and still does), I had not learned to understand people my size or take them seriously.
I honed in on adults. They were the ones who concerned me. They worried me deeply, these tall people with their odd, painful ways. I watched them carefully for what easily went unseen by people twice my size. I listened for what went unheard by people twice my size. I scanned. I scouted. I stood vigil. I gathered information that I had no place for, information I didn’t want to keep and hoped that someone twice my size would have some use for.
Sometimes I offered it up to them—bravely, I think now, then dismiss that thought, embarrassed—small palms open, dark round eyes worried. But they had no place to put it either, so they pressed it back into my hands, closed my fingers back over my offering, and sent me on my way.
They did the best they knew how, and they didn’t. As we all do, and don’t. I understood it then, as I understand it now. It is the part of me that has changed the least over the years. Everyone is just doing the best they can. You can’t be mad at someone for doing their best. What could be more unkind than being mad at someone for doing their best?
I am still a watcher and a listener. Being an adult now, or some facsimile thereof, I have honed in on myself, as well as the now-my-size people. I am wary of both. I tend to keep my palms closed. No fists in public—nothing unfriendly, nothing you would notice. I am unfailingly friendly in my necessary travels, friendly to a fault (but do your best and no one is to blame, so let’s skip over the fault, jackrabbit right over it, jump). I still behave, as a means to an end. But really, I am watching and listening to you.
And to me. These days, I spend far more time watching myself and listening to myself than I do you, so you don’t have much to worry about anymore. If you do find yourself in one of my stories or plays someday, or in the poems that will surely—and awkwardly, as dumb as cattle—come, you can trust me to paint you in your best light. Unless I caught you being mean, unless you were cruel to me along the way. Even then, you’d have a fighting chance of coming across as simply conflicted, hurt at an early age, wounded by women, mishandled by men, disturbed, sick, anything but mean. So relax.
I can see you are trying hard, and that touches me. Effort goes a long way in my book. You’re appreciated here. I won’t get mad. I don’t do mad, not real mad, at least. I go directly to sad—Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect the Satisfaction of a Good Loud Fight that Clears the Air.
I’m good at sad. These days, I am very good at sad. And I worry that I am not doing my best at undoing sad. Because I have these people, see. Half my size. Two of them. And they see more than my wide hips and the soft belly they tell me they remember living in. They look up. They watch. They listen. They watch and listen when I am too busy watching and listening to myself to notice.
These days, my two favorite half-my-size people come to me with palms open, touching my cheeks, searching my face to figure out why I am crying, again. Sometimes, they watch helplessly as I cry with hands balled up in fists. It hits me—too late, after the fact, long after they have been ushered off to bed by people twice their size, people who are not crying again and again and again like Mommy—there’s not much room in a fist for a small open hand.
Some of you come here for the funny, for the show pony, for the poo, and I am glad I can give that to you. I am surprised that I can give that to you, even now. Tell me what to be. The comments flood in, and I feel good. Laughter! To make a stranger laugh! To wring a laugh from poo, from parenting, in the form of small dashes and dots on a lit screen! Doing my best! Doing something right!
I do like to write. I am good at it, sometimes. I would like very much to think of myself as a funny writer-person, a likeable, memorable something or other of a person. But I trust myself more on the page or the computer screen than I do in person. I can be careful when I type—less so when I talk, too easy to get sloppy—and it surprises me when people ask how I can reveal so much on the blog. It is hard to know what is authentic. I want to be authentic, I want to believe it is all me, all real, so I can hand it all over to my daughters when it is time and simply exhale, knowing I have done my best, done good, done me well enough for them to carry me with them in a way that does not hurt them. I want them to be able to travel lightly.
Some of you will pull back, will not comment on this post. Yes, it’s true, I will notice. It will worry me. It will. It will bounce me more quickly back to poo than if you had commented, and some of you will be relieved to get back to the poo. I understand. I am wishing my life were plain poo, too.
Poo is simple. Parenting when you’re very, very, very sad is not so simple. No one talks much of this. I have not heard what I need to hear, what I am waiting to hear. I keep watching. I keep listening. I wonder why what is wrong with me is not wrong with you.
Sometimes I think we are entering a new 1950s, a new psychotropic-cocktails-at-the-door, How was your day, dear? era, and I feel the panic surge again, the panic that makes me swing hard to the left, to the right, to get away from tiny talk, the small small talk that makes me dash behind closed doors and cringe at the ringing phone.
My family is not getting the funny. Their comments don’t look or sound like yours. I have yet to come across an emoticon my household of one same-size person and two half-my-size persons could make any use of.
This is such a long post, I am hoping that those who come here only for the laughs have already abandoned ship, way back when, somewhere around paragraph three or four. I press on for a reason. I do. And trust me, it’s hard to press on, because the voice in my head is a bossyboots dominatrix who likes to hiss self-indulgent! who cares? wrap it up! too late for you, show pony! and rap me on the wrist with a miniature bullwhip.
Perhaps there are only nine or ten of you left out there reading this. I think I know who you are, even if I wouldn’t recognize some of you on the street. I guess I am talking to you, if you don’t mind me talking to you like this. I know I am saying more than I usually do, but I am wary and ready to jackrabbit out of this mess of language if the last nine or ten of you aren’t having any of it either. I can make you forget it ever happened, if necessary.
But I’m trying hard to do my best here. And I think part of doing my best, so I can let myself off the hook, is working harder at keeping my palms open. For my little half-my-size ones, and for anyone else who’s looking for a pair of open palms.
Nothing scares me but myself these days. So if you are sad, I want to tell you that you are safe here. You’re in good company. If you have scouted and scanned and sought and still have come up empty-handed, well, look, we don’t have to touch or anything. We can just shrug helplessly at each other, right here in this small dark space, and show each other our palms. Nothing to hide—at least, nothing that can fit in an open hand, or a blog.
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