Living Out Loud (17 page)

So it is only in theory that those things sound like the torments of the damned. It is something else that haunts me about being a mother.

One day I was at the playground with my son, and everywhere there were children just a little older than he, skinny four- and five-year-olds, infinitely inventive giants hanging from the monkey bars and swinging so high the chains strained against their moorings. Time after time he approached them, his hands linked behind his back, and tried—not well—to talk to them, to make friends. Time after time he was ignored, too young to be worthy of notice. Finally, his shoulders slumped and he came back to me, his thumb in his mouth, rebuffed one time too many. I took him home.

Such a small thing, but I can’t even think of it without wanting to cry—for the worst things I remember about childhood aren’t the physical injuries, the broken nose on the gravel driveway or the bad belly flop off the high board at the local pool. The worst was hurt feelings. When I think of them dispassionately now, they seem so silly, but even as the adult in me is chuckling, from somewhere in the distant past a feeling rises in the gorge, that hot, awful flush and surge in the stomach that comes when you feel ashamed to be yourself.

I don’t think it would surprise many women to hear that one of the most vivid memories I have of growing up is intercepting and reading the note that the two cutest boys in my eighth-grade class exchanged, describing me as a carpenter’s dream—flat
as a board. Funny, huh? And meaningless now, when I am no longer constructed that way and might not care if I were. So why is it more vivid to me than the day my long longed-for sister was born? And why, of all my relations, can I best evoke a great-uncle who never missed one opportunity, always in company, to make a cutting little comment about my sucking my thumb?

I don’t mean to suggest that such things are only done by and to children, but we adults, having successfully flattened out the sharp edges and idiosyncratic little corners of our characters to more generally acceptable configurations, usually are adept at keeping them sub rosa. I still get hurt feelings, sometimes seriously hurt feelings, but I meet them with complicated rationalizations. With children it is more difficult, because it is simpler. “They don’t like me,” my little boy said, when we got home from the playground.

So while I have learned to live with the two small pink scars left over from his hernia surgery, I cannot bear the thought of the hurt feelings that my son will have to endure before he is old enough to will them away. When someone teases him about sucking his thumb, I turn on them, a virago in running shorts and a T-shirt, defending not only the little boy now but the little girl then. The children who will not want to play with him, the teams he will not make, the girls who will laugh at him at dances—sometimes the stitches don’t look so bad.

Occasionally, my husband and I try to torture ourselves, prepare ourselves for the worst by reading each other news stories about terrible things happening to children. But when we’re talking about real life, our lives, we come again and again to hurt feelings, to the comments about the braces, the best friend who suddenly wasn’t, the droop of the shoulders. Then we turn to our sons and sigh. I occasionally wish them to be the kind of people who don’t get hurt feelings; they’re not, and I would not truly want them to be. Hurt feelings come because
they will walk out to the world, their arms open, their chins up. And somebody will boink them one on the head. It is a wonderful thing, and a terrible one, like seeing your mother standing there while a black rubber mask comes down on your face, knowing she will not leave you, but knowing too that she is helping strangers give you pain.

T
he boys are playing in the back room, a study in brotherly love. The younger one has the fire engine and the older one has the tow truck and although entire minutes have passed, neither has made a grab for the other’s toy. The younger one is babbling to himself in pidgin English and the older is singing ceaselessly, tonelessly, as though chanting a mantra. It is not until I move closer to the two of them, toe to toe on the tile floor, that I catch the lyrics to the melody: “Get out of here. Get out of here. Get out of here.”

Later the older one will explain that he picked up this particular turn of phrase from me, when I was yelling at one of the dogs. (In a similar phenomenon, he always says “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph” when I apply the brakes of the car hard in traffic.) When I said it to the dogs, I meant it figuratively; how Quin means it is less easily classified. I know, because I know where he is coming from. I have vivid memories of being a small girl
reading in a club chair, and of having my brother, a year younger than I, enter the room and interrupt me. An emotion as big and as bang-bang-banging as a second heart would fill my ribs. It was, trust me, pure hatred.

This house is full of sibling rivalry right now, as colorful and ever-present as my children’s Lego blocks. The preschool class is full of it, too, filled with three-year-olds in various stages of shell shock because their moms and dads came home in the car one day with a receiving blanket full of turf battles, emotional conflicts, and divided love.

Realization has come slowly for some of them; I think it began one day when the younger one needed me more and I turned to him and said, “You know, Quin, I’m Christopher’s mommy, too.” The look that passed over his face was the one I imagine usually accompanies the discovery of a dead body in the den. shock, denial, horror. “And Daddy is Christopher’s daddy?” he gasped. When I confirmed this he began to cry—wet, sad sobbing.

I cannot remember which of my books described sibling rivalry thus: Imagine that one night your husband comes home and tells you that he has decided to have a second wife. She will be younger than you, cuter than you, and will demand much more of his time and attention. That doesn’t mean, however, that he will love you any the less. Covers the down side pretty well, doesn’t it?

And yet the down side is not the only one; if it were, “Get out of here” would not have such a sweet little melody. My son loves his brother, who is immensely lovable; at the same time, he dislikes his brother intensely. He wants him to be around, but only sometimes, and only on his terms. He is no different from a lot of us, who have fantasies about the things we want and who are surprised by the realities when we get them. He likes the idea of a brother, but not always the brother himself. When his brother is hurt and helpless, he calls him “my baby.”
“I don’t want my baby to cry, Mommy,” he says, which is the kind of line you get into this business to hear.

But when there is a tussle over the fire engine, his baby develops a name, an identity, a reality that is infuriating. “Christopher,” he says then, shaking an index finger as short as a pencil stub in the inflated baby face, “you don’t touch my truck, Christopher. O.K.? O.K., CHRISTOPHER?”

He actually likes babies; he even wants to bring one home, the two-month-old brother of his friend Sonia. Eric, he thinks, is perfect: he cannot walk, cannot talk, has no interest in Maurice Sendak books, Lego blocks, the trucks, the sandbox, or any of the other things that make life worth living, including—especially including—me. One day at Sonia’s house he bent over Eric’s bassinet to say hello, but what came out instead was a triumphant “You can’t catch me!” as he sailed away from him.

His baby can’t catch him yet, but it’s only a matter of time. Then he will have to make a choice: a partner, an accomplice, an opponent, or, perhaps most likely, a mixture of the three. At some point his fantasy of a brother may dovetail with the reality; mine did when my younger brother, the insufferable little nerd with the Coke-bottle glasses whom I loathed, turned into a good-looking teenage boy who interested my girlfriends, had some interesting boyfriends of his own, and was a first-rate dancer. But it’s not as simple as that, either. In his bones now my elder son probably knows the awful, wonderful truth: that he and his brother are yoked together for life, blood of each other’s blood, joined as surely as if they were Siamese twins. Whether the yoke is one of friendship or resentment, it will inevitably shadow both their lives. That is certainly something to bear, as good a reason as any to look at someone and wish that he could, impossibly, occasionally, go someplace else.

P
eople sometimes ask: Whom would you like to meet most in the whole world, if your press pass magically opened doors and was not just a meaningless rectangle of laminated plastic with a bad picture of you in one corner? I used to have difficulty answering that question. In the course of my professional duties I have met most of the people I wanted to meet. Some of the famous writers were as smart and enthralling as their books, and some were pompous bores. Some of the famous actors were as smart and enthralling as their roles, and some were pompous bores. Sean Connery is remarkably sexy, although monosyllabic and bald. Barbra Streisand has glorious skin and is much smaller than you would imagine. I don’t know how tall Paul Newman is.

Now, however, there is someone I want to meet more than anyone else in the whole world. I want to meet the man who decided some time back, during a week in which the rain stopped so
seldom that mothers of toddlers were locking themselves in the bathroom to get away from their kids, that the regularly scheduled children’s programs on public television would be preempted in favor of the confirmation hearings for Justice William H. Rehnquist. This decision found kids across America, mine among them, saying of Chief Justice Rehnquist what perhaps has never been adequately expressed about him before: “He not Cookie Monster.” Out of the mouths of babes.

It was then I realized that
Sesame Street
is my salvation. It is sometimes difficult for me to believe that a scant three years ago I could not tell the difference between Bert (tall, crabby, fastidious, collects paper clips) and Ernie (short, extroverted, messy, deeply attached to Rubber Duckie). It is equally difficult for me to believe that some program director took the show off the air for even a few days for the sake of the judicial confirmation hearings, which to my mind do not qualify as educational television. Oh Lord, you’re saying to yourself, not another piece about letter recognition and reading readiness and exposure to good values and alternate cultures on television. “Hah!” as Oscar the Grouch might say. “Bah!”