Pencil sketches of my girls (2023)
A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:
MONDAY
Since I last wrote, all and nothing has happened—and at a pace that shows little chance of change. The days linger the way absence does; each full of popsicles, bike rides, and small conversations about death.
Laying down in her new big kid bed, N surprises me with her thoughts. When I’m all grown, I’ll have the magic, she says. Kid, you’ve already got the magic, I tell her, but she shakes her head and brushes me away. You have magic and dad has magic, and it’s okay because you’re big. But magic comes from the ground and goes up into your feet and if you get it when you’re little, you’ll be dead.
She pauses and then adds, like Jack, as she does often these days, his name smushed against dead on her tongue.
N, you are the magic, I want to say, mesmerized by her brain, but instead, I try to understand what she means and in trying, I almost do. I am disappointed by the deep chasm between young and old, by the misunderstanding that ripens when an adult spends too much time in worry and not enough in imagination. My thoughts aren’t as flexible as hers—they don’t stretch in directions beyond what I can see.
When you are old, you will be dead, N informs me, in words so plain and true there’s nothing for me to do but nod. It is dusk and I am startled, not by my own impending death, but by the inevitable separation of me and my child. She is only three, but already, it feels close. One day, she will live without me—and if I am lucky, it will be only because my body is no longer here.
N doesn’t appear concerned, but I reassure her because I think I’m supposed to. That won’t be for a long time, I say, and she agrees. Yeah, like five days, she says, and I’m stricken by her understanding of time, which feels truer than mine. With the recognition of my own mortality, time is finite. For her, time is mind-independent: a river that streams on and on, regardless of whether anyone sees or hears it.
Again, I am met with the unsettling realization that there is a gap keeping me from my child—that I will always fall short of giving her what she needs. The gap feels large, already, and it’s potential for growth is even greater. There is a magic in N that keeps her mind moving in unexpected ways. She holds room for surprise. I want to absorb her magic—just enough to keep us connected, to make her feel understood—but I’m not sure I can.
When you’re dead, what will I do without you? N asks, her sweet voice void of fear or sadness. She’s only curious, wanting to know.
In the dark, I reach for her. We are on opposite sides of a river; I try to build a bridge. I want to be where she is, but a gap is a gap, and sometimes it doesn’t close for any amount of dedication, or effort—or even, love.
TUESDAY
I’m smitten with the work of John and Faith Hubley, and in particular, Windy Day, which I’ve watched several times over the past few weeks.
I’m in the middle of early concept sketches for a book I’m working on, and the loose lightness of this animated film captures the feeling of childhood’s core, like learning to whistle, simmering in summer languish, and staring at endless skies dotted with clouds that run your imagination.
WEDNESDAY
“As it happened, my relationship with my kids has been as philosophically, spiritually, or intellectually vital as anything else I’ve done, leading to the kind of realizations we’ve long wanted to seek elsewhere, away from the home, away from the family. Through them, I’ve cultivated a healthy relationship with uncertainty, with attention, with feeling closer to the source of life, whatever it is, with all its wonder and fragility—all moments of revelation that came by way of a mix of stress, rupture, wholeness, and ease. If I had let motherhood stay small, confined to the sidelines, then those stressful moments would have felt like forces holding me back on my way to an interesting and meaningful life. But by letting motherhood become big, those challenges…became part of a larger narrative arc.”
—from Elissa Strauss’ essay, It’s Weird Times to Be a Happy Mother. I don’t agree with everything in her essay, but this passage resonated sweetly.
THURSDAY
I am reading: Cass McCombs on songwriting, The Many Assassinations of Samir, the Seller of Dreams, the 1984 archive, and A Million Kites.
FRIDAY
At night, Freud says, we hide things from ourselves:
dreams wear disguises. All right. But also there's
an intimacy and acceptance there: we take
it all as it comes. We don't explain away
or correct the irrational, we believe the real
terror, the horror, the sweet tenderness.
—Night and Day by William Bronk
xx,
M
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