Post 16: Masterpieces in the Making

Little loves in Montana

Masterpieces in the Making

The following essay won 9th place (out of 20) in a Writer’s Digest contest. Yes it feels a bit like it should be murmured rather than STATED to say 9th place, but I think you’ll agree that knowing there were 20 places awarded makes it slightly less so. Also, I can’t argue with the prize money treating us to a sushi dinner. I’ll write 9th place essays all day for that kind of action. Reading it now, there are parts I would change that would possibly bump it up to at least 8th place but probably not a brag worthy 4th or higher. Now that you know what you’re dealing with, here you are:

A young dying mother is not afraid of the dying part. I know this as a 41 year old mama to a 5 and 7 year old, as I grapple with the most ferocious of diseases, ALS. I’m scared of plenty before and after death though. I’m afraid of not being able to talk or walk at all. Of not being able to use my hands to  draw and tickle and rub backs. Of struggling to breathe. But my greatest fears (and sorrow) are in an imaginary future where I am not. My fears come to me in raw, paranoid, unedited movie clips of my children’s lives. 

Fear comes to me as a classroom in early May. Drawings of a plant’s life cycle strung on a wire flapping in the breeze from the open window. Piles of sequins and popsicle sticks and a glue stick on a small oat colored desk with a trough for pencils. A tall girl with mossy eyes and a splatter of freckles staring at the supplies and not knowing whether to turn her eyes into laser beams to set them on fire or disappear into herself or fabricate a mother or give her tears permission to release her. All around her smiles and laughter and frenzied gluing remind her she is alone in her experience. The teacher leans down and softly says would you like to make one for your grandma? The girl says yes but everything inside of her screams no I want my mother back to make one for and it’s not fair. She is right. 

There is a boy with a golden mop of fluff atop his head at a primary colored playground. His friend scrapes his knee and runs to the bench where his mother sits guard. The boy watches the mother hold her child and wonders what that must feel like and wants more than anything to have access to a personal human ambulance too. He has seen pictures of his mother holding his little body nuzzled against her thin frame, an impossibly content smile resting on his face. He knows he was once the lucky dweller of a nest of arms. But he has no mental images, sounds, smells of her. Throughout life someone inevitably asks about his mom, leading to an awkward apology to which the boy responds “yeah…It’s ok, I was really young when she died so I never knew her.” It is not ok.

I fear the girl and boy won’t allow others to get close to them because of a subconscious fear of losing someone they love again. I’m no stranger to the torturous internal pain of commitment issues. I fear their childhood and life will have a gaping wound left unmended, gushing at inopportune times. That they will be cheated out of a happy childhood. I’m afraid they will never adopt a suitable replacement mother. I’m afraid they will.

A dying mother’s fears can only turn to negotiations of a trade off for a meaningful future. A mother’s imaginary fears are mitigated by imaginary hope.

I know enough from historical figures that hardship and even catastrophic trauma has the potential to form greatness in human beings. In his book David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell points out a phenomenon: a large proportion of highly successful adults (eg presidents, Supreme Court justices, etc.) lost a parent at a young age. He calls them “eminent orphans.” I used to think my goal, my purpose as a parent, was to give my children a near perfect life, to avoid any pitfalls of my own upbringing, and protect them from the world’s harshness. I now know that is bullshit and sets children up to become low sodium saltines, fragile, bland, too uniform and perfect in form, missing something. Watered down people. You can’t manufacture hardship. But you shouldn’t create a protective, artificial bubble that shields them from life either. It took me a long time to see how growing up without a father shaped me into a resilient, scrappy person. And while I would have preferred to have a loving father, I can acknowledge the benefits.

Of course I would rather not my nuclear hardship bomb situation but here I am and I find some solace in the positive things that may come out of it. I imagine either of them going on to cure diseases. Or counsel traumatized youth. I know they will be more compassionate, resilient, accepting humans. They will know the fragility of life firsthand and live as such, grandly and fully. It can be tempting to immerse myself in the possible positive side effects of tragedy, to think that it is all for a greater purpose. This is a trap that protects me from feeling the grief and acknowledging how devastating ALS and dying young is. The protecting leads to complacency, the feeling leads to living.  Lately I’ve abandoned my imaginings (ie trying to control that which I cannot) to enjoy the present and accept that I cannot know the future but trust that it will be both ok and not ok.

I believe my children are complex masterpieces in the making. They are artist and the art. Along the way they will angrily smash canvases over their knee, cover a room in paint and roll in it, take long breaks from the clay slab as they seek numbing distraction, be elated with inspiration and insight as though God is forming their art through them. They are not a painting of a unicorn by a pond under a rainbow. That painting sucks. Their piece is mixed media- paint and lace scraps and clay and a stick and dismantled kitchen appliances and a claw foot bathtub filled with hats. The masterpiece will convey joy, longing, anger, love, and every emotion in between. It will be open to their own interpretation and revisions again and again for as long as they live.

I see the girl in the classroom and the boy at the playground. They are carrying on living, experiencing life with all its complex emotions and thoughts and infinite possibilities and growing stronger with each paint dab and chisel of clay.