Yesterday I took Iona to her group violin lesson. We have a love-hate thing going with violin; she dallies during practice, I lose my patience, she cries. She nearly quit as a result of our poisonous practice dynamic, but her instructor talked her out of it (she dangled Violin Camp as bait). Now Iona says she plans to persevere until Violin Camp, and then quit right after. I guess I'd better figure out if we can even attend, with all the camps and travel and visitors. When did it transpire that one needs a masters degree to sign one's kid up for summer camps? I went to Vacation Bible School when I was Iona's age. The rest of the time I read or rode my bike or picked sun-warmed blackberries off the bramble jungle at the end of our street, where the dirt road was. The blackberry bushes are, of course, gone now, as is the dirt road. Replaced by cookie-cutter houses and a sign for the new development that reads "Copper Leaf." The boy who was my arch-nemesis in junior high school cleared all the trees for the development, and if that's not poetically tragic I don't know what is. But I digress, down the rabbit hole again. Back to yesterday.
Iona was hungry and tired, and she told me so on the way to the group lesson. Red lights and warning bells surrounded us as we walked into the church that houses the violin institute. She looked wan as she handed her instrument over to be tuned. She sat in the first row next to two girls being chummy with one another. I could feel her waiting for them to include her. Seriously, I could feel her sad and lonely waiting, and I felt her lack of energy to insert herself and make friends that would make group lesson more bearable. I told myself I was projecting, but as soon as the group played Twinkle Theme and she couldn't keep up, she collapsed into a sobbing heap on the floor. I had to pick her up to take her out of there. We sat on cheap carpet of the church staircase for a while. I waited for her to calm down. She told me, crying, that she doesn't have any friends in violin, and that those girls wouldn't talk to her. I hid the tidal wave of sadness that crashed over me then, a lifetime of feeling like an outsider. I said a silent prayer please do not let her inherit this from me please let her be more like her father. We left group lesson and went through McDonald's drive-in, and I added a hot fudge sundae to the chicken nuggets this time.
My fiction writing homework this week is all about writing style; I have to choose an author to imitate. I grabbed Geek Love from my shelf and started reading it. Geek Love is a book I can get lost in every time. Of course, I turned right to the following passage:
I cut Arty's meat slowly while my chest fills with a yearning that would like to spill out through my eyes and nose. It is, I suppose, the common grief of children at having to protect their parents from reality. It is bitter for the young to see what awful innocence adults grow into, that terrible vulnerability that must be sheltered from the rodent mire of childhood.
Can we blame the child for resenting the fantasy of largeness? Big, soft arms and deep voices in the dark saying, "Tell Papa, tell Mama, and we'll make it right." The child, screaming for refuge, senses how feeble a shelter the twig hut of grown-up awareness is. They claim strength, these parents, and complete sanctuary. The weeping earth itself knows how sticky is the darkness of childhood, how rigid the blades of infant evil, which is unadulterated, unrestrained by the convenient cushions of age and its civilizing anesthesia.
Grownups can deal with scraped knees, dropped ice-cream cones, and lost dollies, but if they suspected the real reasons we cry they would fling us out of their arms of horrified revulsion. Yet we are small and as terrified as we are terrifying in our ferocious appetites.
We need that warm adult stupidity. Even knowing the illusion, we cry and hide in their laps, speaking only of defiled lollipops or lost bears, and getting a lollipop or toy bear's worth of comfort. We make do with it rather than face alone the cavernous reaches of our skulls for which there is no remedy, no safety, no comfort at all. We survive until, by sheer stamina, we escape into the dim innocence of our own adulthood and its forgetfulness.
