I used to come home from high school to find mom sitting downstairs reading a paper or novel, paying bills, always something. I'd walk in and first thing she'd say "hey hey!" or "hi, little mister" like she'd been waiting for me.
Suddenly weary of it all, I'd drop my bag to go forage in the kitchen.
She says: "Well?"
I say: "Well, what?"
Smiling now: "Tell me everything."
I sigh, peer into the fridge, remember that I want a glass of water, try to remember what I did today, hope she'll give up asking.
Then she starts leading me. "First I..." she croons, never backing down, killing me with kindness. She is diligent in her commitment to stay involved in my everyday life. Young adults whose parents participate actively in their teenage years are over twice as likely to graduate from a post-secondary institution. Asking the same question every afternoon makes it clear that she cares not only about which hoops I jumped through at school, but about me, about my success, my happiness. Asking the same way every time suggests she's been taking cues from a guide to parenting teenagers. My most intimate and sustained introduction to the human sciences.
"First I...got on the bus." I answer, painstakingly, and rehash every dumb detail that comes to mind. I gloss over classes that I skip, I grope for answers when she produces interest in what I haven't learned today.
One day, probably while I was evading what I hadn't learned in geometry class, I chose to skip the usual "realistic" assortment of responses. Instead of "learning congruent right triangles," I was chasing a tornado and joyriding in a school bus. It was unexpected, too fast to catch, a gift from who-knows-where, a weird quantum conflation of daily antagonisms, love, and excitement that taught me to lie with my mouth wide-open. And to this day she loves it.
She giggles and scrunches up her face to keep from spitting out her drink. She knows I'm full of it, but plays along, asking where the tornado was, pushing on little details in the narrative to see where they'll go. She tilts her head back and shuts her eyes to laugh when she's taken by surprise and, if I tell the story right, she always has a little bit of wet Kohl or mascara to wipe like sleep seeds out of her eyes.
I think this is one place where I learned to play like I do. After so many years my coming-home exercise had become so tedious for me; it produced daily a plodding, steady anger, the kind that makes me so mad that I want to lie down. It got to where, some days, I felt great until I stepped through my front door, at which point I'd remember that, in hindsight, I'd had a terrible day. I'd realize that I'd had the most boring, ill-lived, unproductive day in the history of angsty-bored teenagers. I could be instantly crabby, spiteful and mean, and not for low-blood sugar, lack of nicotine, deep-seated mean spiritedness or even "stress."
They're not really lies; a lie is a tied end. The good bits of my day - the fluent bits - weave in and out of make-believe, in and out of time. Outlandish stories are ways to articulate the eloquences of my everyday life to mom, as well as tools for learning from her and sharing with her, frames for articulating the swiftly shifting ground beneath my puppy-dog feet to the barrage of emergent objects finding my purview.
That's reason enough to play this way. I think we have lots more ways of getting on with each other than we acknowledge, and it's always fun to make mom laugh.
No comments:
Post a Comment