“Living calls for the art of
The wrestler, not the dancer.”
(Marcus Aurelius)
On Sunday, I spent the afternoon at a double baby shower. Two of the teachers at school are expecting – one at the end of November, one in the New Year.
Melanie is radiant: twenty-eight years old, this first pregnancy was planned down to the last detail. Joan, the second mother-to-be, on the other hand is ragged; at forty she’s carrying her fifth and most unexpected child. Even amniocentesis can’t relieve her worries about her new baby.
What a lottery life is.
I sat with Karen who sees everything in life as an anti-climax. (Does everyone have a friend like her?) Karen is the youngest of five sisters and a veteran of too many showers: bridal, baby and one that was combined (so she says). She rolls her eyes at every romper suit as it’s unwrapped and draped over protruding stomachs – to check for size.
She sighs and drags me into the kitchen to look for more wine as the ribboned party hats are presented to the guests of honour. She looks at me, stunned, when I confess that this is my first shower and that it interests me. It makes us both wonder how it’s possible that I missed the entire shower phase of my life. I guess it’s because I haven’t had many close girl friends.
While I was at the shower, I remembered a course I took in university: The Family in Society. Studying “family” has always intrigued me, like some anthropologist looking for clues to understand the inner workings of those “intimate, social, relational groupings”. It still seems so foreign to me – I always think of family as “them”, never something that I could be part of.
With the writing that I’ve been doing for Jean, it’s made me think about what family means to the people around me. I read the daily notes from the parents of my students; some are long winded and concerned, others are barely legible, short, abrupt – covering up a self-consciousness that they feel about writing to the teacher. These few lines each day are sometimes my only link to the family life of my students. It makes me realize that I don’t know much about what happens to them after three o’clock.
What do they live with when they get home from school? Is it a sitter who welcomes them with cookies and crafts, or a bullying big brother who torments them into a hiding place that gets more remote each day?
The kids that I interview for my research are even less familiar to me; through the files and documentation I know so much of their past yet so little of their present beyond how they’re suffering in school. I don’t really want to know any more about them – it would make me feel responsible.
For Danny, family is everything. The middle child – two older brothers, two younger sisters – Danny is the bridge between them. He doesn’t understand how threatened I feel by all the enthusiasm they have for each other. He doesn’t know how I long for, yet am afraid of, their intimacy.
He lived in a home where children had the right to believe (for a time, anyway) that their parents were perfect, infallible, all powerful, all knowing. In Danny’s world it was a given that meals were prepared, clothes were clean and mended, and that he would be wakened for school on time each morning.
I was ten years old before I heard an alarm clock ring, or knew what a placemat was for.
Bill is proud to say that he has never owned a couch or a dining room set in his life.
To this day, Danny can’t imagine his parents having sex. I grew up in a home where sex was all around me. The adults in my world felt free to express their sexuality, regardless of how it made me feel, or kept me from going into my room because some couple was using my bed.
Still, I don’t think that I resent the way that I grew up. I was seen as a little adult who was able to take care of herself. I set my own boundaries. I was allowed to make my own choices. I was left to decide for myself what I needed. I took care of Claire.
I keep telling myself that I don’t know why I’m connecting so much, on an emotional level, with these kids that I work with. But when I reread the last paragraph that I just wrote, I realize that if one of my students used those same words, described their life in that same way, the teacher in me would be alerted and concerned about a possible case of neglect or abandonment.
I don’t think that I felt neglected. I just wished that they had known me better and noticed me more.
The wrestler, not the dancer.”
(Marcus Aurelius)
On Sunday, I spent the afternoon at a double baby shower. Two of the teachers at school are expecting – one at the end of November, one in the New Year.
Melanie is radiant: twenty-eight years old, this first pregnancy was planned down to the last detail. Joan, the second mother-to-be, on the other hand is ragged; at forty she’s carrying her fifth and most unexpected child. Even amniocentesis can’t relieve her worries about her new baby.
What a lottery life is.
I sat with Karen who sees everything in life as an anti-climax. (Does everyone have a friend like her?) Karen is the youngest of five sisters and a veteran of too many showers: bridal, baby and one that was combined (so she says). She rolls her eyes at every romper suit as it’s unwrapped and draped over protruding stomachs – to check for size.
She sighs and drags me into the kitchen to look for more wine as the ribboned party hats are presented to the guests of honour. She looks at me, stunned, when I confess that this is my first shower and that it interests me. It makes us both wonder how it’s possible that I missed the entire shower phase of my life. I guess it’s because I haven’t had many close girl friends.
While I was at the shower, I remembered a course I took in university: The Family in Society. Studying “family” has always intrigued me, like some anthropologist looking for clues to understand the inner workings of those “intimate, social, relational groupings”. It still seems so foreign to me – I always think of family as “them”, never something that I could be part of.
With the writing that I’ve been doing for Jean, it’s made me think about what family means to the people around me. I read the daily notes from the parents of my students; some are long winded and concerned, others are barely legible, short, abrupt – covering up a self-consciousness that they feel about writing to the teacher. These few lines each day are sometimes my only link to the family life of my students. It makes me realize that I don’t know much about what happens to them after three o’clock.
What do they live with when they get home from school? Is it a sitter who welcomes them with cookies and crafts, or a bullying big brother who torments them into a hiding place that gets more remote each day?
The kids that I interview for my research are even less familiar to me; through the files and documentation I know so much of their past yet so little of their present beyond how they’re suffering in school. I don’t really want to know any more about them – it would make me feel responsible.
For Danny, family is everything. The middle child – two older brothers, two younger sisters – Danny is the bridge between them. He doesn’t understand how threatened I feel by all the enthusiasm they have for each other. He doesn’t know how I long for, yet am afraid of, their intimacy.
He lived in a home where children had the right to believe (for a time, anyway) that their parents were perfect, infallible, all powerful, all knowing. In Danny’s world it was a given that meals were prepared, clothes were clean and mended, and that he would be wakened for school on time each morning.
I was ten years old before I heard an alarm clock ring, or knew what a placemat was for.
Bill is proud to say that he has never owned a couch or a dining room set in his life.
To this day, Danny can’t imagine his parents having sex. I grew up in a home where sex was all around me. The adults in my world felt free to express their sexuality, regardless of how it made me feel, or kept me from going into my room because some couple was using my bed.
Still, I don’t think that I resent the way that I grew up. I was seen as a little adult who was able to take care of herself. I set my own boundaries. I was allowed to make my own choices. I was left to decide for myself what I needed. I took care of Claire.
I keep telling myself that I don’t know why I’m connecting so much, on an emotional level, with these kids that I work with. But when I reread the last paragraph that I just wrote, I realize that if one of my students used those same words, described their life in that same way, the teacher in me would be alerted and concerned about a possible case of neglect or abandonment.
I don’t think that I felt neglected. I just wished that they had known me better and noticed me more.
Copyright 2003
