Closing Time
Another school year, another prison experiment.
I am halfway through reading Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men (published by Transit Books, who are fundraising since the NEA took away their grant, in case you want to throw them a few dollar bucks). Without giving you any information beyond the first few pages, it’s about a woman recounting her years as a young girl in a kind of bunker prison filled with women, with mysterious circumstances and rules and a bleak existence.
The weather is anything but bleak. School let out Thursday and we have been on a steady daily diet of ice cream. I have been digging through the attic to find bathing suits that fit my fast-growing children. It is the first year where there is no celebration to mark their transitions to the next grades — second and fourth. It seems the fact that these minor beings have clarified their personalities and sprouted love handles and become more independent is unremarkable. But I have been hit, in the past few days, with a sense of time careening by. Maybe it’s the seasons changing, or the country unraveling at breakneck speed, or the thread in my book where the women attempt to be their own clocks, counting their own heartbeats, just to have the secret knowledge that time has passed.
I had coffee with another mom who sends her young child to forest school. In nature, she told me, they don’t have toys. They make them from the rocks, from the twigs and leaves. Immediately my mind went to the damage I must have done to my children by depriving them of this wildness. Their city school is all black-top. They like to play Connections on my phone, and are not even very good at it. They have recently become obsessed with an adult Youtube creator named Matt Rober, which prompted me to Google “Mark Rober MAGA?” (not much came up, though there is an entire Reddit thread devoted to the question “Does anyone else get weird vibes from Mark now?” where you can learn more about anxieties that he’s becoming more like Mr. Beast and concern over his divorce). This is not tree play, not at all.
Friday there was no school, no camp, and I let my kids kind of dick around all morning. This involved many Mark Rober videos, but once the TV was off, they wanted to wrestle. Before I knew it, my hands were tied behind my back with a red kids’ tie, and I was marched into the backyard. “What am I being imprisoned for???” I asked. “Crimes against kids,” my captors replied.
Walkie talkies were procured, as were Nerf guns, and then, things got dark. I was made to rake the backyard, and only granted one chocolate chip for each stray Nerf bullet I collected during my raking. After emptying four barrels of leaves into the compost, I successfully negotiated a glass of water. When I heard a car alarm go off on the street I yelled “That’s them, they’re coming for me!”
“No,” the older captor told me, his face unflinching, “you don’t get a hero.” He cocked his Nerf gun. I returned to my raking, wondering how my book, and the prison dreams it had been causing me, had incepted my children’s play.
At one point, they insisted I strip naked and rake until I earned my clothing back. Honestly, this was the most engaged in playing with my children I’d been in a long time, and being against me made them a team — in rare harmony. I complied.
Out there in the yard, the rake starting to blister my hands, the faint breeze grazing my butt cheeks, I noticed how wild it had all gotten during the spring. A strange grassy weed seemed to have taken over the side yard, horizontally somehow, and then promptly turned dry and yellow. The lavender had flopped over and was crawling onto the fake grass the previous owners had installed. Old leaves from the avocado tree were piling up in the corners, reeking of death. Spiderwebs were everywhere.
What do I want for my children? What do I want from them? To expand but to stand still. To explore but to be manageable. To tell me, somehow, that the choices I’ve made for them have been good. When I told my friend about my jail stint later that day, she joked, “Is the prison motherhood???”
I thought of picture books like Weslandia and the great Roxaboxen, which show children building their own words, out of doors, negotiating their own societies. This year, inside the buildings that contained their school days, my daughter had built a child-led cheer squad, invented a land made of candy which she mapped out feverishly with her friends. My son had learned how to make music, had written a song about being lonely, had created a world I knew little about with 25 odd other children and one adult in an airy portable, which he seemed to genuinely love. And he told me of the trench he and his buddies dug at the beach after school yesterday. His hair was still full of sand.
I have never liked the beach, to be honest. I like the city. I like people. I think, though I’m embarrassed to say it, that I like Mark Rober, Reddit complaints aside.
My husband’s shift began, and they packed up for the pool, back to fighting about nothing. When they’d gone, I put on my sun hat and returned to the yard, determined to give it a real clean up, my friend’s 90s playlist in my ear. As I rocked out to Under the Bridge and Closing Time, I pulled at roots (I am too lazy to actually dig them out) and cut the jasmine that was spilling over the fence from our neighbor’s yard. At one point I paused, worried that I was doing something horrible, enacting some violence against the weeds, like I’d experienced in my own backyard prison, like the women of my dystopian novel had felt, destroying their spirits, maybe, like feral kids in a classroom for nine months of the year. But I realized that what I was doing was only temporary: the weeds would be back. It would all grow over again, probably much faster than I’d expect. In the words of the great poets Semisonic, every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.
Also, this:
I’m really into this comedian Dan LaMorte, who is very funny and fresh and Autistic. Here he is doing a great bit about RFK Jr.
He also has a 15-minute Comedy Cellar set that I’m excited to watch. One of the things I appreciate about him is his physicality on stage. I had never thought that the way comedians face the audience might be pretty neurotypical. How many comedians (me! me!) have been masking their desire to turn away??
He’s touring this summer, and I’m considering travel to NYC to see him in July. Anyone want to join me?
Hi there! I met you briefly last week at Womb House and see, this kinda stuff is why I’m a fan.
My husband would love to see me engage in some nude weeding so let’s not tell him it’s a thing, k?
Also! Hot lazy parent’s tip for kids who need a break from blacktops in Oakland, if you haven’t already tried it! Some weekend, get a friend with kids to drive with you up to the Redwood Glen area of Joaquin Miller Park. Have you been? Bring chairs and coffee and hang out and let the kids go wild. If you hike a bit down into the forest, there’s an area where people make stick forts all the time and leave them. My kids grew up doing the Roxaboxen thing up there, with sticks and forts and pinecone currency. I was lucky that I had a group of fellow parents who did this with me on a regular basis. We just sat around dishing all day while the kids played. My own kids are grown now and living in far-flung places and this is the place they always want to go back and visit when they’re home. 💕
Oh hey sounds like a good playlist. Also, I like this post. Forest school is great, but ours was very much not low-key or magical all the time! Griffin got sunburned, dehydrated, extremely cold sometimes, scraped up, kids got like, legit hurt sometimes, and *no one* learned letters or numbers. It was cool, but like all things ups + downs. (you know this but just tossing it out there).