I Break Into Cemeteries

On seeing and being seen

If your mom had a day to herself, where she did not have to focus on being a mom, what would she do? This question, part of an autism assessment that tries to get at a child’s perspective-taking skills, has haunted me for the better part of ten years. There are other questions, of course (“Who are you friends? What do you like to do with them at lunch or recess?”), but this one knocks my mismatched socks off. I think if I could convince someone that I am a researcher and I should have tenure and grants and stuff, I would just go around asking this question to every child I could find and hole myself up in a windowless lab somewhere, looking for patterns in the responses.

I have been asking kids this question since before I was a mother myself, and even then I was amazed by how consistently and completely it stumped them. Many kids, autistic and neurotypical alike, simple reply, “I don’t know.” No clue. Some manage to muster a “she’d go to the gym and drink wine with her friends.” One kiddo offered several interesting ideas, like “go to the grocery store?” all of which, I carefully explained to him, would unfortunately still be considered “focusing on being a mom.”

the fun being had in this photo is a corporate lie

When you follow up with a question about their dad, kids almost always have a bit more to say, usually something like “he’d play golf” or “he’d play Call of Duty,” though I can tell it makes their sweet little brains hurt just to think about their dad as a person. You be might thinking, “these kids’ parents are just losers!” and of course, some of them are. But just as often, I know these parents, and they have rich social lives, are involved in interesting causes and projects, are not living in an endless cycle of gym-grocery-store-golf-Call-of-Duty-times. This phenomenon, which I think I’ll call the “Mothers are People Too” effect (my friend has a hat with this slogan on it and threatens to wear it in times that call for passive aggressiveness), has nothing to do with autism. It is a simple fact of childhood that many children have no real idea who is raising them.

This past weekend, I experienced 48-hours of child-free bliss on a retreat with my writer’s group. I became friends with these women last summer, and though we have a more intimate friendship than most, we’ve never really gotten to socialize. It’s like we went straight into a an weeklong tantric ‘experience’ without kissing first. And so, I found myself telling stories I hadn’t told in a long while, the kinds of stories you tell on a third date, when you are pretty sure they are not a serial killer but you still don’t know if they are a coffee drinker or not. “One day during my freshman year of high school, Edith Zimmerman and I went to the Garage in Harvard Square after school and I got my nose pierced, against my parents’ explicit wishes, because I lied and said I was 18.” “My senior year, I dressed up as the principal for Halloween and yelled at all the students during lunch.” “Once, when I was in Paris during college, I hung out with the ‘conscious rap’ group People Under the Stairs and we all got high and tried to scale the wall of the cemetery where Jim Morrison is buried.”

this, but the light of day, is a very tall wall

My friend Jen remarked on the telling of these stories, tenderly. Look at us, we’re making new friends by telling old tales. Sure, there was the jittery excitement of being away from our families, finally in the flesh after nine months, of getting to shape how someone thinks of us in the early days of a friendship, before those images calcify. Something like, “Listen, before all this - a partner, kids, minor but chronic incontinence - I used to be cool.” But there were stories of motherhood too (“Once, when I was nine months pregnant, I sang Usher’s Nice & Slow at a karaoke bar in a leopard print skirt, and the crowd just about lost it when I started grinding the floor and actually managed to get back up”). But these women see me in ways not a lot of people do. They read my drafts and listen to my doubt and remind me start and also to finish. Why do I so badly need them to know about that one time in Paris? There was something else there. Something more like, “I want you to know the edges of who and how I can be, I want you to hold these possibilities of me, for me.”

This time in our lives, dampened by family demands and pandemic, is more about intention than action. My friend Allison does this thing with her girlfriends called “Wolf Night” where everyone shows up at one woman’s house, makes her try on everything in her closet and talk about her style dreams, and helps her settle on an articulated look. Everything that doesn’t fit the look has to go. On Allison’s Wolf Night, she decided she is a “Free-wheeling Novelist.” Another friend is a “Witch on a Hike.” I have never gotten to have a Wolf Night, but just knowing that Allison knows that it is my intention to style myself as “Dr. J. Lo, Urban Psychologist,” is enough to make me feel seen. I just want people to know that I intend to look like J. Lo got a last-minute call to play a couples therapist in a rom-com but somehow could only choose from her real clothing as a wardrobe, no matter that I am actually dressed like Ben Affleck before he’s had his morning Dunkies. This does a world of good. But at the same time, I want to be seen for what I do, not just who I am or want to be. I want the people I love to know that I am a woman of action, a woman who gets down on the floor during a killer bridge, fully-grown-baby-in-uterus be damned.

no words needed

I remember this one time (this is not a “one time” story I tell with big hand gestures after a few glasses of Whispering Angel), I was talking to my mom about our careers. We were walking down her street in the town I grew up in, I was just finishing my degree as a school psychologist, and she asked me what I wanted out of it. I told her I wanted to make a difference, to write books, give talks all over the world, that I didn’t just want to be holed up in an office somewhere, treating people one at a time, even if I looked like J. Lo while doing it. My mother, a career therapist, became incensed, which is not something she does often. “You think I haven’t made a difference?!” she cried “I have changed the lives of hundreds and hundreds of people, and the people around them in turn. I walk down the street in my city, everyday, and see people who I’ve helped, that’s making a difference!” I was sorry I’d offended her but I didn’t, at the time, see her point. I wanted to be seen en masse. I was the kid who consumed the Oriental Trading catalogue like it was a Playgirl. Quantity over quality, baby.

During our retreat, one of our reflection questions was “Your child is out of the house and living with their first roommate. When they ask them what their mother is like, how do you hope they’ll respond?” This, to me, is the bones of the “free day” question, and then some. In a way, I am constantly worshipping at the altar of my adult children - may they be healthy, may they be happy, may they never have sex with one of those lifelike dolls or use the term “deliverables.” But also, may they see me for who I really am, and also who I have intended to be not just for them, but for myself. I thought about my mother this weekend and how poorly I’d seen her, how I’d mistaken her expertise, dedication, impact, as an accident rather than a choice. My mother acts on her intentions, and is there a better definition of success than that? I want my son, eventually, to have that solid of an understanding of why I do what I do. And I want my daughter to tell the Nice & Slow story to every new friend on their way to meet me, beaming with pride. I want to be seen and seen and seen and seen and seen.

is it too much to just want your son to grow up to be this dude?

When I tried to broach the “day off” question with my five-year-old (I made the mistake of doing it while a screen was open, so, not a lot of focus there), he just asked, “but if you and dada were both gone, who would take care of us?” Egotistical as he oughta be. Perhaps this seeing business is a lot to put on a child, who is busy figuring out their own shit, noticing things in the sky, fumbling over emotional-regulation, learning to tolerate life’s disappointments, like ice that is “too cold.”

My friends see me, my partner sees me, my siblings see me, my neighbor Ron sees me, the waiter who reminds me that if I’m too exhausted to order dessert, I could always get it to go and eat it in bed, sees me. Maybe it will take my kids until they are 40 to understand that I’m not just a grocery shopping, golf-playing, Giving Tree. I think I can wait.

We are being seen a lot more these days, by some who haven’t seen us in a year, by others who have seen us every day but had nothing to reflect us against. I wonder what stories I will tell about myself, now, and which I might discard. Will I have to start being seen through my actions, or can I continue to get by on wishes and plans? In some ways the gift of this year, which was also at times a curse, was having no one to see you but yourself. What would you do on a day off? All these years, I haven’t even considered my own answer.

-I had my first spot as a podcast guest last week and it was a blast! If you like TV, ladies with husky voices, and juicy celebrity encounter stories, you will probably enjoy listening to me and Lyndsay Webb discuss The Wire on her podcast, The Way Late Show.