It Was On Fire When I Lay Down On It Read online

  The child is not hurt. And the father has had some experience with the uselessness of the stop-crying-or-I’ll-smack-you syndrome and has remained amazingly quiet and still in the face of the catastrophe.

  The father is calm because he is thinking about running away from home. Now. Just walking away, getting into the car, driving away somewhere down South, changing his name, getting a job as a paperboy or a cook in an all-night diner. Something—anything—that doesn’t involve contact with three-year-olds.

  Oh sure, someday he may find all this amusing, but in the most private part of his heart he is sorry he has children, sorry he married, sorry he grew up, and, above all, sorry that this particular son cannot be traded in for a model that works. He will not and cannot say these things to anybody, ever, but they are there and they are not funny.

  The box-boy and the manager and the accumulated spectators are terribly sympathetic and consoling. Later, the father sits in his car in the parking lot holding the sobbing child in his arms until the child sleeps. He drives home and carries the child up to his crib and tucks him in. The father looks at the sleeping child for a long time. The father does not run away from home.

  THIS IS 1976.

  Same man paces my living room, carelessly cursing and weeping by turns. In his hand is what’s left of a letter that has been crumpled into a ball and then uncrumpled again several times. The letter is from his sixteen-year-old son (same son.). The pride of his father’s eye—or was until today’s mail.

  The son says he hates him and never wants to see him again. The son is going to run away from home. Because of his terrible father. The son thinks the father is a failure as a parent. The son thinks the father is a jerk.

  What the father thinks of the son right now is somewhat incoherent, but it isn’t nice.

  Outside the house it is a lovely day, the first day of spring. But inside the house it is more like Apocalypse Now, the first day of one man’s next stage of fathering. The old gray ghost of Oedipus has just stomped through his life. Someday—some long day from now—he may laugh about even this. For the moment there is only anguish.

  He really is a good man and a fine father. The evidence of that is overwhelming. And the son is quality goods as well. Just like his father, they say.

  “Why did this happen to me?” the father shouts at the ceiling.

  Well, he had a son. That’s all it takes. And it doesn’t do any good to explain about that right now. First you have to live through it. Wisdom comes later. Just have to stand there like a jackass in a hailstorm and take it.

  THIS IS 1988.

  Same man and same son. The son is twenty-eight now, married, with his own three-year-old son, home, career, and all the rest. The father is fifty.

  Three mornings a week I see them out jogging together around 6:00 A.M. As they cross a busy street, I see the son look both ways, with a hand on his father’s elbow to hold him back from the danger of oncoming cars, protecting him from harm. I hear them laughing as they run on up the hill into the morning. And when they sprint toward home, the son doesn’t run ahead but runs alongside his father at his pace.

  They love each other a lot. You can see it.

  They are very care-full of each other—they have been through a lot together, but it’s all right now.

  One of their favorite stories is about once upon a time in a supermarket.…

  THIS IS NOW.

  And this story is always. It’s been lived thousands of times, over thousands of years, and literature is full of examples of tragic endings, including that of Oedipus. The sons leave, kick away and burn all bridges, never to be seen again. But sometimes (more often than not, I suspect) they come back in their own way and in their own time and take their own fathers in their arms. That ending is an old one, too. The father of the Prodigal Son could tell you.

  MY SON IS A MOTHER. Grown up, married, first child. He and his wife have full-time careers and believe in Equal Rights and Equal Responsibility, in the spirit of New Parenthood. Son does his full share of everything for his daughter, and spends as much time with the child as his wife does. I call him a “mother” in that he does all those things that, once upon a time, mostly mothers did. He feeds, cleans and dresses, nurtures, accepts, approves, encourages, protects, comforts, and dearly loves the babe in his arms and heart. I admire him for this.

  His daughter is just a year old. So far, so good. But since there are quite a few more laps to go, I thought I should give my son some advice about being a mother. Advice for him, not his wife. She knows what she’s doing. And I have learned not to try to tell a woman how to mother. I have had some traumatic experiences along this line. I will explain.

  For twenty-five years of my life, the second Sunday in May was trouble. Being the minister of a church, I was obliged in some way to address the subject of Mother’s Day. It could not be avoided. I tried that. Mind you, the congregation was quite open-minded, actually, and gave me free rein in the pulpit. But when it came to the second Sunday in May, the expectations were summarized in these words of one of the more outspoken women in the church: “I’m bringing my MOTHER to church on MOTHER’S DAY, Reverend, and you can talk about anything you want. But it had better include MOTHER, and it had better be GOOD!”

  She was joking—teasing me. She also meant it.

  Year after year I tried to get it right. Somehow, having had a mother and having known quite a few firsthand didn’t seem to count for much. I had never been a mother, so what did I know? I did give it my best—I swear. Tried to deliver on-the-one-hand-and-then-on-the-other-hand sorts of balanced, evasive sermons. Quoted a lot of big-name authorities, read sensitive poetry, avoided chancy jokes and gratuitous advice. But the Sunday never passed without half the congregation thinking I was a hypocrite for not laying it on the line about mothers, and the other half thinking I was an ingrate for not laying it on with a trowel as to how wonderful mothers really, eternally, are. What’s a minister to do?

  (In passing, I note that Mother’s Day has become an economic juggernaut. One hundred and forty million greeting cards are sold—very few humorous ones. And about seven billion dollars are spent for presents and taking Mom out to eat. Sixty million roses are given, not to count orchids and pot plants. Biggest commercial activity over a holiday after Christmas and Easter. And only at Christmastime does the telephone company do more business. There is fiscal power here not to be trifled with.)

  Around that second Sunday in May are focused other powerful forces—concentrated in memory and forever stored in hearts and minds and psyches. Serious stuff, too. Mother’s Day is not noted for comedy.

  One memorable Sunday I said that for all those who had wonderful mothers or who were wonderful mothers or who thought motherhood in general was just wonderful, I would like to say “WONDERFUL.” But if this isn’t you …

  Then I gave a kind of moot quiz—asked some questions without asking for a show of hands.

  How many of you find yourself involved in hypocrisy of the most uncomfortable kind around Mother’s Day?

  How many really don’t like—or even really hate—your mother, or hate being the mother you are?

  How many really don’t like or even really hate your children?

  How many don’t really know your mother at all?

  How many of you find Mother’s Day painful, especially when it involves thoughts and memories of such matters as adoption, abortion, divorce, suicide, rejection, alcoholism, alienation, abuse, incest, sorrow, loss, and words like stepmother, mother-in-law, and unspeakable obscene references to motherhood?

  I had other questions to ask, but the church had become very quiet as I read my questions. The congregation sat very still, and it was clear that a lot more truth than they or I wanted to deal with was among us. I stopped. Looked at them and they looked at me. The look was pain. I sat down, not in the pulpit chair but down in a pew where they were. Enough had been asked to last a long time. There wasn’t much joy that Sunday in May. The cold spring
rain falling outside the windows of the church didn’t help much, either. Bringing up the whole truth seemed like such a good idea at the time, but now …

  A visiting lady, who had “sainted mother” written all over her face, accosted me after church: “Young man, better men than you have gone straight to hell for suggesting less than what you said this morning. Shame, shame, SHAME for spoiling this day.”

  So. As I say, I’m a little gun-shy talking about Motherhood. Especially to women. As my own mother often explained when things did not go well: I was only trying to help.

  My Sunday obligations are over now, and my mother is in her grave. I am on safer ground in passing some advice on to my son the mother. Advice for his older brother as well, who is engaged and has that fecund look about him that tells me motherhood is not far away from him, either.

  For both my sons, then, some motherly thoughts from their father:

  Children are not pets.

  The life they actually live and the life you perceive them to be living is not the same life.

  Don’t take what your children do too personally.

  Don’t keep scorecards on them—a short memory is useful.

  Dirt and mess are a breeding ground for well-being.

  Stay out of their rooms after puberty.

  Stay out of their friendships and love-life unless invited in.

  Don’t worry that they never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you.

  Learn from them; they have much to teach you.

  Love them long; let them go early.

  Finally, a footnote. You will never really know what kind of parent you were or if you did it right or wrong. Never. And you will worry about this and them as long as you live. But when your children have children and you watch them do what they do, you will have part of an answer.

  As I write this, Mother’s Day is coming around again. I must remember to send my son some flowers and a card.

  A FRIEND DOESN’T LIKE THE ESSAY “ALL I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.” Says it’s nice as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. Thinks it should go beyond “nice.”

  He’s right. There are things I learned—and needed to learn—that were not taught in primary school. Teachers and adults would never tell you these things. Oh, they knew them all right, but they would never tell you they knew. You had to find them out for yourself or from your friends.

  The ultimate source of this information was the snake in the Garden of Eden. I am talking about the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. “Try it, you’ll like it,” whispered the snake. To eat of it is always trouble; not to eat is not to be fully human.

  There are two parts to this body of knowledge: what I learned before I was thirteen, and what I know now. (Some of these things I wanted to know. Some I did not. As my friend Lucy puts it, “Now that I am grown up, I sometimes wish I didn’t know NOW what I didn’t know THEN.”)

  Sex. I learned that girls are different from boys; that there is a terrifying ecstasy in playing I’ll Show You Mine If You’ll Show Me Yours; that four-letter words about sex have awesome power, and if you write those words on walls, adults go crazy.

  Crime. I learned how to take money out of my mother’s purse, and how to get into and out of places I wasn’t supposed to get into and out of—locked cupboards at home, and school buildings after hours.

  And I learned that no matter what my mother said, sometimes you get away with it—you don’t always get caught.

  Furthermore, I learned to lie sometimes if I did get caught, because sometimes they would actually believe me. And if they didn’t believe me, I could say I didn’t know why I did it. Sometimes they believed that. But if the alibi didn’t work and they punished me, it wasn’t ever really as bad as they said it was going to be. And if I was going to have to suffer consequences anyhow, I might as well do some things that made it worth the trouble.

  Remorseful crying afterward was useful—it broke their hearts.

  God. No matter what they said, God is not watching you all the time. On the other hand, if you pray real hard, sometimes God will hear you and even make a deal with you. You may have to be good for a while to get what you want, but it may be worth it. (I almost destroyed my third-grade teacher this way. I prayed for her to get sick and she did, over and over and over.)

  Power. Might may not make right somewhere in the world, but in our neighborhood the big boys always had the first and the last word. I learned that hitting people was sometimes necessary to bring people into line. Didn’t my folks hit me? The basic rule is clear: Always hit someone smaller than you.

  Skills. I learned how to spit between my teeth, how much fun it was to play with matches, how to play poker and cheat to win. I learned how to sneak out of my house, where to get a key duplicated, and how to drive the car up and down the driveway when my folks weren’t home.

  And Death. Not only did I discover that things could die, but I could kill them—bugs, lizards, worms, and mice. Old people died, but since I would never get old, I would never die.

  What do I know now?

  For one thing, the last item in the list is false. I did grow up to be old enough to know I, too, will die. I became one of those parents. My own children have themselves passed through kindergarten and their own back-alley education. Though my older son is a man now, only twenty-three years separate us, and we are both able to talk about our childhoods without total embarrassment. He KNOWS now—about the snake. He tells me all the rotten things he did behind my back when he was a kid, and I tell him all the things I knew he was doing but that I ignored because I didn’t want to deal with the problem, considering what I had done at the same age.

  Being a parent forces you into a benevolent hypocrisy. It goes with the job. It is comforting for the two of us to confess to each other—it clears the air between us and makes us people to each other.

  Here’s the tough part of what I know now: that the lessons of kindergarten are hard to practice if they don’t apply to you. It’s hard to share everything and play fair if you don’t have anything to share and life is itself unjust. I think of the children of this earth who see the world through barbed wire, who live in a filthy rubbled mess not of their own making and that they can never clean up. They do not wash their hands before they eat. There is no water. Or soap. And some do not have hands to wash. They do not know about warm cookies and cold milk, only stale scraps and hunger. They have no blankie to wrap themselves in, and do not take naps because it is too dangerous to close their eyes.

  Theirs is not the kindergarten of finger paint and nursery rhymes, but an X-rated school of harsh dailiness. Their teachers are not sweet women who care, but the indifferent instructors called Pain, Fear, and Misery. Like all children everywhere, they tell stories of monsters. Theirs are for real—what they have seen with their own eyes. In broad daylight. We do not want to know what they have learned.

  But we know.

  And it ain’t kindergarten stuff.

  The line between good and evil, hope and despair, does not divide the world between “us” and “them.” It runs down the middle of every one of us.

  I do not want to talk about what you understand about this world. I want to know what you will do about it. I do not want to know what you hope. I want to know what you will work for. I do not want your sympathy for the needs of humanity. I want your muscle. As the wagon driver said when they came to a long, hard hill, “Them that’s going on with us, get out and push. Them that ain’t, get out of the way.”

  “SIT STILL—JUST SIT STILL!” My mother’s voice. Again and again. Teachers in school said it, too. And I, in my turn, have said it to my children and my students. Why do adults say this? Can’t recall any child ever really sitting still just because some adults said to. That explains why several “sit stills” are followed by “SIT DOWN AND SHUT UP!” or “SHUT UP AND SIT DOWN!” My mother once used both versions back to back, and I, smart-mouth that I was, asked her just which
she wanted me to do first—shut up or sit down? My mother gave me that look. The one that meant she knew she would go to jail if she killed me, but it just might be worth it. At such a moment an adult will say very softly, one syllable at a time: “Get—out—of—my—sight.” Any kid with half a brain will get up and go. Then the parent will sit very still.

  Sitting still can be powerful stuff, though. It is on my mind as I write this on the first day of December in 1988, the anniversary of a moment when someone sat still and lit the fuse to social dynamite. On this day in 1955, a forty-two-year-old woman was on her way home from work. Getting on a public bus, she paid her fare and sat down on the first vacant seat. It was good to sit down—her feet were tired. As the bus filled with passengers, the driver turned and told her to give up her seat and move on back in the bus. She sat still. The driver got up and shouted, “MOVE IT!” She sat still. Passengers grumbled, cursed her, pushed at her. Still she sat. So the driver got off the bus, called the police, and they came to haul her off to jail and into history.

  Rosa Parks. Not an activist or a radical. Just a quiet, conservative, churchgoing woman with a nice family and a decent job as a seamstress. For all the eloquent phrases that have been turned about her place in the flow of history, she did not get on that bus looking for trouble or trying to make a statement. Going home was all she had in mind, like everybody else. She was anchored to her seat by her own dignity. Rosa Parks simply wasn’t going to be a “nigger” for anybody anymore. And all she knew to do was to sit still.