Anger

Hey Kid,

I was going to write you about drugs, because drugs are supposed to be one of those things parents are afraid of discussing openly with their children, but, honestly, we can do that any time. Later. What I'm really having a hard time talking about is anger. Anger's something I've been dealing with lately, and my inability to face it and my antagonists is part of why I've been too unhappy to write you lately.

Anger is not something I was raised to feel. I suspect this is a temptation for a lot of parents, to kill their kid's anger as soon as possible, convince them that it's not okay to be angry. When I was fifteen, and my emotions were officially going out of control, I told my mom over the tomato patch that I was freaked out because sometimes I felt so very, very angry.

She looked up from the garden hose, "Are you ever angry at us?" she said, meaning herself and my dad.
"Sometimes," I said. She looked so sad.
"You know," she said, "God doesn't want you to hold anger in your heart toward your parents. It grieves Him mightily."
"But God gets angry all the time in the Bible," I said.
"That's righteous anger," she said. "That's different."

A year later I was hospitalized for suicidal depression. Gosh, I guess I haven't mentioned that before. This is definitely something I haven't wanted to talk about. There's not much to say, unless you want to get into the grim details, but, to be brief, my parents drove me out to Colorado on the pretense of visiting relatives. And then, late on the second night of driving, led a sleepy, pillow-clutching me into what I thought was a Motel 6, and left me there. That place was my first mental hospital. I was admitted into the Christian program to deal with suicidal depression. I was depressed because I had begun to question my family's Christianity and they were treating me badly as a result, which naturally made me very angry. However, I'd been taught from childhood that I wasn't allowed to be angry with them.

The classic line from therapy goes like this: "Depression is anger turned inward."

I had a lot of anger--but I didn't know it, because I had been taught very well not to acknowledge it.

It's been eight years since that time, as of this writing. I've learned to get angry, but I still don't always know how to deal with it. Sometimes it spirals out of control and I take it out on the wrong people. Sometimes I get very sick from holding it in, and there's bile in my mouth all the time Sometimes I pretend I'm not angry, and then I feel ashamed.

Lately, I've been angry because some people were insulting and rude to me, and I tried to placate them instead of telling them that they had to stop. Worry about how to save those friendships was making me very sick, and I knew I had a problem, but I didn't know what to do about it. I began to think that maybe I was wrong to think of having you, because how can I handle the stress of having a kid who will, inevitably, have conflicts with me, if I can't handle the stress of these petty conflicts now? And what kind of anger management skills could I possibly teach you? Wouldn't I just doom you to a life of headaches and stomach ulcers?

And, kid, thinking of you was enough to make me do something about it. I went back to the people I'd first tried to placate, and I told them off, and then I told them I did not need them in my life anymore--because why would I? You might think someone's a good friend, but if you argue, (and arguing is normal and fine and usually it just means there's been a misunderstanding that needs to be worked through), they'll show you their true characters. If someone's true character is a person who thinks it's okay to be insulting, vicious, and condescending, then they're idiots and bad people and you don't need to keep them in your life. And if you're in a group of friends who see what's happening, and they don't care enough about you to point out that it's wrong for friends to be insulting and vicious and condescending to each other, then they're not really your friends either. Just go ahead and tell them where to get off--and do yourself a favor and refuse to be insulting and rude when you do it, so that you can walk away knowing you're the better person. You see, I always skipped over that part where you explain why you're angry and why what the other person did or said was wrong. I thought, why bother? You're going to walk away anyway, why risk further flaring tempers? I'll tell you why: self-respect.

Self-respect may sound like a buzzword, but it turns out life really is better when you think you're worthy of basic courtesy and love.

Now, there are people you can't simply tell off and walk away from forever, and one of those people, at least until you're 18, is me. To you I can only say: it's fine if we argue, but let's both behave like good people when we do it. It's normal and healthy to disagree. But I want to show you by my own actions that I respect your point of view and that I'll admit it when I'm wrong. My parents never did that for me, so I never learned it was okay to respect my own point of view. Now, granted, I was a teenager and sometimes my point of view was totally wrong, because I didn't know that much about life. Like it or not, you'll be wrong a lot too. But not all the time. Sometimes I'll be wrong or unjust, and I hope we'll be able to work through those times. I hope you'll feel like you can stick up for yourself. That's why I write these things to you, though, to remind myself of things parents seem to forget, so I won't be unjust as often, and so that I'll remember to respect your point of view, so you'll know how to respect yourself.

You know, you should totally feel free to make me re-read parts of this, if you think I've forgotten.

I love you so much, Kid,



C.

Why We Don't Commit Suicide In This Family

Hey Kid,

I realize that the only acceptable follow-up to my last letter is to explain exactly how life ISN'T miserable and pointless, but I'll tell you what--it's tricky. I can tell you that, so far, I haven't offed myself because I don't want to make other people's lives even more miserable and pointless than they already are. And since that seems to be the most convincing argument for me, I'll try to explain it to you.

Suicide makes other people's lives, (not to mention your own life), more miserable and pointless because:

I) If they love you, your suicide points out in no uncertain terms that their love wasn't interesting, useful, or beautiful enough to keep you around, which is another way of saying you never really loved them back. And while life may be pointless and frequently miserable, it has not extended the courtesy of rendering us heartless.
II) If they don't love you, your suicide points out:

A) They weren't important enough to you for you to try to acquire their love. Of course, why should they be? The heartless bastards.
B) Life, at least to you, was miserable and pointless enough to end. Suicide, in my opinion, is a fairly convincing argument for your own perspective. However, don't let the cheerful prospect of finally driving your point home lead you to believe suicide is The Answer, because even if your suicide were to hit the morning papers:

1) Most people don't read the papers anymore.
2) If they do, suicide has long since become the most boring headline in section B, page 13. The fact that this is absolutely true ought to validate your point that life is miserable and pointless but:
3) Even if they do read about your boring suicide in section B, page 13, most people have the all the perspective, compassion, and capacity for reason of a dense cloud of gnats. And that brings us, finally, to:
4) If they do have a whit of feeling or thought for your little act, if it does occur to them what a convincing argument you've just penned, if for a second they feel the morose weight of their empty lives, they will assume the smug, sorrowful expression of news readers everywhere, turn to their families who wait around the breakfast table and either:

a) Say, "Let's go to Disneyland, everybody! Disneyland!" That's because they think they can halt the niggling sense of meaninglessness with an abnormally Good Time. What a legacy for you!
b) Mix a Paxil and vodka tonic. Or,
c) Go, "Tsk tsk, isn't this sad?" And everyone will agree that it's sad and say aren't they lucky to be so happy and healthy and religious?, and then they will forget all about you and study the Family Circus, possibly for minutes.

All of which to say, there probably isn't a reason for being here, and your life probably won't mean much in the end, since 150,000 people die every single day and what do you care? But suicide is easily the whiniest way to die, as well as the most self-pitying, and the most snivelling, especially if you live in Western Civilization, and so we don't kill ourselves if we respect two things:

1) Our intelligence. And if you're smart enough to figure out that life is meaningless, surely you're smart enough to figure out how thoroughly you insult yourself by ending it.

2) The people we love and who love us. Because they'd care if we were gone. And we'd care if they were gone. So we stick it out and think about them until we stop thinking about ourselves. And when you stop thinking about yourself, for some reason, life gets a hell of a lot better. I guess, to be honest, that's the main reason I keep writing you.

The only trick there is to making meaning in your life, as far as I can see, is figuring out what you love and focusing on that. It may only be meaningful to you, but that's all you need to know. Never lose sight of what you love. Religious people, for example, are often more purposeful because they've decided to brainwash themselves into perpetual focus on what they're told they love. Now, I'm not saying I know what love is, as I've mentioned earlier, but I am saying that you can know WHAT you love, because it's whatever's worth staying alive for. If you're smart, you'll sit down right now and start a list.

Every other good thing that happens to you after that is just gravy. Delicious creamy gravy.

And by the way, kid, I'm saying these things to you, in this calculating manner, because I don't want to guilt you into living life. Mothers are very good at the emotional appeal, the whole "you'd rip out my heart?" business. But for now, while you don't sit in either my uterus or on my couch, I can still occasionally think rationally about you and about life. This is the rational appeal for life, to life, for you and for me, because unfortunately if you're anything like me you'll probably be a moody son of a bitch (ha ha! true on so many levels!). At any rate, if you're anything like most of Western Civilization, adolescence will be hell, so I imagine these thoughts might come in handy. Although I'll grant you, Dav, if he becomes your father, is one of those lucky few who sailed through adolescence like a prince on a shining schooner of light, so maybe you'll get lucky.

I love you.



C.

Damn Unlikely

Hey Kid,

I just don't know, kid. I just don't know.

There are so many good reasons why I shouldn't be a parent. Jesus, I can't believe I'm saying this to YOU, of all people. Hello ammo!

I look at this journal and it seems so terribly neurotic. Here: maybe if we analyze everything RIGHT NOW--and I mean EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD--maybe you'll live better and I'll be a better parent and maybe, maybe just maybe, NOTHING BAD WILL EVER HAPPEN. It's not just neurotic, it's a power trip, and as power trips go it's exceedingly naive, which is exactly how I don't want to be.

This week I began to feel that maybe staying alive really is pointless. That certainly makes having YOU pointless.

A lot of different shitty things happened this week, and if you're sitting there reading this then they clearly weren't that bad, but I'll tell you the kicker. On the road between Kingston and Montreal, there's a detour to a little town in the plains called Merrickville. Merrickville was the kicker. Merrickville made me want to kill myself.

I took the detour because I'd been told it was a nice place to have lunch. It turned out to be nothing but a tourist trap: a few little shops with arty beaded necklaces and crystals for sale, a painting studio or three, flavored fudge, and a restaurant, as advertised. I sat down alone in a dark dining room half-full with other tourists, all significantly older than me, and while I waited for my food I eavesdropped. I always eavesdrop--is that a crushing blow to your idealized view of me? Probably not.

They were all deep in conversation, table by table, "chatting" I suppose. They talked about the things they'd bought from the arty little shops, and what they might want to buy later, someday, and about other people's problems. They wore sweatshirts, bulged out of their chairs, swiped fronds of greasy over-processed hair out of their pasty faces, and they just talked and talked and talked about nothing at all.

Do you realize, once upon a time, those people were just like you?

Once, at SOME POINT, the majority of them had to have been bright eyed and healthy and maybe even attractive, or at least wanted to be. The majority of them, considering the bourgeois circumstances, probably went to college at some point, and certainly all must have had some kind of dreams for their lives. They probably wondered if there was a god, perhaps asked themselves in despair if they'd ever find love, perhaps laid awake every night when they were twelve, thinking about death. Did they realize that one day they'd wake up and say to themselves, "Hey, let's go to Merrickville today! Yes, Merrickville will be a GOOD TIME"?

Probably not. One hopes not. I certainly never said that to myself. Merrickville, for me, was an accident.

I sat there and realized that this is what life becomes, for most of us. We become used to the mundane swing of events, the fact that life is not as romantic or exciting as we hoped, that we will work at jobs that bear very little resemblance to our hopes, and may never bring meaning to our lives. Or to anyone's life, for that matter. Worst of all, we get used to it. We stop caring. Or they stopped caring. Me? I'd rather die now and save myself the trouble of faking a life.

Today Dav and I went to the World Press Photo exhibit down the street, all the winners of international news photo contests, lit up and lined around the edges of the room. I saw pictures of bloated humans face down in filthy streets, little children with ragged nubs for arms, very few smiling faces, mostly starvation. Reasons why we don't read newspapers anymore. What can I say? You laugh or you cry. I cried.

Life looks like nothing but a simple brutal choice: either we suffer horribly, or we choose to feel nothing at all.

Yes, there's always drugs and spending to excess if you'd rather be abnormally happy.

But here's me, writing furiously to you, trying to... what? Stop it all from happening to you? Better I should never have you at all, then believe I have that kind of power. Maybe I'm just trying to lie to myself, weave a magical incantation over us with the power of my mind, believing that if I write enough down, it'll all be better--at least better. We'll stand up on the blasting bow of a white boat and wave silk handkerchiefs into warm wind and orange sunset skies. You and me, kid, me in my fluttering linen dress, you in yellow dungerees. Every single day, breathing salt and clean sky, the rest of the world nothing but a blue dream in the mist behind us. Each wave, nothing but a buoy into a perfect life.

Oh, god, I doubt it, kid. At any rate, I doubt it would be all that satisfying after a week or two.

I really don't know what to tell you.

I love you.



C.

Look

Hey Kid,

Recently I read about the scientific variants for determining human beauty. It turns out that beauty isn't really just a social mindgame, but can be objectively measured and understood.

Attractiveness, I learned, is three things:

1) Bilateral Symmetry. No big surprise here. If your face shows lateral symmetry, (that is, the right side more or less perfectly mirrors the left), you're more attractive. This has to do with not looking diseased.

2) Secondary Sexual Characteristics. Again, no surprise. The more your face exhibits the qualities of virility or fecundity common to your gender, the more sexy you appear. It's so obvious, you can't even describe it without being redundant. But the third one fascinates me:

3) Facial Averageness. The more closely your facial features display the average size and shape of all others in your cultural net, the more attractive you are. Apparently this has to do with looking as though you are a composite of as many different parts of the gene pool as possible. Heterogenity is good for offspring.

I love this. I find myself looking at everyone through the lens of averageness. I LOVE the opportunity to momentarily wrench my brain away from my subconscious and just LOOK at what's in front of my eyes as an objective series of facts, devoid of intrinsic meaning.

It's also made me feel better about how I look. I can look at myself in the mirror and use a series of vague mathematic estimates that PROVE there's not much that's particularly deformed about my face. More importantly, what this means is that "pretty" is not about being SPECIAL, (which is a terrifying thing to have to be), it's about being absolutely mundane.

The best part is that even if you DON'T think you're attractive on any given day, that may well mean you have one of the universe's ever-slimming chances of actually being unique. And if you can hack being unique, that means you're also very brave, and if you're brave, that means you might have the opportunity to actually contribute something new and good to this world.

But all of this starts with being able to see what's in front of your eyes. That's really the point of this letter.

One of the things I want to try to teach you as we go is to stop and really look at what you're seeing. The first thing a good teacher tells any young artist is to draw what they really see. You grow up drawing trees like lumps of mashed potatoes on sticks, but there's never been a tree in the world like that. Every time you draw a tree that way, it's like pulling on blinders. Once you know you've been brainwashed by easy labels like "tree = mashed potatoes on sticks" or "beautiful = that tingly feeling in my crotch" you're completely blind. Since it's unlikely that you will give yourself a tingly feeling in the crotch, you may think you're not beautiful. You begin to separate all experience into crotch-tingle and not-crotch-tingle. You can't see the point of portraiture galleries, or old people.

Hopefully you're not like this. But enormous swathes of the population really see the world this way. Maybe they separate everyone into other kinds of categories: "Useful" vs. "Not," or "Exciting" vs. "Boring," "Me" vs. "Everything else," or anything else you can think of. But, as with any labels, as soon as you start relying on them you stop being able to see a thing. And then you miss out. You start to hate and fear people at random, and desire them at random too.

I want you to be able to see the truth. I hope you'll really look at the world around you. Carry a camera to school, put frames around every wonderful thing. Expand your definition of "wonderful" until you can see the unique personality in a blade of grass, until the cornices on a bank fill you with awe. Look and look and look until you can see everything in everyone. It's all there. I swear to God, it's all there.

I love you,



C.

Good Times

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Liiiiiiiiiive!

Hey Kid,

Today I made myself throw up with nothing but the power of my mind.

You know, sometimes I ask myself if you'll be proud of my choices, proud I'm your mom. In this case, today, I'll let you off the hook.

I should amend: I threw up with nothing but the power of my mind and my overwhelming fear of swallowing toothpaste. I HATE toothpaste. I still use it, but I rinse and rinse and rinse and if I even suspect I might have swallowed the TINIEST wisp of minty paste, I usually dry heave until the stomach acid burns the flavor out of my mouth. This doesn't exempt you from using toothpaste, though. Sorry.

What's so disturbing about this, though, is that I don't actually know if I'm swallowing toothpaste or just minty spit, so sometimes, when I throw up like this, it's probably entirely in my mind.

The reason why I tell you this is because it's worthwhile for you to know that everything that happens to you, happens within your mind, and more importantly that I believe this idea and will probably warp your mind with it. While there may be an indifferent (or, as they say, "objective") reality, practicing outside your mind, you will never know it. Which is why you have to take care about the things you let yourself think. At a certain level, any assertion becomes a superstition, and people who believe in superstitions too hard can really freak themselves out.

Or vomit using nothing but the power of their minds.

One of the things I worry about, (AND I DON'T JUST WORRY BECAUSE I'M CRAZY, BELIEVE ME, WE'RE ALL FAIRLY NEUROTIC, ESPECIALLY MOMS), is that something awful will happen in my parts and I'll never have you. Or you'll be stillborn. Or brain damaged and never be able to read this. And what I worry after I worry that, is that the power of my mind has just reached into the future and created a dead baby.

But I don't write these letters to a dead baby, I write them to you. I can picture you in my mind: 15 years old, gangly, smart. If you've bothered to read this at all you're probably smirking or freaked out or both. I'm afraid you're a bit androgynous in my mind, because I'm trying hard to write these letters for either a boy or a girl. Hopefully you won't come out looking like a Hanson kid (look it up).

I just want you to know that I believe in you. You're going to be okay, because every one of these letters is a story I'm telling the universe inside my head, about how great you are.

I hope you believe in yourself too, but that's another letter.

I love you,



C.

Snowmen Built on the Heads of Volcanoes

Hey Kid,

Enthusiasm is tricky. The way I see it, most kids, if they're not horribly squashed, come out totally enthusiastic about life: they've never been here before, they've never done anything before, and by god they're ready for all of it! Hooray!

This behavior pattern is, at best, known as ADD--at worst, we call it "childhood."

I say "at best," because it seems to me that those diagnosed with ADD have a lingering excuse throughout adulthood to be eccentric, enthusiastic, and wildly themselves. The reason why "childhood" is the worst, is because there is only a limited number of years where that excuse will apply. I do encourage you to use that excuse well, by the way, although that might be the wine talking.

What happens after childhood is, of course, adulthood, and that, as I say, is where enthusiasm becomes tricky.

Adulthood beats the enthusiasm out of you. Years of drudgery, whether in school or work, teach you that the easiest way to get through life is to tune out of it. This syndrome of disillusionment and apathy is frequently referred to as "maturity." I don't mean to imply that there's no such thing as maturity, or that maturity is not a good thing to have, but I want to emphasize that disillusionment and apathy ARE NOT IT.

And yet, this is what the majority of adults will model for you as you grow up: that to be a mature grown-up you have to stop being so enthusiastic, stop bursting into tears over terrific songs, stop running to the ocean because a great paragraph filled you with the need to leap in, stop loving quite so hard--it's embarrassing. Your only excuse for enthusiasm is to ingest heavy doses of narcotics and hope you don't either A) die, or B) get interventioned.

If you want to fit in the adult world, if you want to make money and be taken seriously, in general, that is what you have to do. What I am experiencing right now, on the cusp of full adulthood, is the terrible feeling of wearing a mask almost all the time. It's a mask like a cup, that carries my raging, bouncy, boingy heart within its white interior, smooth, like the surface of an egg.

It's very hard to both love life and be like the other adults.

I don't know if I've found a good balance yet. The main reason I'm writing this is to remind me how it feels, and to tell you what's going on here. I hope it helps, someday. Both of us, I mean.

I love you.



C.

Love

Hey Kid,

I tried to write you a letter, a long, long letter about what love is, or at least how it looks, or at least what I've seen of it so far, and by the time I got to the end of page after page of writing, I realized I had no idea what love was. And no one knows what love is. I suppose I just didn't want your heart to be broken too badly. But it will be broken. It will happen. And you'll find yourself giving up a lot of precious little fantasies in the end, so that you don't end up with a broken heart every single goddamn day of your life.

But maybe that won't happen to you. Maybe you'll figure out the solution. So I don't have any right to try to deprive you of those fantasies, as much as they will probably hurt you in the end. I think having that hope, the hope of living all your dreams, is part of what being young is about, and it's why the rest of the world envies youth and why they worship it as well.

I love you,



C.

In Which I am Sarcastic

Hey Kid,

So I was cleaning out my shelf in the closet today, so as to make things a little more accessible and grown-uppy looking (HA), and, as I dug through the clothes I realized that with every old piece I pulled out I was thinking, "Yeah THAT one never worked either SIGH." Actually, that wasn't what I realized. What I realized was that what I MEANT by that, somewhere inside, was: THIS SHIRT DID NOT SUCCEED IN TRANSFORMING ME INTO SOMETHING OTHER THAN MYSELF.

Son of a bitch. WHAT A DAMN SHAME.

My dear kid, CLOTHING IS JUST ANOTHER THING THE GOVERNMENT MAKES YOU DO. Like wearing a bicycle helmet, or elementary school. It has nothing to do with who you are. In case I forget to mention this later: don't take it too seriously.

I love you,



C.

Our Nation

Hey Kid,

I've just come from weeping over a buttered bagel. Not that it helps, but I've got greasy cheeks from pushing tears off my face with each new internal wave of telling you how sorry I am, so fucking sorry.

I shouldn't be allowed to read the newspaper.

So the governments of here and there announced yesterday that they have foiled (so they claim, so they claim--can you hear the weariness of that refrain?) another massive terrorist plot, which of course did nothing to foil the actual terror that was intended all along. Our privacy will be compromised a little bit more, "temporarily," they say, and we'll go along with it like the Jews at the start of the Third Reich, agreeing with the logic of it, waiting it out for better times, unable to imagine where it all would lead.

I am so angry that you will grow up not knowing what it's like to believe in the irrelevance of a phone tap on your wire. I am furious that your first plane ride will be like an incarceration. I hate that you will grow up in an America that has capitulated to evil, where every purchase you make, whatever job you take, will ultimately contribute to funding this nightmare of corruption and self-congratulation and greed.

I don't know how to stop it. I don't know how to stop it.

Forty years ago, in the sixties, the youth weren't afraid like we are. Their protests were born out of anger, and you hear it reflected in their music: Jimi Hendrix, Janice Joplin, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, music wild with joy and fury, unvanquished. But my generation lives in fear. The most-lauded sub-culture musicians of my time are Iron and Wine and Death Cab for Cutie, musicians with one note, one tone, whose greatest quality is their utter inoffensiveness. We are a generation crying out for lullabies and nightlights, a numb fuzzy blanket to cuddle us to sleep.

What I want this morning is to be able to be optimistic for you, but nothing seems more dangerous or willfully ignorant at this moment than optimism. I reject these fuzzy blankets to keep my outrage strong, for you.

I recognize how childish it is that I should insist on the privilege of keeping America isolated from the bloodshed and terror that it has inflicted on the rest of the world for so many years. We can no longer ignore the fact that we are directly engaged in injustice and terror. Maybe this is how a nation grows up. We are finally being stripped of our illusions.

Then, too, this is not the worst point to be born in human history. The Napoleonic wars were probably a bit worse. Hygiene was definitely worse. We can give thanks for clean armpits.

What else is good about the world I still fully intend to bring you into? There are more opportunities now than ever before for writers, artists, and storytellers of all kinds to create and have their voices heard. The internet has created a world community that allows the individual to contribute to something greater than herself. And with that pronoun shift, I can also say that little girls grow up now believing they have options for their lives. And, with the world now united by our experiences of terror, we can no longer pretend or be forced to believe that we are alone.

I do not want you to be raised sustaining your sense of community on terror. But I am just as determined that you will not grow up believing you are alone. There is another world not in the newspapers, where people plant backyard gardens and have long conversations on lawn chairs and do not capitulate to the fears of what they are told is inevitable.

They are a secret nation, and they are still free. We'll find each other. I'll find them for you.

I love you,



C.