Our family had a perfect day in Boston this week. It was as perfect as a movie montage scene. Ice cream melting down cones, getting sprayed by water at the play ground, eating out and taking the boat to and from Boston and of course people watching and the Swan Boats.
But what lingers and is unsettling grabs my writing mind. Writing is a slice of life but not a whole picture. Photo albums rarely capture illness and sadness. Journal entries are not often needed when one is calm and at peace. So, after a perfect family day in Boston, this scene lingers with me and captures a part of me.
It was still a perfect day. Ideal. Wonderful. Best ever birthday for my man. And yet, this hangs around my the borders of my being too.
Sharing the Same Umbrella
“I swear to God I’ll end you if you move from the table one more time.”
“Just put a piece of paper under it,” he said, it being the wobbly metal table.
“I can’t get out of my chair,” the boy says, he skinny legs sticking both sticking out from one side as he leans up. He is eight. Maybe he is nine.
“You can do the DVD, the Game boy, the VCR and the computer but you can’t figure out how to get yourself out of a chair?” his father says, his voice raising.
The mother is red-faced, sweating on this hot day.
The younger boy, maybe four, says, “I love Mommy.”
The older son is also red-faced from crying.
We are all sharing one blue umbrella, sitting outside at the Salty Dog, in Fanuel Hall. We are celebrating my husband’s birthday.
“This is supposed to be a relaxing day and if you can’t get it together, I swear to God we’ll leave here,” she says to her oldest, “we’ll go home and I’ll take out your little brother.”
“I just want to change my seat,” he says.
“I’ll switch seats,” his younger brother says.
“No,” the father says, “I can see you are trying to be helpful but no.” The father stands, and I think maybe he will change seats with his son. Instead, he lifts his son’s chair up and then shoves it back down and closer to the table.”
”I just want to move,” the boy says.
”Don’t move,” his father says.
“I swear I’m gonna kill him. He’s driving me crazy,” the man says to his wife.
She switches seats with her younger son to share the wobbly table. She leans over to her older son and says, “You are making a scene Do you know what a scene is?”
“I don’t care,” he says.
“You’ll care when we get home she says. You’ll care when something gets taken away.”
She goes on, “Do you see anyone else in here acting like you?”
And I want to jump in, “Do you? Do you?” to each parent and I want to say, “It is not him who is making the scene.” We are so close I could reach their cups and drink from them, so close we are sharing the same umbrella to get shade, so close we can hear every word.
“It’s hot,” my daughter says, but even as she says it she’s staring at the boy as I have been doing since we’ve been seated.
I am, until she speaks, not her a mama bear but a deer in the headlights. If they are like this in public I fear how they are at home. If they are like this when supposedly enjoying themselves I am imagining them unhappy.
S and I exchange glances and he takes action, pulling out paper and a pen and saying, “Let’s make a picture book of our day so far.”
They draw the boat we came in on. They draw the buildings around us. “And don’t forget Daddy opening his presents,” I say.
“Did you notice the paper?” I ask S, “The wrapping paper K picked up?”
“No,” S says.
“It was of Ariel,” I say, “because K knows how much you love her.”
I smile, “I know how you feel about red-heads.”
“You might have to worry,” he says if we were mermaids.
K is busy drawing. We are laughing.
Near us are two acrobats in tight red pants and black t-shirts, men They are getting the crowd’s attention, juggling balls and then swords. One of the men puts what is the size of a steak-size pillow on his head.
“Don’t try this at home,” he says, “Try it at school where they have nurses.”
He puts the pillow on his head and then his partner approaches. They are head to head for a moment, bulls locking horns, and then the partner elevates so that he is doing a headstand on his partners head. I see his legs up in the air, his light ballet shoes in soft contrast to all of his sharp muscles. His hands and the hands of his partner intertwined until he lets go. I can see his head wobbling a bit, his neck muscles alone holding him in a delicate balance. He is all limbs and spine and upside down.
This boy, at the next table is not being beaten or burned or slapped. But the words are cutting and the anger is making me hot and uncomfortable and he is also unsupported as he dangles in mid air sitting at a shaky table.
His father does eventually trade seats with him and softens. “Who wants to try my crab cakes” he asks. “Who likes these better?” he says than some restaurant they go to often, maybe Jake’s or something. No one likes them better than at that place.
“New rule,” he says, “We only get them there from now on.”
“What does Mom make the best?” the father asks.
”Ice cream,” the little boy says.
What does Dad make the best?”
Fear I want to say. Loathing.
But I say nothing and who am I to judge. I don’t know their lives, the details and history, the moments that led up to this lunch, the morning they had or the years that will come.
The mother implies the son was just hungry. The father says something about never leaving the house until they are all well fed. The boys are slow to recover though the father is trying. I failed to cover my daughter’s ear, to act quickly, move her seat or ask for another table. I didn’t know how to help the boy either and I wanted to.
The only thing I did is say to my daughter, without lowering my voice, “It’s scary to hear parents talk like that to their kids, isn’t it?”
She nodded her head yes but her fingers up to my lips to silence me as though she was afraid the father would hear me as though she were protecting me.
Later, I say, “Lunch would have been better without those people talking to their son that way, huh?”
“Yes,” she says adding, “He said he’d kill him. He (the boy) didn’t even understand what his father wanted.”
“We all get angry and lose our patience,” I say, “But that was unacceptable behavior,” S adds. We want her to understand we are never going to turn on her like that, that we understand the power dynamics, how much smaller she is, how dependent. We don’t want to go on forever and elaborate but also don’t want to fail to reassure her either.
Parents can, in frustration and exhaustion and anger tip over. I, if I had more than one child, might have crossed my tipping point. Will my daughter someday say, “I would have wanted a sibling,” and not known that for me, to make sure I had reserve enough to count on my own patience could not parent more than one.
Smug as I might like to be, it serves no purpose and is a trap. Smug won’t help K, that boy or even me. Instead, I will take the warning, the reminder, and think, “Don’t get that high strung, on empty, at blow up. Don’t ever treat a child as an enemy. Don’t forget the size and power imbalance.” I read somewhere once, maybe it was in Parenting from the Inside Out, that any time a child’s fight or flight response is activated by a parent’s behavior and not by an actual threat, the child is being treated unfairly, the parent is abusing his or her power. Any time the flight or fight response is activated in absence of real danger…. That concept has stayed with me.
Later at night at home I see a taped show. It’s Oprah talking to the host of a program I have never seen called, “What would you do?” There is a series of set-ups where people in parks are being threatened. The cameras are to see if anyone stop to offer help or intervene. In another, a woman, of Middle Eastern descent is refusing to be served in a restaurant. Most people did nothing. Most were neutral. Rarely did someone step in, speak up and rally on behalf of the person being threatened in a public setting.
Oprah quotes Ellie Wiesel who has said it isn’t hatred that kills but indifference. Smug?
What good would smug do? I did nothing. Nothing. Until writing. Until now.
SEA GLASS ARTS with Sea Glass Girl 