Back when I was significantly younger with longer legs and fewer stretch marks etc etc than I have now, I had a kind, clever, and funny friend with a crush on me. I adored him, and we spent a lot of time together, but I didn't reciprocate the crush, and, being an extremely decent and restrained human being, he very seldom pushed the issue. He did, however, take me out to dinner for my birthday, and gave me a necklace he had made. On strictly aesthetic grounds, it did not rate highly: it was a small sand-dollar, painted in garish red and yellow acrylic paint, with a paperclip hot-glue-gunned on to the back through which a string was threaded - a competent kindergartener could just about have pulled it off - but it had a very sweet and personal message written on the back in ballpoint pen, and I have treasured it for the last nearly 20 years. Part of my attachment I think comes from pride that I have been at least once in my lifetime capable of inciting open adoration in such an extremely worthwhile human being, and the other half of my attachment to the necklace is penance for how callously I ultimately treated his feelings. (I have since apologized, and he - now happily married with children, still a spectacular person and a once-a-year friend - has forgiven, but I still squirm with horrible shame when I think about him). I planned to keep it in my jewelry box forever.
Beach mementos painted in bright colours, however, are kryptonite for four year olds, and tonight I went into my daughter's bedroom for nightly story-plus-cuddle and discovered the necklace smashed into red and yellow dust on the floor. I said, "Oh, no, no, no, my necklace, no" and started to cry, triggering howling guilty sobs from my daughter, who wanted to be comforted and told it was OK (which is what I usually say when things get broken), but of course it wasn't at all OK and I couldn't get myself together to pretend it was. Ultimately we had a reconciliation of sorts, albeit an unsatisfactory one: I took her on my knee and cuddled her and told her how sad I was about the necklace, and that it would really help me if she could tell me that she was sorry, and she tried very hard to put the blame on a friend who'd been over to play earlier, but ultimately did apologize, and then we read stories together and she tried to be silly to cheer me up, and I said that I wasn't quite ready to be silly yet because I was still feeling sad about my necklace, and then she started to sniff and asked for a hug and then she fell asleep as I cuddled her. She will wake up tomorrow having forgotten all about it, and I will absorb the hurt because she is the present and the future whereas the necklace was and is now past, (and besides, just now there is another extremely worthwhile man who inexplicably openly adores me) but right at this moment it just really hurts, and I can't bear to look at the pile of smashed sand-dollar bits on the kitchen counter.
The point of which is to say: very soon I will remember to be grateful for what I do have, and I am really, really sorry if I ever broke anything of yours - literal or metaphorical - that you minded about.
Thursday 12 November 2015
Monday 17 August 2015
Diaries so awful they will give you insomnia
There is a rite of passage that happens sooner or later to those of lucky enough to have had a happy, stable upbringing, which is that the doting parents who have until now been lovingly hoarding all your precious childhood treasures for you suddenly decide that they are sick of living with a basement/attic full of your crap, become fractionally less loving, and issue an ultimatum for you to clear out your stuff already. My sister is in the enviable position of having actually semi-useful/valuable childhood crap (several dozen antique 78's, well-ordered files of sheet music, etc.), but over the last week I have come to suspect that I might have been better served actually saving scatological samples over what I did save, which was every journal I have ever kept, starting at age eleven.
The Moth Radio Hour has a program where people can come on and read bits of their adolescent diaries out loud, and some of them are pretty excruciating, but rereading mine (I am up to age 14 at this point) has been a descent into self-loathing I wouldn't have dreamed possible. Very occasionally my 1986 cluelessness will evoke a twinge of sympathy in my 2015 self ("I wonder what I will be like when I am old? Will I have kids? Who will I be married to?"), but generally I am completely horrified by what a bumptious, self-important, boring little turd I was. Is this normal? I have met some pretty awful preteens and teens, but (perverse shades of my former narcissism still persist, apparently) I am fairly sure I was more horrible than all of them. I originally kept the diaries because I was sure they were full of deep truths, and then that eventually morphed into a more realistic "they'll help me remember what happened," which after I had actually become a mother myself turned into, "well, they'll be a good laugh for her when the time comes," and now I think the only conceivable use they could possibly have AT ALL is to keep me honest and humble once my own child turns disgusting. Assuming she emerges in one piece from her own adolescence, then I'll be allowed to get rid of them.
I can't quite stand to post any of the more egregiously self-obsessed preening entries, but here's a little glimpse, written just before my twelfth birthday:
"August 30th, Dear Eleanor [after Eleanor of Aquitaine, an obsession between age 7-12ish]:
D. was laughing at me because I told her that I wanted it to snow eight inches on the morning of my birthday party. I would wake up around nine, to a beautiful crystal world made, it seems, especially for me. The snow would be deep, but early in the morning the little dew-fairies [please bear in mind that I have been menstruating for 6 months at this point] would clear away the snow from the raods, the early morning sun flashing on their silver wing tips. No, I think i would rather wake up, say, at sevenish to see all the fairies shoveling the snow in the pale glow of the winter sunrise. Lovely! For some obscure reason I was the first person in the Seattle area, so I would be the very first to witness it. Then either a bubble or a white cloud [...] would drift through an open window lift me up and I would float, shimmering, a few feet above the ground. Then a whole team of snow-white does and stags with bells on would come out and stamp about, and wake up everyone.
"August 31st. New School Year Resolutions: I will practice my clarinet at least four times a week. I will not put off homework. I will work UNNATURALLY hard at social studies, language and maths. I will write in this journal once a day, probably in bed. I will not "stuff" my locker with old school work, but instead have a folder to put everything in. I will "keep up my physical appearance," i.e. not pick my nose, wear earrings every day, shower every evening, etc. etc. I will not say silly things that I will later regret, and I will not lie. If I buy cookies, I will pay out of my own money. I will try my very hardest to keep ALL of these resolutions. When I get my new diary I will not tear the pages out of it."
There follows about twenty pages of obsessing about whether Giles Sydnor did or did not have any idea who I was and why doesn't he ever look at me and we used to be "really close" (by which I meant that we sat next to each other in art class for a term, arm-wrestled when the teacher wasn't looking, passed notes under the table for a few weeks, and he once lent me his MAD magazine). I really really wish I could have played a video tape for my poor deluded 11-year-old self of the moment 20 or so years later that I discovered that the captain/host of the tugboat tour/party I was attending with some friends was none other than the Man Himself (by then a magnificently successful techie who had taken youthful retirement to concentrate on his boat fetish). I blushed to the roots of my hair and confessed to a life-threatening junior-high-school length crush on him, to which he replied, "That's funny. What's your name again?" Just think of all the time, paper, and biro ink I could saved myself. Oh, well.
The Moth Radio Hour has a program where people can come on and read bits of their adolescent diaries out loud, and some of them are pretty excruciating, but rereading mine (I am up to age 14 at this point) has been a descent into self-loathing I wouldn't have dreamed possible. Very occasionally my 1986 cluelessness will evoke a twinge of sympathy in my 2015 self ("I wonder what I will be like when I am old? Will I have kids? Who will I be married to?"), but generally I am completely horrified by what a bumptious, self-important, boring little turd I was. Is this normal? I have met some pretty awful preteens and teens, but (perverse shades of my former narcissism still persist, apparently) I am fairly sure I was more horrible than all of them. I originally kept the diaries because I was sure they were full of deep truths, and then that eventually morphed into a more realistic "they'll help me remember what happened," which after I had actually become a mother myself turned into, "well, they'll be a good laugh for her when the time comes," and now I think the only conceivable use they could possibly have AT ALL is to keep me honest and humble once my own child turns disgusting. Assuming she emerges in one piece from her own adolescence, then I'll be allowed to get rid of them.
I can't quite stand to post any of the more egregiously self-obsessed preening entries, but here's a little glimpse, written just before my twelfth birthday:
"August 30th, Dear Eleanor [after Eleanor of Aquitaine, an obsession between age 7-12ish]:
D. was laughing at me because I told her that I wanted it to snow eight inches on the morning of my birthday party. I would wake up around nine, to a beautiful crystal world made, it seems, especially for me. The snow would be deep, but early in the morning the little dew-fairies [please bear in mind that I have been menstruating for 6 months at this point] would clear away the snow from the raods, the early morning sun flashing on their silver wing tips. No, I think i would rather wake up, say, at sevenish to see all the fairies shoveling the snow in the pale glow of the winter sunrise. Lovely! For some obscure reason I was the first person in the Seattle area, so I would be the very first to witness it. Then either a bubble or a white cloud [...] would drift through an open window lift me up and I would float, shimmering, a few feet above the ground. Then a whole team of snow-white does and stags with bells on would come out and stamp about, and wake up everyone.
"August 31st. New School Year Resolutions: I will practice my clarinet at least four times a week. I will not put off homework. I will work UNNATURALLY hard at social studies, language and maths. I will write in this journal once a day, probably in bed. I will not "stuff" my locker with old school work, but instead have a folder to put everything in. I will "keep up my physical appearance," i.e. not pick my nose, wear earrings every day, shower every evening, etc. etc. I will not say silly things that I will later regret, and I will not lie. If I buy cookies, I will pay out of my own money. I will try my very hardest to keep ALL of these resolutions. When I get my new diary I will not tear the pages out of it."
There follows about twenty pages of obsessing about whether Giles Sydnor did or did not have any idea who I was and why doesn't he ever look at me and we used to be "really close" (by which I meant that we sat next to each other in art class for a term, arm-wrestled when the teacher wasn't looking, passed notes under the table for a few weeks, and he once lent me his MAD magazine). I really really wish I could have played a video tape for my poor deluded 11-year-old self of the moment 20 or so years later that I discovered that the captain/host of the tugboat tour/party I was attending with some friends was none other than the Man Himself (by then a magnificently successful techie who had taken youthful retirement to concentrate on his boat fetish). I blushed to the roots of my hair and confessed to a life-threatening junior-high-school length crush on him, to which he replied, "That's funny. What's your name again?" Just think of all the time, paper, and biro ink I could saved myself. Oh, well.
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