This is the world I let be created. They know this. They blame me for it. They are right. Also, would you like dinner? What movie should we watch?
By Carvell Wallace
Published June 15, 2020Updated June 21, 2020
Before I saw them silhouetted by the fog of tear gas and the light of police helicopters, back when the crisis we were in meant that our world was uncomfortably quiet rather than uncomfortably loud, my teenagers and I were in need of things to do.
The options were limited. There is a pandemic. I could not take them to the mall or drop them off at a friend’s house, from which they would go to a movie and wander around downtown having all kinds of experiences I would never know about unless one of them went horribly wrong. I could not take them to a museum and listen to them complain about how boring everything was, right up until they became obsessed with an exhibit they couldn’t stop talking about in the overpriced cafe. The world was closed to us. We had only the living room, the inside of a car and a nebulous place known as “outside.” [...]
With the world closed, we had to search further. I piled them into the car to go for “drives.” Often I would have no idea where we were going until we were halfway there. A teacher in my college theater program, a director, once told me that when she was struggling in a rehearsal she would sit in the last row of the theater and announce: “I have an idea.” She would then begin a long, slow walk toward the stage, and by the time she got there, she’d better have had an idea. It wasn’t until I had kids that I understood this. We have visited beaches, forests, brackish inlets where seals bob and cranes perch. We have driven to the campuses of colleges my daughter wants to attend, to find halls emptied and coyotes roaming free through the parking lots. We have driven to the edge of the land in overwhelmingly white Marin County, where a parks official told us we had to go back to Oakland because they didn’t want our germs there.
Because we are Californians, most of our important conversations happen in a car. Maybe we don’t know how to talk meaningfully without the crutch of parallel gazes, a shared view on the world passing outside. I used to think we were all seeing the same thing on those rides, but my son once showed me a video he had shot from the back seat, and I was startled to see myself in the rearview mirror — I looked so severe, so lost in dark thought, even as we were, in my mind, enjoying a chill Sunday drive through the empty city. I realized in that moment that I had almost no idea what my son saw when he looked at the world.
My children were 13 and 11 at the time of the 2016 election, and it was in the car, the morning after, that they asked me what had happened. I didn’t know exactly what to tell them. I have an unfortunate need to explain everything as completely as possible, to offer them the grandest view; I worry it is too much for them, but they are stuck with the father they got. So I thought about it for a long time — as long as it took to get to the freeway and past the first two exits, the gas station, the temple, the curve where I once saw a car spin out late at night, barely missing me at 70 miles per hour. That night I kept driving, and another car seemed to stop to help — or at least I decided it did as I continued into the darkness, my heart still in my throat.
Finally I told my children that one of the most important questions you have to answer for yourself is this: Do I believe in loving everyone? Or do I only believe in loving myself and my people? I told them that their mother and I had each decided, at some point in our lives, that we believed in trying to love everyone. But there were some people who simply did not believe in loving everyone, and that was just the way it was. I told them that their mother and I had made our choices, but we could not decide for them what kind of people they would be: They had to decide for themselves.
They were quiet. Maybe this was a pivotal moment in their young lives; I wanted to think it was. But maybe they tuned out after 30 seconds, letting their thoughts wander to things more present and graspable, like what I’d packed in their lunchboxes. [...]
She found a perch on the top of the hill to sit in the sun, fashioning the blanket around her legs to protect herself from the wind. Sometimes my daughter resents being dragged along on hikes. Her resistance is mostly good-spirited, a quick eye roll, but every once in a while she hits within herself an obstinance that borders on the self-destructive. She tells me she’d rather sit alone in a parking lot than walk with us along a trail, or that she’s going to call her mother, who is an hour away, to pick her up because she doesn’t want to wait for 30 minutes. In these moments she has a kind of scorched-earth policy on airing her grievances. She will, in the knifelike and breakneck style of a 14-year-old, tell me I always have to be right, tell her mother she’s manipulative and passive aggressive, tell all of us she doesn’t care about our feelings. It hurts in a way that little else does. Later she will apologize. Later we can have an honest, gentle talk about these feelings. Her wisdom in those talks leaves me speechless, just as her sudden nihilism sometimes terrifies me and leaves me shattered.
My son and I ventured downhill, watching the grasses blow in waves like green velvet. He talked to me about his relationship. He had questions about what to do with another person’s feelings. I started by trying to tell him what I know, which I quickly realized was not much. So I ended up telling him what I don’t know, what I struggle with — how much time I’ve spent trying to control what others think of me, or treating every opportunity at intimacy as though it were life or death. I told him how I did not know how to love myself, so I looked to other people to love me. And how rarely that worked.
via {ny times}
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