A Collection of Tears
The 14-year-old said to the 19-year-old, “What if there were teacup koalas?” And at just the thought of it, the 19-year-old’s eyes brimmed with tears. They were tears for the hitherto unimagined mixture of cuteness, and the sudden desire for, and the total non-existence of the species in equal proportion. And tears because she wanted to hold a tiny koala up next to her cheek so badly; tears because she never could.
Then she said this actual sentence: “Teacup Koalas love to hug. Because koalas hug their branches.” I looked straight into her eyes that glistened with tears of longing and sparkled with her unbridled imagination. I was so delighted by this conversation that engagement was a must. “Do you mean that they hug their branches so that they don’t fall off the trees?”
But she was undeterred. This one fights me. She jutted her lip, she deadpanned:
“No, because they like to hug.” Then in the natural parlance of teenage frustration: “MOM.”
***
The doorbell rings again and it’s always UPS. These days I have the perfect blip of hesitation down, a timing to where the delivery guy is almost back at his truck but not quite, and then I unfurl the door wide to grab my package. I let the 30 degree wind rush over my pajamas and cleanse me. And I yell to him “Thank you!” with a big smile and a big wave and… an unexpected assembly of tears in my eyes. One tear from the cold, one from my heart, and one for the look he gives me back, when I call out to him. He turns and pauses, his smile is so genuine, his “You’re welcome” full of warmth.
We are starved for human interaction. For the niceties within those pauses, those smiles. We are also just nicer.
***
When that 19-year-old was a little girl she would say the word “grave” for “brave.” And she would use it with the most intent self-confidence and solemnity that I could only agree, “Yes, I will be grave,” instead of ever correcting her. I loved it so much.
(She also said “grecording” for “recording” but that was later, and due to some seriously invasive orthodontia, and so hilarious that it still makes us laugh.)
One time, as a toddler, walking in new flip-flops (and I’m going to venture out and say that they were her very first flip flops because I remember the way she determinedly clasped her toes to the plastic strap to balance), she was moving like a geisha. Tiny steps in a slow trickle of water in the gutter in front of our bungalow on Emerson. It was another summer afternoon that went on forever, and another summer sundress, and another beautiful vignette of motherhood and our life, in the towering shade of an oak tree so colossal that its roots upset the sidewalk.
Her mouth was pursed in concentration, tight like a new red bud, and it was such frivolity met with such serious expectation of herself that I could only encourage with a slow walk beside her, in flip flops of my own, and a grave (the real kind of grave) nodding of my head if she looked up for help.
“Are you proud of me for being grave?” She asked.
I was.
***
This happens every time we are stuck in the house together with stretches of nothing to do: a poem is procured and after it’s memorized, a cash prize is given. And by “a” poem, I mean one specific poem, and it’s my husband’s favorite. The kids try; they sometimes succeed. But for the easily frustrated it will lead to crying, this part is preordained.
The nine-year-old is by me, trying to learn the stanzas even as I wish he would learn a different poem (Something more pure! Something less credo!), but he’s really going for it. I follow along with the words behind him and while I sit and listen, I affect an act of his, which is strange and unprecedented: I throw, over and over, his football into the air above me, bobbling the ball but catching it. I am listening; I am throwing; I’m rewriting thoughts in my mind and thinking of Ada Limon instead of Rudyard Kipling.
IF. (Oh, if.)
Suddenly, my little guy grabs the football mid-air and brings it to his chest, crashing into me while tears begin to fall. His head burrows into my belly. He cries all over my hands. They are literally wet with his tears.
He’s crying because he can’t remember the words and he thinks his 16-year-old brother is laughing at him. He isn’t.
16-year-old insists: “I am impressed. I’ll never even try that. I hate memorizing.”
I agree with the 16-year-old. I too hate memorizing. Moreover, something inside of me rebuffs internally at the very idea of pressing anything so permanently on me. Give me wishy-washy, give me impermanence, give me the glory of the metaphor, the adjective of the second.
Anyway. He’s crying probably/mostly because sometimes you just need to cry. Especially right now.
It’s ok. I want to tell him: Be grave and cry. But I don’t say anything at all. I just touch the top of his head over and over. I bless him with his own tears, still hot in my palms.
***
Let’s go back to the pajamas I wear onto the porch and sometimes all day. They are vintage April Cornell, so, you know… really sweet. A white Swiss dot with puff sleeves and gentle pleats and four dainty buttons lined up along the front placket. At this point of sequestered aloneness, my husband finds them sexy because they are slightly sheer. I find them appropriate because I feel like they are from another time, a time of wholesome basics, when we were pioneers who kept the home fires burning by churning butter and raking chalk on slates and this innocence suits me somehow—a little Brooke on the Prairie.
My bravery has been both bold and small, and it is discovered, often, in the very doing of the very next thing in front of me, simple as it may be. I “do” when I feel out of control. And sometimes when I stop, the sudden inaction almost makes me cry, tears gathering in the corners uninvited. Again. “Why are you all here?” is what I think, “I am fine.” But I know what it is—it’s the stillness of all of this, the sitting with it.
If only it would all go away; if only; if if if…
In the meantime, we gather our courage in these moments of tears, we are brave.
And…
Think about Teacup Koalas.
CUZ TEACUP KOALAS.
