The House on Margate Street

I recently listened to the incomparable Sandra Cisneros on the radio reading from her groundbreaking work The House on Mango Street, celebrating its birthday (was it 30 years? and how can that be?). I've been thinking a lot lately about the piece in which she says that what no one tells you is that when you turn eleven you are also still ten and nine and eight and ... well, you know, right?

I'm going to come right out and admit it. My take? What's been on my mind? Greedy stuff, and I don't try to equate myself with Sandra Cisneros when I say it, because that would really shameful. But here's the thing: What no one tells you is that when you are a mother, you are still a daughter, a granddaughter, a child, a needy baby. When you are a mother, you still get angry, hurt, or sullen sometimes, and you still want to cry, want someone to kiss the place that hurts to make it better, sometimes you still want to climb in bed and hug your pillow and wait until someone comes to rub your back to make it better. Now, none of those childhood comforts ever actually happened to me. I didn't have that kind of childhood. But yet since I'm still "eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one," that means I'm still wanting, still yearning those childhood yearnings, even when I'm supposed to be on the other side.

Sometimes my son needs me to take care of him through a very rough patch, and although he's almost five, he's also four and three and two and one (plus there's the whole autism thing), and he does things he should not do, things he ought to know better than to do, and I know it, and yet... and yet... and yet... it's so hard to find my 37 year old grownup, when I too am four and three and two and one, and it feels like through his behaviors he's torn down my towers, broken my doll, pushed me in the mud. Sometimes I feel the childish urge to push him back, to take away his toys, to call him names, to sob, "That's not fair."

Today, I felt so hopelessly infantile as I tried to mother, that I picked up my phone and pushed the speed dial for my own mom. It was the only childish thing I could think of to do that would cause no harm. And when her line was busy, and when I began to cry with longing for my grandmother, with wanting to be the recipient instead of the provider, I thought, surely, when there is no other choice, I will pull it together? I will age up? I will mother. I was sitting on the floor, thinking this, trying to breathe, wanting to rise.

Then it hit me: I could call my husband's parents.
Yes, that small I am. I did.
I said, "This is what the rooster just did, and these are the things I thought about doing, and since I know all of those things are wrong, I thought I could call you, and just talk in the space in which I might have collapsed, and this will keep me accountable, and maybe minutes will pass, and then I will be able to keep it together and be the grownup again."

When I was ten, I needed my thick striped diary with the flimsy brassy key. I needed it to escape my home, and in it I wrote copious plans for my future. I outlined my grievances and charted my course for righting their wrongs one day. "I will NEVER this and that... when I'M a grownup, when MY kids are sad...."

And now I'm 37, with a blog reflecting my layers of immaturity, my juvenile self-centeredness, my black-and-white and wrong-and-right, and me me me. And thank goodness at least I have it, because what might I do if I didn't?

Today I'm 37, going on maybe seven or eight. Today I sat my sadness on my elbow, and watched as my street, an M street too, filled with other families hunting Easter eggs, laughing, smiling, no one fighting or worried, ten million miles away and foreign and yet just outside my window. I am sorry I am so small today, so small and so greedy.