HAIL WEIRDO WELL MET

Yesterday something strange happened. One minute I was grumping around about the espresso machine (how it has become more of a tired, leaky urinary tract situation than intimidating caffeine demon situation) and the next, I was clobbered by the desire to paint a bird.

I’m not talking “oh wouldn’t it be nice if” or “who wants to play chalk”; I’m talking WHERE IN GOD’S NAME IS THE NON CRAYOLA PAINT. I’m talking falling over several large and dangerous items in the basement (including a disembodied sailboat galley table and the skeletal remains of a shop vac—neither of which, I would have you know, stands as stably as it pretends to) to look for a small brass travel watercolor kit among the years of dust and the many poops of mice.

I’m talking wandering the halls of the upstairs gazing abstractedly into offices and bedrooms wondering which bookshelf has swallowed the pad of watercolor paper that I would have bet a block of my favorite cheese still existed SOMEWHERE. (I did not find it. As such, the project, which had sufficient momentum to get me to paint on the back of a parking ticket if necessary, moved forward on paper from one of the children’s crayon pads.) I’m talking doing all of this with half-pint-sized humans trailing me, looking diffusely disappointed and sounding acutely affronted that I wasn’t interested in the distinction between the sliced cucumbers I’d provided and the whole mini-cucumbers of their hearts.

Sometimes I go for these stumbling wanders, with a far-off wish in mind, and must content myself with the feeling of having begun the process at all, the knowledge that I tried—because someone has accidentally peed on the floor a little, or needs urgent help affixing a spatula to a model Ford 8N tractor with a chip-clip. That has been the past five years: pretty much any art project is a dream, a wine tasted and spit out so I can keep driving the rest of the soused crew. I have been a serviceable but crotchety DD for what feels like centuries.

And yesterday, I got wasted. Plastered on whatever chemicals hit my brain when a project starts in earnest and I know I won’t eat or move until it’s done. I think it’s finally “happened,” that my kids have gotten “old enough” for me to “do” some of the things which, though I cannot tell you why, bring me such joy that my ardent silence is occasionally punctuated by laughter.

I was talking to my hairdresser while I “got my hairs did” (as I once heard a writer from Texas say), and she told me, with a sort of confidential tone, that she really enjoyed hiding in her house to scare her husband, which immediately made me respect her even more. No— she confessed, in a burbling gush, that hiding in her home “brings [her] such joy.” I could see it in her eyes, the fervency. Takes one to know one. Hail, weirdo, well met. I HAD TO PAINT A BIRD.

How did my children fare? I believe one of them mostly watched a YouTube channel of tractors plowing, effusing in broken but verbally rich narratives from a wildly careening swing-hammock we put up in front of the television for this purpose; I know the other did some painting alongside me, wondering if she might add a “nice orange balloon” to what I was doing, for which I thanked her, I hope nicely, and then provided a distraction from the idea, again, I hope nicely. I was even able to behave myself enough to stop to do things like help someone with the potty and get some snacks arranged and assist with block cleanup and prepare them for a trip to the grocery store.

But my mind was really only on the bird, and the fact that watercolors appreciate some down-time between passes made it possible to withdraw for a few minutes now and then without severing the lifelines I’d just set up to my desperate being, which was now gobbling the project like stew after a five-winter starve.

I was mildly but irritatingly concerned that I was failing my family. I’m still a little worried that my daughter was deeply aware that her mother, though curiously still visible, was on Planet Xylon until noon. It’s frustrating to know that another person is there, but not, and I don’t especially relish “doing that” “to” her.

But here’s what I hope she also got to know: that 1) there are some activities, particularly creating, that are worth complete and rapturous attention; 2) her mother, though devoted, has a set of internal imperatives that are her own, and the Venn diagram of Her Desires and My Desires will occasionally spread past “stack of tiddlywinks” formation; 3) she will survive, and thrive, past the moments when Mom goes intergalactic, in part because she is a far more capable human than she thinks, and in part because there are two other people in the house who love her and would probably help pull her out of the heating vent if she fell in.

Mostly what I’m aware of, though, is that after I finished the bird and put it somewhere up high, out of pasta-sauce smear-zone, and went off to my hair appointment while the grandparents served as DD, and came back, I suddenly really, really needed to see the bird. Where had I put him?

I watched myself hurry around like I was looking for a lost baby, almost before I’d put the groceries down. It was like there was another person in the house I needed to touch in with, check up on, take a second to toss out a gutsy, relieved “hail, weirdo!” to.

I found him.

Here was this evidence of a thing which, though riddled with questions and doubt from the family structures that pull at us, and have every right to, nonetheless speaks a thing about me over which I have no control, like my hairdresser’s glee when she hides— it just is. It not only sparks joy but feeds identity. It animates me. It puts me more fully in my experience.

Surely that will also make me a better and less grumpy mother in the long run. It’s part of who I am. And if we’re going get through this life without becoming cynical and resentful, I suppose we’re going to need a “diversified portfolio” of sorts. Visiting this part of me, with enough protectiveness to get it through to the hatching intact, resuscitated something which, if I’m in it for the long haul, is going to need my love.