SECRETS

We were trying to drive home in heavy traffic from the skate park and had been at a standstill just before a road-work merge. No one would let us in, and let’s just say I’m not a shy driver.

A low-slung, beige car crept up behind us and sort of dwindled to a halt in our rear left quarter. When the cars ahead of it started moving again, it just sat there. This could be the hole I needed. I checked my mirror and then did the regrettably athletic thing of the full-body turn to double-check.

Behind us in the beige car was a human who looked like he was on the way to his own funeral.

His mouth was open, as if holding it shut had really ultimately just proven too taxing. He was slumped forward, making it unclear whether this “driver” could actually see over the dash. He was staring with eyelids mostly closed— either straight ahead or at the dashboard, anyone’s guess. Even the clothing suggested having one foot out of this world— a sort of cobwebby noncolored getup. It was Mister Havisham, and on his way down Route 13 in an old Saturn. I’d never seen anything this absurd in the driver’s seat of a car, and I used to drive with parrots dancing to Nirvana on my shoulder.

When you’re trying to get home with hypoglycemic gremlins you take whatever spot on the road is available, whether or not it makes you feel a little weird about taking advantage of the auto-funerary event apparently taking place behind you. I drove on, thankful for the spot among the moving cars, and not inconsiderably concerned about the wellfare of the funeral-goer, wondering who exactly had let this person onto the road. Had that really been a good decision? Should the elderly be retested more often for their drivers’ licenses?

From his car seat, my son suddenly mumbled, exasperated, “old people are terrible drivers.” He was four at the time. We had never talked about good or bad drivers, or people being old for that matter. His life was just a mish-mash of surprising and delightful events with people of all stripes. Also, there was no physical way he could have seen this driver from where he sat.

I asked him where he’d heard that, about old people—who said that?, maybe Daddy, when he was in a hurry, one time? Silence.

I asked him if he’d seen an older person driving and that’s what made him think of it. Silence. He looked a little confused.

Really curious now, and hurrying to get at this nugget of origin before it flew out of his head, I launched a thought-dart with my eyes closed: “Or were you just listening to what was in my head?”

“Yes!, it was in your head,” he said, immediately, confidentially, and matter-of-factly, sounding very relieved that I understood.

*

Yesterday, long story short, I did one of my Ultimate Succumbing moves (Dada’s been traveling) and allowed my children choose a $200 Disney Princess Play Castle at the secondhand children’s store (on sale for $70)— a choice somewhat excused, I felt, by the fact that we’d just been issued $72 of store credit for bringing some of last year’s Desperation Buy items back for resale. (To be fair, the last time my son had an aneurism over an item his soul required in order to stay alive, last week, I held firm, at great personal cost. I am STILL hearing about the $297 “green chandelier with the glorious strands!”)

So anyway, I agree to let them get this six-foot particleboard and plastic monstrosity, on the condition that they put some of their birthday money towards it and STOP PINCHING EACH OTHER, and they agree with the golden brilliance of angel-trumpet blasts, nodding their heads so hard I fear they’re going to bobble right off. “Listen, though, I have no idea how we’re going to get this in the car,” I say, “and we might have to come back when it’s not so full so we can fit—” but they’re already bustling out to the parking lot “to help,” and anything I say will not, cannot, be heard.

There is no way to take the castle apart in any helpful capacity because the previous owner has put a very sturdy, nailed-in, sistering plywood patch over the otherwise screw-out-able paneling, so it’s going to have to go in the car as is. We have a bike with training wheels, a BigWheels plastic rider, a light-up scooter, forty stuffed animals, and our adventure tote in the car already, plus our three selves will have to go in, somehow.

I put the third floor of the castle over my shoulder and heft it out to the car and then I look around like someone about to take a dump on public property. No one is watching. Very well. I set to work as fast as I can. It becomes almost immediately clear that a trunk-based operation is impossible. None of the dimensions are amenable to such standard procedure.

The farmer in me takes over, and with bailing wire and duct tape of the heart, I manage it. The castle ends up threaded across the car, an inch or two in front of the children’s bumper seats, with its top turret hanging six inches out the rear driver’s-side open window and its plywood-reinforced ass hanging out the rear passenger-side open window. (Both front seats are as far forward as they will go, and I’m going to have to drive with my knees bonking the dash. Next to me, on top of the BigWheels, the adventure tote, my purse, a backpack of snacks, the scooter, and a lifejacket I failed to take out last month, are filed the plastic “golden staircases” that first stole my son’s heart.)

I ask the children if they can get in or not. They disappear into the car like minnows and are buckled within seconds. They have never once buckled themselves in under thirty-six minutes, in any weather. I peer in and they are happily, astonishingly folded behind the jury-rigged piece of junk. They are not pinching each other. “OK,” I say to my little outlaws, “we’re just going to go straight home. Hang in.”

The problem with going straight home is that the quickest route is on the main highway, but I don’t want to venture out there because I suddenly feel sure that what I’m doing is illegal, and I also suddenly feel sure that the police are going to come get me for bad parenting and unsafe driving and the general disaster that I am. They’re going to know, in addition to my obvious reckless car-packing, that I let my kids blow $70 of store credit on this hideous trophy of consumerism.

So I embark on a convoluted route, trying to remember all the downtown streets I’ve never seen a cop car on. Yes, this is my brain. There is one heart-pounding moment where I can’t choose between two of the more obvious possible routes, because it seems… somehow just… too easy. It seems like we are sure to be stopped if we do the thing that gets us home with less convolution, with greater ease. But I do end up taking the more obvious road, in the end, despite its frequent police cars, because all the windows are open and the jubilant trolls in the back seat are beginning to complain of the chill (it is 60 degrees). My nervous system clearly doesn’t have room for complaints on top of what’s already happening, so we zoom up the hill towards home.

No one stops us. No one even seems to notice us, with our Cinderella’s castle T-boned across our back seat, two humans somehow folded behind it. I have forgotten, it seems, my basic rule that “no one really cares what I’m doing.”

Getting the thing out of the car is harder than getting it in, and it takes me about twenty minutes to jiggle and prod and ease it out once the kids are inside the house shouting their many preparations. (They are noisily gathering the stuffies for whom this castle is apparently intended, Ratty and Hammy the Hamster, and are preparing them verbally for their “new forever home!”).

I finally get the stupid thing up to their room, sweating, and drop it to go down and make a shitty dinner. They are quiet, as is expected with a new toy, but for far longer than is normal. I let it slide. I don’t want to hear any more voices, any more needs, any more preferences, any more anything, today. I don’t want to know what’s going on and what I’m going to have to clean up.

After dinner, when it is time to go prepare the upstairs for bed, I go up, wondering what I’m about to have to undo. They don’t disappoint.

Sitting neatly next to the castle are two completely sodden stuffed rodents, around whom a dark pool of wetness is spreading onto their pillow, which has apparently been placed here specifically for their convalescence, with two bedroom fans plugged into the wall next to them, running at just the right angle “to dry them.”

I recognize the work of my daughter immediately. The orderliness of the sopped creatures, their parallel alignment upon the pillow, the exact trajectory and intended function of the fans, the smell of soap— she loves soap; the ultimate and obvious dignity of the whole operation. It is impossible to reprimand a child who has been this attentive and efficacious on behalf of her fellow sentients.

When I inquire about Ratty and Hammy, she looks bright, jewel-like, but ever-so-slightly worried. She is aware that bathing stuffed animals is frowned upon, which is why no announcement of the quiet activity was ever made. She says, in her most bell-like tone, “don’t worry! I set them up to dry nicely.”

“Mom, they were FILTHY,” her brother adds. “We did such a nice job. Now they’re ready for their forever home.”

*

I had the thought the other day that we should really have the explicit “we don’t have secrets with anyone who’s not Mommy or Daddy” conversation with our kids, just as a matter of course in an often-horrible world— a way to try and safeguard against forms of predation by wounded adults. I don’t know why this came into my head; I can’t remember the train of thought that brought me there; I made note of it and moved on to the next flow of thought— words, images, feelings, whatever happens when I’m driving, which often ends up being crucial to something I’m working on.

Two minutes later, though my kids had just been arguing and hitting each other in the back seat, mingled with a fragmented approach to singing along to Frozen II, my son announced, out of absolutely nowhere, “Mom. I do NOT have secrets with anyone except Mommy or Daddy or Sister.”

Sister agreed enthusiastically, as if she were an audience plant.

By now I’m kind of less surprised, and more amazed. “That’s right,” I said.

I guess they’re just going to download certain things straight to the hard drive.

*

Beside the giant blue beanbag in the dining room (next to the bicycle, three guitars, a life jacket—??—, some records, and a busted 1960s ride-on tractor named PeckaPecka), I found a little plastic case of spearmint gum yesterday while cleaning. (You would never know that I clean, but I do, most of the time.)

The lid was open, and most of the probably 50 or so pieces had been chewed. This made sense of the abrupt auditory patterning I’ve been hearing for the past few evenings, where the kids are watching a movie or show while I hide and eat cheese in the kitchen, and I hear THUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMP — paaaauuuuuuuse— rattle rattle— THUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMP back to the TV room.

Apparently I’d gotten one of them a canister of gum as a peace offering or meltdown evasion technique this week and forgotten about it, as I am wont to do the second the hellfire has passed, and they were making hay while the sun of my repression amnesia shone. Free gum for everyone, every night! No meddling! No disapproval! Sweet chewy spearmint, right where I left it! Come on by the blue beanbag! Open access! Sugary sensations, at my fingertips! AGENCY PLUS PLEASURE EQUALS BLISS.

*

I’ve been reflecting on the nature of secrets. And of course, there is no one type of secret. Many tend towards causing harm, whether they’re the kind we hold internally, from ourselves, or interpersonally. I’ve generally held them in a kind of contempt, and dismissed them as bad actors for this reason.

But I’ve had a growing sense lately that secrets might also be like an underground river that orients us towards an ocean of sorts— they might signal a little ribbon of knowing, moving through us, that propels us towards a greater, deeper truth of self.

The difference between these two kinds of secrets might be expressed as those formed by fear of censure or punishment by others on the one hand and those formed by a type of integrity on the other— a kind of dignity and pleasure in the unknown or lesser-known self. And I think sometimes these two origins coincide, dovetail, which is a little unfortunate, because I think it leaves us assuming, passively, that our secrets are probably somehow all bad.

It can take the exhaustion of parenthood, the humbling of middle age, and the loneliness of the contemporary adult, in combination, to reveal the potential goldmine of self and experience that our secrets just might signal— even the ones that seem sort of problematic or ignoble or dark or embarrassing, at first.

*

When gazed at by an owl, particularly a Barred Owl (I’ve had lots of occasion for this, long story, but basically I’m an owl groupie), I have often had the thought, “well, if I had any secrets, I don’t anymore.” There’s a way in which the occasional sublimity of the natural world can interrupt our habitual patterns of obfuscation, from ourselves and others, whether those moves to dissemble are active connivance or simply sad, busy little assumptions that whatever we’re up to is somehow lousy.

In the case of driving home from the skate park and having a pint-sized mind-reader speak back to me my ageist judgment of the corpse driver, or in the case of pondering the necessity for a conversation on secrets and having it laid out for me from the back seat without any conversation at all, it wasn’t so much that I was keeping a secret from my children as that I was tolerating the background chatter of my mind and dismissing it as a matter of course.

A couple important things were obscured in those moments, before my preschool oracle piped up from his car seat: 1) the fact that our minds communicate with each other all the time nonverbally in ways we can’t understand or anticipate, which is cause for wonderment and annihilates the concept of the secret entirely; and 2) what was going on in my background chatter was actually not only harmless but also sometimes pretty important or kind of hilarious. Those are a couple of things worth knowing.

When it came to the Princess Castle (which they’re now calling “The Manor” and have added some glue and glitter to in strategic locations), my active assumption was that I’m an idiot. Specifically, the variety of idiot who drives with a castle puncturing the belly of her car across the laps of her children. All for what?— More junk in the house. It seemed so imperative to me to conceal this ungainly reality that I felt it necessary to wander back roads holding my breath while my children were slowly crushed by the particleboard of their dreams.

But my “secret” here, impaled by Disney toy, is once again no secret at all: our predicament was clearly visible to anyone who cared to look at us driving by. And perhaps most importantly, the sense I had of the imperative to conceal took from me many values, many underground streams inside who I am that actually speak of goodness, and pleasure, and generosity: a desire to move with the imagination and passion of my kids, a crazy-ass skill with packing things into cars, and a general gameness that makes life… well, fun.

When the kids were bathing Ratty and Hammy, making a sodden, matted mess of the upstairs and a whole heap of blankets and pillows, their quiet was their signal to themselves and to me that they understood there was a probably-unacceptable cost to their joy. They did it anyway.

This could be called “naughty,” and their activity could be seen as a basic garden-variety bad-behavior secret. But I think what the concealment here was actually doing, more relevantly than delaying my consternation and grumpiness, was protecting joy.

It’s not much of a leap from there for me to appreciate, to value, my kids’ sneakiness with the canister of wintergreen gum “hidden” between the blue beanbag and the exercise bike: it is dawning on me, day by day lately, that covert behavior often serves to protect and fortify a self with a mind and heart of its own.

So the next time you find yourself getting squirrely, secretive, ask yourself a few questions. Try asking, “what is the noble or generous thing trying to happen behind all the smoke and mirrors?”

Try asking, “what self is trying to teach me it belongs, though I haven’t quite let it?”

Try asking this: “who would I be if I embraced more than I denied?”

I begin to suspect the world wouldn’t fall apart. I begin to believe it might just come together.

Photo credit: allaboutbirds.org