Notable American Women (17 page)

It is not that I presumed the girls' water we used as his infant formula would counteract these predictable, unsatisfactory instincts (protect the head, breathe, eat, grab warm bodies, and nuzzle their flesh). For all of its power, girls' water cannot prevent basic animal responses to threats or hunger, however boring these predicaments have proved to be. As you may have noted from your observation tower, I have stood outside under the flood of evening birds, who circle the emotion furnace and feed on the behavior smoke, and I have consumed great amounts of water, with the hope of generating an ideal learning fluid for the boy, which would save him from the terrible guesswork of life among people. He drinks it and he smiles, but nothing is learned; he swallows no instructions. Ben still sits at the window and sings his warble, runs after the birds with his little arms waving as though he controls them with string. I am trying to discourage his sense that he can influence the life around him, that he is responsible for something that is already occurring. Part of my approach here is the institution of a Powerlessness Emphasis Program. For about an hour each day that Ben is charged to me, I take him around the house and point out things he was not responsible for, mostly tables, chairs, beds, walls, other people. I have lately also been scheduling a stop at the mirror by the bathroom, allowing Ben to discover how unremarkable his features are, to educate him on the basic disappointments of the face. When the light is right, I drop his pants and we consider how crushed and matted his hips appear, how his penis looks like an entire person smushed into a wrinkle, his buttocks like the flattened head of a seal.

My problem: Parenthood should not feel like charity. Ben is proving special in the wrong way. My soft spot for cretins is bone-hard.

I am nevertheless disappointed to see Ben's contract with poor performance so quickly fulfilled, his apparently easy assimilation to other people and their average theater of disappointments, despite our best efforts to originalize him.

My concern: by publicizing his “insecurity” (your words), Ben boasts of a future failure and creates a zone of foreshadowing around his head, indicating his Kill Spot, akin to wearing a bull's-eye. I read the papers enough to know that failure is the trend for young people today, but it does not compel me, and I'll be curious to watch its enticements fade as success and survival regain prominence as the coveted actions for persons, and others, of our time. A sort of glory is lately attached to coming up short, then articulating the inadequacy, soliciting blame with the same fervor our generation sought to deny it, as though verbal eloquence can overwhelm incompetence. But I say let the other American children fail and brag of failure, whether through song or verse, even exaggerating the various ways they have become terribly weak people of the Current Moment, a regime where the word “person” now equals “loss,” where to breathe is to inhale remorse. Error is a dead end. Modesty is the most arrogant stance of all. Our boy will continue to operate in secret, beyond the behavior fads, and his debut will revise what has heretofore been thought possible in the scope of actions that a person can produce. I believe this.

Do I care how arrogant this sounds? I do not. Am I worried that my ambitions for him are not his ambitions for himself? I am not. Left to his own devices, Ben would have no devices. Left alone, he would be alone. The history of behavior has borne this out. No more equivocating. My role is to optimize him, to medicate his trajectory, to fuel the launch. “To mother:” a verb suggesting special, strategic assistance, a tactic of person making. Mothering is the science of waking up. Bestowing behaviors on others. Mothering.

So how will he do it? At the least, Ben should be outfitted with a decoy weakness, an area some distance from his head, that he nurses with care. This is an old-fashioned idea, but one that we have apparently overlooked in all of our quests for newness. I am not suggesting a garden—civilization should quit its relentless tilling of the earth before it digs its way to hell; it is presumptuous the way people attempt to enhance or alter vegetal life, while in the end they only interfere with something they don't understand (fatherhood, according to my father, is to modulate interference, to ration intervention, like management with a whip). Instead, why not a living creature who can die before Ben does, to give Ben a sample of recoverable loss, just to widen his arc of grief before his emotions are finally cleansed? But who or what should this living creature be? Who or what? Who or what? Do any candidates come to mind that we can sacrifice to Ben's advancement? A loved one? A formerly loved one? A despised one who thinks he's a loved one? Think! Presuming your own selfishness still obtains (which isn't even a presumption, but a rational prediction based on all of your past behavior), and you refuse to completely and finally donate your own person for this project, we might consider accessorizing Ben with a dog or a child, a side-car diversion to give his potential attackers real blood to shed and to let Ben fail at something grave—the upkeep of another life—without dying himself, though we should be careful not to fetishize his survival above more spectacular behavioral gains. Let's not presume that he needs to live to be considered a successful young man. Survival for its own sake can tend to feel so obvious, so plainly desperate.

A short diagnosis of Ben's condition: Afraid of One's Own Motion, Afraid of Hands, Scared to Breathe, Walking Fear, Repulsion Toward Food, Fear of Clouds, Water Phobia, Nauseated by Sound, Allergic to Objects, Allergic to People, Allergic to Oneself. I presume parents, if anyone, should cure these fears and aversions. Parents should intervene at a stage such as this one and impart a survival tactic, a motion reduction, an anxiety channel to siphon off the distracting behavior. Certain specific parents, in fact, should consider the ultimate sacrifice to their son, a boy who might finally require the loss of a parent in order to be healed (I'll spell it out: Ben requires a disappeared father, a dead father, a father harmed and brought to his knees, an embarrassed or humiliated father, a father attacked, a father lost at sea, a father with no money, a depraved father, a shot-in-the-head father, a gut-shot father at night, a father fallen from a tree, winded, a confused and possibly blind father, groping down the hallway in his nightshirt, entering the wrong room, weeping, a father who must be fed, a deaf father, whose lips curve around other people's words but never discern them, a father who one day doesn't wake up, who stiffens there in bed, finished). A successful young boy might require one of these events to mark him as a more authentic young man, a man with experience, a man with knowledge, a man who has suffered. If you cared at all for his progress in the world, you would help Ben with this deficiency; you would not even blink before volunteering. You would be loading your gun at this very moment. You would be swallowing all of the wrong pills and dragging your fatally poisoned body out into the field, where Ben could watch you fail this world forever, and never forget your death. A father having a seizure. A father expiring in the grasses outside his own home. How proud we would all be if you could do this for him! What an amazing gift! How noble, to exit your hard life and infuse our young man with such an important, defining loss! How many young men actually get to watch their fathers die? An intelligent man would overcome his self-serving blind spot on this topic. What exactly are you “living” for if not to accelerate your son's stalled launch, to jettison your sorry boy back onto the frontier of the all-new behavior? Let him live through grief! An intelligent man would do this.

For my part, no matter how often I provoke the boy to a fainting spell by launching his body in the chair—his limbs wheeling in the air above the fainting tank, my own son aloft and unconscious, confusing the bird life in the vicinity—upon landing, his fear of himself is not cleansed. During the resuscitation procedure, after I salt his upper lip, he comes to alertness and seems “glad” to be alive, for I observe his face to gain the rictus of a smile and I watch his arms breach the space toward my person as he nuzzles into my heat, his mouth transmitting coos and baby sounds. But after I right his body, and distance myself two arm's lengths from him to better observe the effects of the faint, and then note his symptoms in the ledger, he is soon again fending some invisible attack near his eyes, swatting the air, sometimes appearing to hug himself lightly on the shoulders in a solo embrace, as though his arms were being operated from afar and he were administering to himself some early, unchecked version of affection. I am repulsed when comfort becomes the chosen performance of the day, when people decide to soothe one another or themselves. It is so disappointing to ratify our panic. And to try to comfort oneself, a sort of asexual masturbation, like administering a massage to your own body, simply communicates to others what they should never do for you. It advertises your basest need. If Ben desires to be touched by me, he certainly won't get his wish by touching himself in my presence. That is simply patronizing and far too obvious.

As you know, I prefer objects that do not give when you push or poke or prod them: a wall, a rock, a tower. I prefer men who don't fall down and weep, who absorb a blow, who do not scamper and yell when chased, but stand firm, crouch, square off, meet an attack with something like resistance, even if it kills them. The four-point stance is my favorite posture for men. It indicates readiness, disguises fear, and raises their bottoms above their heads, which more authentically prioritizes a man's body. Men should not gust so heavily from the mouth when they are being tended to; their noises should occur as language, or not at all. I do not like their sounds of relief. They sigh too easily, overusing the facial strategy of “smiling,” as though communicating their mood will deliver wanted news from their persons. As though, as though. They expect a far more ample interest in their needs than is ever warranted. The biggest tactical error of our time: using the face to communicate a mood. It amounts to spying on oneself. As for men, it is their completely wrong view of themselves I cannot stand. We could use a little more self-loathing from them, to give the rest of us a break. There is so little accuracy in their faces.

So when I can preside over the alteration of an object, or when that object sympathizes with my touch so much as to yield to it (Ben's personality, so-called, not to mention his body, such as it is, and his head, his overall yieldingness and susceptibility and failed resistance to everything suggested for him), I am inclined, since I pursue my desires with “intense behavior” (your words), to continue shaping that object until it is small enough for me to stash in my pocket or bury or fling into the sea, all actions that would bring a final harm to Ben and our plan.

Although I am eager to resist the stereotypes of motherhood that would have me coddling the boy, swathing him in blankets, soothing his rages with my special, medical voice, and confirming or accommodating every fear and worry he attempts to indulge, I am not convinced that the opposite Approach of Indifference is any more original a parenting stance, and I'd like to resist ignoring the young man just because it's a less charted region of behavior, however personally fascinating I might find it, however endlessly rich the results it might yield for me. Detachment is an indulgence of mine, I'll admit, particularly when Ben speaks to me—announcing his feelings, querying mine, reporting what he has observed in the field, strategies that all cause me to stiffen—and I must moderate the display of my aloof postures with vigilance, lest it seem to him that I am simply powered down, or drunk. As useful as it is to position myself as a remote, masterful mother who employs hidden, satellite controls while refusing her son such techniques as physical proximity, or basic verbal or physical acknowledgments of his messages or gestures, such as eye contact (an overrated method), the danger is that, however advanced his mind might become as a result, Ben's body will cool considerably, he will grow inert, his muscles will atrophy, and he will become too listless even for the most basic self-care. A dead son is not immediately in our interest at this time.

The question now is, So What? Here is just another crisis of parents with an average kid who will not produce the behaviors they dream about. Welcome to the club. What is so different about our struggle? Why should we complain when our boy fails to pioneer? Should we not be pleased by his divergence, even a divergence into likelihood, sameness, average output? Is it not necessary for him to be
precisely other
than we thought he would, exactly outside of our imagination for what people can do, a schism that defines the tension produced between generations? Well, yes. In theory, I agree. Let Ben be a Dutch princess. How utterly startling. My problem, which I hope is yours as well, is that Ben's failure has not proved challenging, surprising, mysterious, complicated, difficult, alarming, or exciting. He is small and colorless and his voice cannot compete with a hushed room. His words, when he uses them, are nervous. He is bald and his head is overlarge. His lips are fat and wet.

Which is where you come in.

I am not sure if, in your ministrations to him, when you cleanse him or coach his life maneuvers on the Person Course behind the shed, you have had cause to handle his face, or to read his gestures with your mitten to discover what our young man might be feeling (not that such a subject concerns you, or should). But I ask that you look to him at once during his next behavior bath, being careful, please, not to alarm him, if indeed he is not accustomed to hosting your hand on that part of his body (reminder: Ben has Afraid of Hands).

Here are some remedy queries you might consider during your examination:

Should a boy's face be that soft?

Does overnight burial harden a boy's head?

Will an Outdoor Endurance Occasion create a facial callus sufficient to conceal him into adulthood?