I remember seeing it
“The Boy in the Plastic Bubble”
John Travolta living in a plastic- enclosed world
To keep the germs out
To survive
I felt just the same
Surrounded by plastic
A bubble of my own making
Designed to keep me safe
A way to stay alive
Became a prison of my own design
Like John
I’ve built up my immune system
I’m ready to walk outside
To leave the safety of the bubble
To be in the world once more
There comes a time
When one has to become
One’s own mentor
When the voice you seek
In the sea of voices
Is your very own
And that time, I think,
Is the time you grow up
And that time, I know,
Is the time you become
Who you really are
All that I held dear
Was washed away
By the tsunami that was you
My heart, my mental health
My easy laugh, my joy
My positive outlook
My belief in goodness
My trust in my own body
My trust in my own soul
The winds have long since died down
My body has healed from the twists and turns she rode
I sit in the quiet aftermath
And wait to see what of me
The tide will wash ashore
Will I recognize my essential parts
Or will I pass them by as detritus
Not knowing their inherent value
From a very young age, I could feel what was happening in the adult world around me.
I am not unique. Yes, I am a highly sensitive person. But I believe we all are. I have no way to gauge another’s inner experience – just guessing.
Children have not yet developed the callous that life experience cam eventually create. They are sponges, picking up everything that is going on around them.
Why then do adults tell themselves that their kids “won’t know what is happening” and decide that is is best to “shield them” from “harsh, adult” realities?
There were pivotal events in my childhood that were never explained to me: my mother’s miscarriage when I was 6. My aunt and uncle’s divorce. The fact that my grandfather had had another family before ours. These things were never spoken of. Yet, I felt the energy around them and knew that something was going on.
Left to my own devices, I had no choice but to try to make sense of what I sensed, to piece together what I could as best I could with my emotional immaturity and my limited understanding.
I assumed my mother was dying. I thought she had stomach cancer. When she was taken away to the hospital, I thought it was forever.
When my uncle literally disappeared from our lives, I thought I must have done something to make him leave. I learned that people who you love can leave without reason or notice. I learned abandonment.
And as for my grandfather’s secret other family: my grandparents knew that there was a first wife and a son. They kept it to themselves. Boy, was that a heavy weight.
I could literally feel it in their presence. Their home, a place I loved dearly, always felt slightly “off,” and there was a barely discernible tension whenever the phone rang.
Years later, when the truth came out, my entire world clicked back into its rightful position. Living in the atmosphere of secrets gives added weight to gravity. It creates a denseness to the air one breathes. There is a physical and emotional tension of “readiness” you develop in that environment: you do not know why, but just under the surface you are on high alert, 24/7.
I’ve had to unravel these experiences. It has taken time, patience, professional help and love.
I have a friend who was an active alcoholic for the first years of his kids lives. After he got sober, he refused to consider that they had been affected by his drinking. He felt he’d hidden it well, that he’d been highly functional, had kept it from them.
I don’t know why he had such a blind spot around it. A kind of denial. Maybe it was too painful for him to admit to himself.
Maybe he, my parents, and my grandparents, were all well-intended and thought they were doing the best thing for their children.
Perhaps it was too complicated-feeling for them to try to guide their children through the truth so they opted to keep quiet and hope for the best.
All I know is that children do know – can sense – everything happening around them. And that if adults do not help the children make sense of what they pick up on, they will form their own conclusions about the world that they experience.
The prolific Stephen Sondheim captures this reality beautifully in his song, “Children Will Listen.” The lyrics are below. Here is one of my favorite renditions by the incredible Mandy Patinkin.
Who are your children listening to?
Children Will Listen
How do you say to your child in the night
Nothing is all black but then nothing is all white?
How do you say it will all be alright
When you know that it mightn’t be true?
What do you do?
Careful the things you say
Children will listen
Careful the things you do
Children will see
And learn
Children may not obey
But children will listen
Children will look to you
For which way to turn
To learn what to be
Careful before you say
“Listen to me”
Children will listen
Careful the wish you make
Wishes are children
Careful the path they take
Wishes come true
Not free
Careful the spell you cast
Not just on children
Sometimes the spell may last
Past what you can see
And turn against you
Careful the tale you tell
That is the spell
Children will listen
How can you say to a child who’s in flight
Don’t slip away and I won’t hold so tight?
What can you say that no matter how slight won’t be misunderstood?
What do you leave to your child when you’re dead
Only what ever you put in its head
Things that your mother and father had said
Which were left to them too
Careful what you say, children will listen
Careful you do it too, children will see and learn, oh
Guide them but step away
Children will glisten
Temper with what is true
And children will turn
If just to be free
Careful before you say
“Listen to me”
Children will listen
Children will listen
Children, children will listen
Songwriter: Stephen Sondheim
It had been fucking abrupt.
She’d come home to the apartment they shared to find he’d moved himself out while she was at work. At work, working at the restaurant – his restaurant.
It was a shock. Strange to feel the ghosts of his things. For half of the life of their home to be gone, just like that.
It almost felt like the floor tilted in places – like a strange funhouse – where only her stuff remained, as if the weight of her things had warped the balance of the room.
She walked around, numb, dazed, picking up an odd hanger or empty CD case, watching dust bunnies scatter as she passed through the rooms.
The only remaining evidence of his presence were two flat unused cardboard boxes, $1.87 in change, and a few crumpled receipts.
Later that night, after the shock had worn off and reality had set in, she used the cardboard boxes as a makeshift bed. (The thought of sleeping in their bedroom was unbearable. Plus, she’d drunk the better part of a bottle of Red Label and the distance seemed insurmountable in the moment.)
It would be a month, after she’d moved out herself, after she found a new place, after a friend loaned her a blow-up bed, until she slept off the floor again.
(There’s nowhere left to fall if you are already on the floor.)
I’ve got a few tricks left up my sleeve
Not going to waste my time in a fret
Midlife is nothing more than a signpost
This life thing ain’t over yet
I am the wind’s whisper of the night
I am the morning-song and her echo
You live off my bounty
I gave birth to your parents
And today, I am dying for you
It astonishes me –
this embrace with poison
The death dance she and I are in
I will die saving you
But you can’t live without me
Will you hear my silent cries
And remember me in time
Or will we destroy ourselves
And leave our decayed remains
To birth a new Mother
And will she create a new race
Or are we the last attempt
My heart skipped four beats
Within seconds I realized my error
The tantrum I just threw
Would be my last
I always knew that my quick, reckless anger
Would be the death of me
Within seconds
I saw how foolish I had been
Within seconds
I knew
It was too late
The darkness descended
The blight that you brought to my lands
Soul-grooves
Worn into my heart
Rivulets of salt-tears
Eroded the once-pristine landscape inside
But I’ve started a conservancy
To build my self up again
Renew, rebuild, regrowth
One day, no traces of you will remain on my terrain
And the wind will carry the seeds of my heartlands
To populate fertile fields so that love will spread
And color the world a thousand shades of beautiful
Of notable worth:
My eyes
My smile
My heart
My soul
These remain
These are intact
These are mine
Beyond the Skinny Branches 