The Scary, One-Eyed Monster

Today I had a rare day off to take my daughter to a specialist.  It was thrilling to see her during the week instead of working long hours, and to be with her after school when I’m normally in the city on deadlines.  Even a specialist’s appointment was exciting to me.  I got to see my little girl, on Monday.  And instead of missing her like I do every week on that day, a missing so much it’s like the heart is taken out of the body and squeezed and thrown to the ground and stomped on, my stomach in its dark pit of sadness feeling like an elevator going up then plummeting (there are no words; only visceral images of body organs can express this), I got to take her to the playground!  This is something I did always as a full-time mom before the divorce, before going back to work.  But now it is as rare as a perfect summer day, which this seemed to be.

Ella was so happy, too.  “Mama has to work tomorrow,” she prepared herself, talking about herself.  “But you can go to the playground today.”

My little girl is 11.  She acts and speaks much younger than her age, but she has the face and body of a beautiful Botticelli princess. She is more precious than life itself, and you want to scrape the heavens for answers, claw at the clouds and the atmosphere and the moon to the gods above, below and beyond to ask why, why this perfect, beautiful baby had to suffer the medical reactions she did that destroyed the life and brain and normal development she was supposed to have.  You want to always go back in time to do it again, the way where she didn’t get injured by the medical procedure that so many have without incident, but that so many others have so similarly suffered.

You want to switch places with her and give her the life you had—friends, classes, outings, learning, speech, reading, writing, the simple exchange of a conversation between girlfriends, a playdate! An exchange with another child that goes past “Hi” and “I’m fine.” The ability to make a phone call by herself, or to have a real phone talk. A lasting friendship with her cousin.  Whispering and planning and the spontaneous, intimate chatter with a best friend her own age that she never had.   

You want to change doctors in the past, you want to cure her, you want to lay down your life for her and die for her.

But you don’t.  You get her ready for the playground so she can have fun like all the other kids.  She put on her bathing suit, shorts and a top and flip-flops—how she preened in the mirror!—and we took the elevator to the back door, and walked across the street, through the pretty little tree-lined path, to the urban playground here on the upper west side of the Bronx where for so long I felt a relief that it wasn’t suburbia, where so many colors and families and religions and ages blend together. Where, despite some times of funny looks from others and attempts to play, then immediately sizing things up and moving on—we still come back. New year, new summer, the spray fountain has been turned on, new chance to try again.

Since we had last been there, my daughter got older and taller—just so much taller now than the other kids.  But Ella saw the water and the delighted laughter of the children; nothing mattered to her but that. So hand in hand, we arrived at the little circular spraying fountain surrounded by happy little kids in bathing suits.

Whenever things sear into the head and heart, they become present tense, and present tense forever they live.  When my daughter has injustices done to her or experiences cruelty from an adult, she lives with them in the present.  She talks to me sometimes as if I’m not in the room, and right now I’m suddenly reminded as I write this of Truman Capote’s title, “Other Voices, Other Rooms.” So it is the same for my daughter.  She hears other voices, real voices, in other rooms—in places where I was not present to help her or experience it with her, and she shares these experiences by suddenly conjuring the reprimand or comment from the adult.  Often these voices she expresses are in the voice of that adult, and the conversation seems to be verbatim.  Everything with Ella that happened in the past that hurt her feelings, that traumatized her, becomes now and forever. And through her, they are forever for me.

And so this story, that happened this afternoon, switches to present tense. Ella is so happy when we arrive, she kicks off her shoes, takes off the shorts and runs to the spray pool. The late 5 o’clock sun is on her pure, white shoulders, her braids still have a bit of red and strawberry blonde in them from her baby hair, she doesn’t notice she is heads and shoulders and chests above the other kids, and prances beautifully in the shower of water.  There is a tiny girl, maybe a little over a year, in the most minute water shoes I’ve ever seen (the same color as Ella’s that we left home).  “Look!” Ella exclaims.  “She has your water shoes!” speaking about herself again in the third person.  The little girl is a delightful fairy sprite, seemingly just a few inches tall, like a tiny fairy who lives in the forest under a mushroom.  She’s wearing a black tee shirt with a skull motif, and pink and white seersucker shorts. 

Ella dances around the water with this tiny baby for a while, then starts to follow two 7 year-old, skinny little girls in two-piece bathing suits.  They are on a suspended bridge that bounces around when you jump across it, which used to seem so treacherous when Ella was very small.  She likes the little girls’ bathing suits, and as usual, hovers too close to them and—loving fashion and all things stylish—peers closely at their hair ribbons and details of the suits. She towers over them, and looms close down by their faces. “Ella, Ella sweetie,” I say.  “Say hello to them, and do you want to play?  We don’t go too close like that.”   The girls, who had already started backing off before I spoke, give her a glance, look at me, look at each other, look at her again, then continue to run around, dodging her and going off on their own.

Ella goes back and forth into the water, doing what the much younger boys and girls are doing. If one puts his stomach flat on the heavy spray at the base of the fountain, Ella does it too.  If one starts running around the water like ring around the rosy, Ella does it too.  She follows the two skinny 7 year-old girls again back to the suspended bridge.  She wants to hang out with them on the platform.  They keep slipping past her.  Wanting her to have fun and at the same time taking in the torrent of words all the younger kids so effortlessly spout, fountains and fountains of torrential drops of language that seamlessly make chains of words and conversation that my daughter never has done, not at that young age, and not at this present age, creates a dizzying effect like the way a ray of sunlight can suddenly make even the simplest mist of water a seemingly sky-wide rainbow.

All of these sensations surround me in a circular embrace; not stultifying as one would think, because the setting is being able to watch my daughter smile and run and feel the cool water all over her body on a hot day, and to share it with me on a weekday.  But it’s like an embrace of that rush of air that holds you and releases you at the same time, the kind of circular hold from within and from without—is it a centrifugal force—of an emotional, physiological kind—that encompasses everything, from the spinning sensation of the children all running in a circle around the suspended bridge, around the fountain, the sun rays following the children, the words of the very verbal children following the children in a circle as they race, my daughter trying to fit in with children half her age and half her size, and my heart following her as if it was running outside my body and trying to keep up with her.

In the midst of all this, the little 7 year-old lithe, vibrant best friends start plotting, from one moment to the next.  They whisper, stare at my daughter, run away from her, look over their shoulders and stand breathless, pretending they are in danger with her too close to them, then out of danger when they escape her.  They scream in fright, look backwards at her, and run again and again away from my daughter. My daughter, they have decided in their obvious role playing, is like the one-eyed monster, a broken half-person they don’t understand, haven’t seen the likes of but intuitively dislike and, reminiscent of “Lord of the Flies,” sense that ah, here, finally, is someone bigger than us, stronger than us, but much, much more vulnerable than us, that we, small and miniature, cruel yet innocent creatures that we are, can feel stronger, smarter and better than that much-bigger, strange—and scary—older girl.

They run, and dodge, they flee from her.  They laugh and mock her as she, completely unaware, or seemingly so, still continues to follow them in the game they have created that actually serves to abuse her and use her as their pawn. The more this goes on, in fleeting seconds and minutes that seem like hours, the more I think about my dear friend Tyler, who once wrote a comment in one of my previous essays, that it is up to me to educate other children who have not had the chance to learn about tolerance and kindness.  I wish she had been here to speak for me in a neutral way.  If you are the mother it takes an effort that I so far have not attained.

 At the third or fourth high-speed round and round of “get away from the weird girl” I stand in place, finally stopping the carousel-ride effect of the pattern of children around the fountain. I approach the ringleader as she passes me in this circle of hell, and with a rush of blood to ears and head call out “Hey!  That is my daughter. That is mean. Is it okay to do that to children who are different? Do not be mean to my daughter.”   This little girl, who had seemed so conniving, so cruel, suddenly becomes the very small, little girl that she is, and for a moment it softens the hurt and anger.  She looks very vulnerable herself, and she looks back at me with her face half turned, from the side of one eye, shivering, her pale skin turning mottled in the chill from the spray, her sleek black hair plastered on her face, the water running down it.  She moves her hands in a nervous way that says oh no, confusion and perhaps I’m sorry. Her hands, spraying droplets, flap with tension and embarrassment of being abruptly caught in the act, of having another mom defend a child, a big girl, my child—who in normal circumstances would have been the boss in command of this much-younger girl. 

The little girl stands frozen in place, not knowing what to do, still looking at me from the side of her eye, possibly with only a vague but now-forming idea that she had harmed anyone; standing, shivering and still until my movement away released her.

Ella runs over to me and I put the towel and my arms around her. As we walk away from the spray fountain to a bench across the park, I turn to see the father—the same cool, bohemian, bearded young dad of the tiny fairy of the spray fountain, talking in a serious way to the girl who taunted Ella. I had no idea he was her father.  I would have thought…that a dude that cool looking…with such a darling younger child, would have noticed his daughter being mean to mine, but he did not. He was so taken in by his other daughter, the little tiny thing wearing miniature water shoes. 

Ella thinks she has been bad, since we are so abruptly leaving.  “You were naughty,” she says of herself, trying to figure out why we’re leaving and why mommy yelled.  No, I tell her.  You were such a good girl.  You are such a wonderful girl.  You played so nicely.  How do I tell her the girls were being mean to her?  That I could not bear it?  She asks me about it in the elevator when we’re home. There is a nice, elderly couple  from a few floors below me sharing the ride up.  As they get out, Ella is still asking about the girls at the playground and why we left.  I tell her “some little girls don’t know how to play nicely.  They don’t know it’s not okay to be mean to other girls.”  My voice cracks and I start to cry.  Ella looks at me intently. Then she hits me.  Don’t be a baby, her hard, smacking hand says to me.  With no words, her eyes and hands say to me, Ugh, Mama, what a baby you are.  Do I have to take care of everything? says that hand I so want to hold and protect.  She whacks me again in the kitchen as I try to explain.  Whack. This is no time or place for tears, says her smacking hand.  I’m not going to let you go there, Mama, says my daughter’s brilliant, strong, resilient hand. Get a grip.

by NANCY ANGIELLO Copyright June 2013