Nothing is more pressing or vivid for a child than their imagination. A palpable organ of myth, always twisting and filling their daily life with change and magic.
Perhaps it’s something we have lost, not just something that only children possess. It seems a natural effervescence to life that children are more connected to, closer to the vine and to the divine. Something we have forgotten with all our obsessions, like responsibility and work and the constant focus on “growing up,” which leave our remaining fantasy life to revolve around such banal compulsions as possessions and sex and power. It seems sad to oppose so much of our “grown up,” cement-filled strivings, with those of a child pretending to be a mythical creature, or carrying on meaningful conversations with their imaginary friends. Do we really want to supplant their daydreams with ours?
We were at the farmers market and the girls were enmeshed in some insane, imaginary game, as usual. I widened my eyes as I gave the grape lady clutches of flame seedless to weigh. The wide eyes of a long day taking care of tiny mental patients.
“They’re a horse family today,” I explained.
“I just do not understand children. They don’t make sense,” she clucked.
I paused, waiting for my change. What she said suddenly seemed sillier than then nonsense my girls were inflicting on us.
“Actually I think it’s the adults that don’t make sense. Kids are free and open to everything. I wonder more what happened to us,” I said, taking my grapes, and she smiled back at me, puzzled.
What did happen to us along the way? The solidifying of cartilage into bone, the loss of our beginners mind, where there are infinities of options rather than the solidified few of our science and certainties. Things we know and they don’t. And stop being so silly and be quiet. Peter Pan is just a story.
We always act like kids just don’t get it. They haven’t grown wise to how the world works. The great irony, however, is that how our world works is an enormous embarrassment. It’s a big, dirty secret how we run things now, what we’ve done with it. What we’ve done to the earth’s life, creatures, each other. Ourselves. How we’ve defiled, debased, destroyed. Pretty much anything of value or purity, we’ve taken a giant hatchet to, among other atrocities. The kids aren’t screwed up, we are. They’re born nearly perfect, then they learn about “the world” and we grow them the rest of the way up, showing them all of our sooty skeletons and how everything “works.” Look what we’ve all been doing while you were away. Sorry.
Right now Lilah and Sophie are engaged in their weekly Fairy-Mermaid-Spy club meeting (complete with matching rings) which is ABSOLUTELY secret and I am not supposed to know anything about. However, the short one is not to be trusted with a secret and cannot help but tell it to me immediately. Thank God for now. I took the blood oath once they discovered that they had been outed, which seemed to placate the committee, but now that I am telling the world about them I am sure to be found at the bottom of the bay somewhere, tied up with fairy twine and covered in tiny mermaid bites.
Although I have serious doubts about the whole mermaid thing anyway. I told the girls repeatedly that I believe in magic, fairies, gnomes, elves in the forest, even unicorns because I saw one. I have a picture somewhere, and sure, it was a unicorn sheep, but you don’t question the magic because it doesn’t follow your expectations or the golden-gilded pictures of your youth, you just say, “Oh, shit, look it’s a unicorn!” and take a picture. But I told them that mermaids are a myth and that I don’t believe in them. You have to draw the line somewhere and I drew a heavy one there. Ridiculous creatures! Frightened daydreams of drunk, lonely sailors. Of course my wife immediately threw me under the mythological bus by saying she believed in them completely.
“Daddy! How can you not believe in them?”
“Because…they…don’t exist, for one.”
“Daddy! I have seen dem. Hazew has seen dem! Dey awe weaw!!” Lilah stood up in her chair, laughing and angry at me at the same time. More angry as my insolence sunk in. She balled her fist up and punched me as hard as she could.
“Hey, you believe what you believe, I’ll believe what I believe. I believe in all kinds of magical creatures, you know that. Except for Mermaids and Bigfoot. THOSE are completely imaginary and silly creatures.”
More laughing and hitting me followed, although there was general agreement on the Bigfoot issue. And, as a token of détente, I was still invited to the mermaid ballet the next month, though I will be taking a pass. I will go to many, many silly things with my girls, watch many mermaid plays and movies (over and over and over, it turns out) and attend other little girl extravaganzas all over the state. But a mermaid ballet? No, thank you. I will play poker at the old tavern that night, and let your mother take you.
Thank God I have my wife. If I was a single Dad I would take them to the mermaid ballet and my testicles would doubtlessly fall off. Although that would make getting into the Merman costume much easier.
‘I am sure to be found at the bottom of the bay somewhere, tied up with fairy twine and covered in tiny mermaid bites.’ That is the best sentence ~ When your girls are older, grown into the adult form you wish they weren’t, they will laugh and laugh at what you wrote. And they will see themselves through your ‘dad eyes.’