Hide and Seek

Dear Ira Glass,

I started my spring cleaning early this year, in February. I’ve done it every year since moving out of my parents’ house, that ruthless kind of purging that has its liberation rooted in commitment to a new, streamlined life. A life that doesn’t cut as many corners as the old one. It’s the kind of cleaning they make montages of in the movies, when the hero or heroine has to pick up and start over in a new place, and the background song starts out melancholy and nostalgic but ends up with some lyrics like “but I gotta hold my head high/ I gotta let this go/ I’m heading out to the horizon/ the sun isn’t showing up yet/ I might get there first/ in the meantime I’ll hold my head high…” Say what you want about the drudgery of cleaning, but it’s a way of leaping out, a way of creating your own inspiring montage in a flurry of clothes flying out the dresser drawers, papers to be recycled or shredded stacking up higher than your desk, and bags upon bags of miscellaneous garbage that’s been hiding in the psyche as well as the closet gathering across the floor.

Sometimes, though, you find something you didn’t bargain for. Something that either will make you stay in the old life, or must go with you into the new. When my spring cleaning was almost complete this year, my most relentless and satisfying cleaning spree to date in which I got rid of roughly fifty percent of the contents of my room, I lay awake in bed relishing. I mentally combed through my closet, newly worthy of one of those infomercials for organizing systems…my desk, complete with typed and alphabetized file folder labels…my bathroom, rid of several pounds of expired makeup and hair products…my back porch, rid of…

Oh, crap. There’s still a humongous Sterilite container out there with God knows what in it. I seriously have no idea.

At that point it was about three o’clock in the morning, so I had to leave the Sterilite project for another day, in the interest of the neighbors who would probably wonder why the red-haired tenant of the basement room next door was in her pajamas on the porch, madly sorting ‘keep’, ‘give-away’, ‘garbage’, and ‘maybe’ piles in the middle of the night. I went to sleep, vaguely wondering what odd assortment of forgotten belongings I would find. Whatever the contents, they were clearly unnecessary to my new minimalistic lifestyle.

When I opened it the next day, only one word escaped me: “Oh.” One sigh. Among a bunch of old sweatshirts twice my size, a couple of matching kitchen-themed picture frames still wrapped in cellophane, and an outdated TJ Maxx pastel painting lay a black-and-white eight by ten. Of me. Of a little boy and me, smiling at the camera, the first camera I ever had, the digital Kodak I held out in front of us like a tourist of our own lives. Around Christmas, the second year I nannied for this little boy. As you know from my letter The Taken Heart, B died when he was five years old, of complications related to a brain tumor that caused significant developmental delays during his short life, five years ago. This picture was taken just a few months before that. It is of just our faces, him looking down and smiling and me kissing his cheek. I printed it, framed it, and hung it wherever I lived for two years after his death. After two years I needed a break. I was getting ready to start graduate school, to start my practicum placement teaching preschool at one of the elite early childhood centers in the country. The job I got without talking about B at all in the interview, not even once, even though he and his brothers are the reason I do this work, the reason I love it every day. But in my new life, I wasn’t yet ready to publicize that reason. So while I kept B in my heart, I kept the details of my past experience to myself, put the picture in a Sterilite storage container, and threw myself into two years of training as a classroom teacher.

Which brings me to the “Oh” moment just two months ago. With my first year out of grad school nearly under my belt, my first year of teaching nearly over, I am starting to talk about why I’m here. I recently had a long conversation with a friend who, struggling to explain feeling constantly caught in the undertow, said “I keep trying, but in the end, I just don’t know why I’m here.”

I stared at him, almost unable to comprehend. “On Earth?”

“Yes.”

“But…it’s great to be here.”

We went on to debate this point, never reaching a resolution, but I’ve been captured by the concept ever since. And I’ve been thinking about why I’m here and what makes it so great. And when I rediscovered the picture and the one sigh escaped, it let open the space for the next breath to captivate a small revolution. And I hung the picture again, next to the alphabetized desk. And I’ve been remembering many things.

One day in my first year of nannying was mostly the same as all the others: diapers, meals, laundry, tube feedings, more diapers, Sesame Street, toys, more diapers. But something different: the smallest moment, the revolution in one breath, mere seconds that changed the way I will live and teach always, in ways I even now don’t understand. It is this moment: B and I are sitting on the floor by the ottoman in front of the television, and I think Sesame Street is on. It’s a segment he doesn’t want to watch, so he turns around to face me. I’m sitting W-style with my knees about six inches apart. He crawls over and hides his head between them, then lifts it back up, looks at me, and smiles. “Boo,” I say. Because what else? He does it again. “Boo.” Again. “Boo.” He’s smiling so wide. “B,” I whisper in awe. “You’re playing.” It’s the first time I see him play like this, the first time I watch someone learn this game, the first time I’m a part of it.

Most people in early intervention have a story about a particular child who catalyzed their passion for this work. Most of those children are alive, preteens and teens now, some even adults. That isn’t my story, and that has been awkward to navigate. Usually I don’t go there; I just don’t tell the whole story. Even five years later, I still don’t feel like it’s really mine to tell, and so telling it is a different kind of risk. A free fall kind of risk. I am not good at that kind of risk. For most of my life, as independent and self-reliant as I’d like to pretend I am, in the end I’ve almost always relied on others to push me out of the nest, down the zipline, off the mountain, whatever. Now I’m pushing myself out into the free fall. I’m telling this story, this story that is definitely not all mine, and it is difficult, the words are so lacking, but the stories where words lack are the most important ones to tell. This is a story about a boy who is still there every time I look up, no matter how long I wait with my head between my knees, before the jump, before the next life that doesn’t cut as many corners, that says with actions more than words this is why I’m here on Earth, and I’ll always be figuring it out, and it’s great to be here. He is still there. Smiling so wide. Reminding me why I play and teach play. Why I must always do both. Reminding me that this moment, the smallest moment, is the most important thing to render in this relational, awkward, wonderful unresolved life.

Sincerely,

Courtney

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