a tall child
My mother has been using her lockdown time to sort through old family photos.
I’m the child who moved out — my sister’s still living at home — so I am not privy to whatever hilarious sitcom is playing out in real time in a semi-detached in Warwickshire. Frankly, I suspect that if I were in that house right now, the last thing I’d want would be to experience yet more of the same faces, with the added bonus of nostalgia for a gentler, less homebound time. Still, I kind of understand the impulse. I think it’s the same one that prompted me to call home, unprompted, a little over a week ago; I was on leave, basically already in lockdown out of sheer anxiety, and I felt like nothing so much as a little kid, grasping after old and well-worn comfort.
I don’t go home much. Last time I went back was at the tail end of 2018, because a childhood friend was getting married in the area. I’m prickly and independent, and I value being out on my own more than… basically anything? I think basically anything. Calling home might sound like a very normal impulse for you; for me, it was anything but. Weirder still: I came away from the phone call feeling unambiguously good about it. We barely even talked about the rona. Mum and I spent about forty-five minutes catching up about work and writing and our local mutual aid schemes, and when I hung up the phone, I was straightforwardly glad we’d talked. Truly we live in interesting times.
I’m getting off the point. My mother has been sorting through our old family photographs. Every day this week, she’s sent me a new photo of myself as a child.
In a very literal way, I am not the same person anymore. I changed my name legally, in its entirety, at 21; I don’t as such have a ‘gender’ these days; I’ve grown up to have hair in a shade that allows me to convince small children I’m a mermaid. I’ve gone to a lot of trouble to put as much distance as possible between the kid in those photos and the person I am now.
But I still see myself — so much of myself — in the photos. Every photo I’ve ever seen of my younger self has a kind of solemnity to it, and that’s including the ones where I’m sticking out my tongue and mugging for the camera. I look at my eyes in the photos and I think, essentially, what ancient entity is inhabiting that child? Or, to be more prosaic (more sincere) about it: who told that baby this shit was life-or-death. The recurring joke, when I was small, used to be that I was born aged forty.
(Mitski has since written about that concept, because of course she has.)
It would be easy to say that the kid in the photos is still with me, whenever I catch myself wishing that life were as simple as calling home for comfort. It wouldn’t be true. That kid hated being comforted. I think that kid would have done nothing but scream for days at a time, sometimes, if they hadn’t known it would call down other people’s worry on their head. That’s when they’re with me the most: whenever I find myself grinding my teeth at sympathy that does nothing to help.
Maybe it’s the idea of comfort, independent of complicating reality, that I miss. A lot of us are missing impossible things right now. Meanwhile, today I joined my colleagues on a conference call that left me horribly bereft after everyone had gone. What I missed, more than I’ve missed anything real so far, was the boring and frustrating and ordinary routine of seeing them five days a week. That’s the kind of reassurance I value now I’m grown.
W