Decameron Project Day 1: Something that pleases
Tell a story that pleases you. It doesn't matter what it's about. It can be fictional or true. The goal: to entertain us all and distract us from our various stresses.
I have been quarantined with my children since January 15th. It is March 15th. There are 7 rooms in our apartment. Here is something I've been thinking.
I have two sons, one dark and one fair. It sounds like the beginning of a fairy tale, doesn't it? It is.
The dark one has his dad's dark brown hair and my skimmed-milk skin, semi-opaque with a fine celtic tendency to burn, freckle over the nose, and the ability to go ghost-white in winter (or after 6 weeks of quarantine, in fact). He looked so like me as a baby that people would laugh at it. Now they say he's the image of his father, and it's true.
The fair one had bright butter-yellow hair for the first 3 years of his life, and it has been going darker ever since. It's what the Americans call 'dirty blond' now, and will soon be what the English call "mousey brown" - this is my own hair colour trajectory, more or less. He also inherited from his father skin that, while pale cream without the touch of sun, goes honey-coloured after the first tan. I would hold him as a baby and marvel at the difference in our skin tones, how his looked golden when mine looked white. This kind of skin isn't that unusual in white people - my own strawberry-blonde sister has it - but it's strange to me, like he glows with his own light (insert reference to The Light Gatherer here) and it is a marvel and a wonder that I made something which is so different to myself.
They're getting too old for this kind of scrutiny, now. They wriggle and shift away from me on the sofa as I kiss the back of their necks or trace the tan-lines that appear on a shifting t-shirt. When they were babies I spent hours staring at their fingertips, their ears, the shape of their ears. Now they're so old, they don't want to be obsessed over (and indeed, I wouldn't like it myself) so I restrain myself to occasionally gazing lovestruck at them while they sleep. I recognize what I'm doing. Sometimes, as a child, I would look up from a book, or something else that absorbed my attention and see my mother looking me raptly; with something unveiled in her eyes that I did not then understand. Like her, I feel my affection like a kind of ache held in check. Most of the time. Sometimes I explode upon them like a bear, picking them up or knocking them over and tangling, giggling, with wrestling kisses. This is still acceptable. I hope forever.
This is a fairy tale because it's about transformation. Mine: I was one thing, a huge, tired, morphing thing, and then I gave blood and bone to make them real. I had other children in my mind - so many daughters! - but they didn't form, and these ones did, and also theirs: from the moment of their birth they have been becoming more and more distinct, both more separate from and more familiar to me. There are so many ways that we know and belong to one another. These ways are always changing.
We are so far from the sense of family that I knew as a child; the Sundays with aunts and cousins everywhere, the good china, the roast pheasant, reading the lesson in churches with 300 years' of ancestors on the walls and in the graveyard outside. I did not give my boys acres of land that was 'theirs' in any sense, even just a vestigial "I go here once a year to see the snowdrops, and so it is mine" kind of way. They have inherited stubbornness, and an insatiable ability to question. They, like me, have a mother who loves them in the blood and bone.
It will have to suffice.
I have been quarantined with my children since January 15th. It is March 15th. There are 7 rooms in our apartment. Here is something I've been thinking.
I have two sons, one dark and one fair. It sounds like the beginning of a fairy tale, doesn't it? It is.
The dark one has his dad's dark brown hair and my skimmed-milk skin, semi-opaque with a fine celtic tendency to burn, freckle over the nose, and the ability to go ghost-white in winter (or after 6 weeks of quarantine, in fact). He looked so like me as a baby that people would laugh at it. Now they say he's the image of his father, and it's true.
The fair one had bright butter-yellow hair for the first 3 years of his life, and it has been going darker ever since. It's what the Americans call 'dirty blond' now, and will soon be what the English call "mousey brown" - this is my own hair colour trajectory, more or less. He also inherited from his father skin that, while pale cream without the touch of sun, goes honey-coloured after the first tan. I would hold him as a baby and marvel at the difference in our skin tones, how his looked golden when mine looked white. This kind of skin isn't that unusual in white people - my own strawberry-blonde sister has it - but it's strange to me, like he glows with his own light (insert reference to The Light Gatherer here) and it is a marvel and a wonder that I made something which is so different to myself.
They're getting too old for this kind of scrutiny, now. They wriggle and shift away from me on the sofa as I kiss the back of their necks or trace the tan-lines that appear on a shifting t-shirt. When they were babies I spent hours staring at their fingertips, their ears, the shape of their ears. Now they're so old, they don't want to be obsessed over (and indeed, I wouldn't like it myself) so I restrain myself to occasionally gazing lovestruck at them while they sleep. I recognize what I'm doing. Sometimes, as a child, I would look up from a book, or something else that absorbed my attention and see my mother looking me raptly; with something unveiled in her eyes that I did not then understand. Like her, I feel my affection like a kind of ache held in check. Most of the time. Sometimes I explode upon them like a bear, picking them up or knocking them over and tangling, giggling, with wrestling kisses. This is still acceptable. I hope forever.
This is a fairy tale because it's about transformation. Mine: I was one thing, a huge, tired, morphing thing, and then I gave blood and bone to make them real. I had other children in my mind - so many daughters! - but they didn't form, and these ones did, and also theirs: from the moment of their birth they have been becoming more and more distinct, both more separate from and more familiar to me. There are so many ways that we know and belong to one another. These ways are always changing.
We are so far from the sense of family that I knew as a child; the Sundays with aunts and cousins everywhere, the good china, the roast pheasant, reading the lesson in churches with 300 years' of ancestors on the walls and in the graveyard outside. I did not give my boys acres of land that was 'theirs' in any sense, even just a vestigial "I go here once a year to see the snowdrops, and so it is mine" kind of way. They have inherited stubbornness, and an insatiable ability to question. They, like me, have a mother who loves them in the blood and bone.
It will have to suffice.
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