the child and the shadow
penis penis penis
A little while ago, Japhy said he was having bad dreams. He would appear like a guilty little ghost in the middle of the night, and I would walk him back upstairs, then help him come up with a replacement dream, the best image I could drum up; something like Aaron Judge lifting his hat to wave at Japhy from the plate before hitting a home run. Japhy would load the dream, close his eyes, and drop back into sleep.
Then he said that wasn’t working. I had a new idea: just fast-forward through the bad dream when it came, as if he had the TV remote. That worked, he said.
A couple of weeks later I was tucking him in — back scratch, chin stroke, nose stroke, forehead pat, arm scratch, music box — and he told me that his entire dream was now playing in fast forward. “It’s like, bzzzzz,” he explained, his hands darting along a rollercoaster track. Like someone sitting on the remote.
“Oh boy!” I said. “That’s no good.”
Bums in the air, kids look so cute sleeping, but you have to think we adults miss something about the creeping dark of a kid’s bedroom and the pitch black of their subconscious. My kids don’t look forward to sleep like I do; I’m always pushing them off the edge and down the shaft sooner than they’d like.
As always, there is a small universe between the adult POV and the child experience.
^would this a) help you get to sleep, or b) make you feel like you’ve agreed to die?
We don’t even know what we don’t know:
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There is a lot we don’t understand about our own kids. I mean obviously. A lot of the Parenting chatter — and I follow as many gentle parenting accounts as the next person — tends to give some nice tips but stop short of acknowledging that our kids are walking across a mountaintop, their beards flapping in gale-force wind, each minute and step of their life longer and taller than those of ours. This is what good children’s books understand and poorly conceived ones do not.
Japhy tends to get in trouble for being too comic and loose in school. I have memories of being similarly silly as a kid and not knowing why I was doing it, though my mind reverberates often with the defensive echo of “I am a hoot!” Anyhow, Japhy is in kindergarten, and recently got “suspended” from afterschool for yelling “Penis! Penis! Penis!” in the cafeteria. “That isn’t funny,” the teacher explained to him. “But it is funny,” he responded. Suspended!
The thing is I know Japhy is a good kid. They all are.
There is a 1975 essay from Ursula Le Guin, “The Child and the Shadow,” that unpacks a Hans Christian Anderson story. It it, a young man sees a beautiful woman in the building across the road, but is too shy to go over. Instead, he sends his shadow. The shadow doesn’t come back. When he is middle-aged, the shadow comes back to him boasting about the the rooms he saw, though, being a shadow, it couldn’t actually go far, probably couldn’t turn the door knobs. The shadow has such bluster, and the man is so timid that the shadow convinces the woman that he is the real man and the man his shadow. It’s a Freudian story; you get the gist.
“The shadow is the other side of our psyche; the dark brother of the conscious mind,” writes Le Guin. “It is Vergil (sic) who guided Dante through hell, Gilgamesh’s friend Enkidu, Frodo’s enemy Gollum. It is the Doppelgänger. It is Mowgli’s grey brother; the wolf, the bear, the tiger of a thousand tales.” It is Night Ninja, one supposes, it is Mayor Humdinger.
In the Hans Christian Anderson story, the man doesn’t confront his shadow until middle age. Sound right? ("I'm just going around on my motorbike, mostly," Adrian Chiles, the Guardian columnist who writes those charming headlines told GQ for a profile. "Having a proper midlife crisis, which has been going on for about 15 years now.")
Your devilish little child has not reached that point yet, explains Le Guin: “As Jung says, the child’s ego and shadow are both still ill defined; a child is likely to find their ego in a ladybug, and his shadow lurking under the bed.”
This is where our lack of imagination shows. “Don’t be silly!” we say. “Look, nothing under the bed!” All the garden varieties of adults not getting it also point to our maybe not having faced our own dickish shadows.
Le Guin: “The only way for a youngster to get past the paralyzing self-blame and self-disgust of this stage is really to look at that shadow, to face it, warts and fangs and pimpled and scales and all — to accept it as himself — as part of himself. The ugliest part, but not the weakest. For the shadow is the guide. The guide inward and out again; downward and up again; there, as Bilbo the Hobbit said, and back again. The guide of the journey to self-knowledge, to adulthood, to the light.”
My dreams as a child were fifty-fifty being able to fly by putting my arms out and running off a hill / being chased by something through the bush. Japhy’s are more charming. For a while, neither he nor Scout could report having dreams. When he was 3, he told me one about the large pancake monster that lives in the woods with two legs, two eyes, and one hand. Tip the dream upside down and you see the reflection: my good pancake.
Snippets
Noodles was recalling some lesson he learned in high school as we walked home from school drop-off one day: “The teacher held up a glass of water and asked us if it was heavy. ‘How about if you hold it for an hour? How about a day? Is it heavy then? How about a YEAR?’” Noodles is excited, because he’s getting to the punchline. “And then he tells us the glass of water is feelings, and that’s why you’ve just gotta put that glass down.”
I laugh HEARTILY. “Buddy I feel like you have missed the point of this story. You have to address the feelings! This is why men are so emotionally stunted!”
Noodles is smiling. “Nope, you just” — he mimes it — “put it down.”
Goodies
Every small city has that one dictator chic house. (Kate Wagner)
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“He said, ‘Can you bake me a gingerbread house?’ I said, ‘I don’t bake, honey.’ He said, ‘Please.’ So I baked the sides of a house, a door, and a roof. I would have built him a real house.” (Laurie Stone)
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“I would say, right off, that when a mother dies so publicly and so violently, the fight is likely to be with the sibling. Nobody actually shares their parent – that’s just an illusion – and even the healthiest of brothers are parrying with wooden swords. Each child wants to go back, fighting off all monsters, all observers and opportunists, all lovers and all brothers, to be alone with her again.” (Andrew Hagan)
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Jenny (alarmed): Why is your hand shaking??
Gargantubaby: Because I'm doing a lot of hand business! (Jenny True)
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“In a lull, we do pull-ups on the monkey bars and an ache spreads in a crescent around our shoulder blades. We say, Getting old, and we glance around. We remember triumphs and bruises.” (Lucas Mann)
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“It is clear that many on that panel think she has committed the ultimate female crime: telling the truth about the man you are supposed to universally uphold.” (Cindi DeTiberio)
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“Even the myth of Guinness ‘not travelling well’, he points out, is an analogy for our own homesickness and distance; ordering a pint, waiting for it to settle, finally taking a sip – all are similar to the act of emigrating and settling abroad.” (Ana Kinsella)
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“The Badger does not come bearing gifts. He eats, he drinks, he does his laundry here, he is waited upon by man and woman alike. But he’s not like, ‘Oh, I drank all your scotch, here is some more.’ He is more like, ‘I hope you guys got some more scotch,’ and if we didn’t, we feel terrible. The Badger wanted scotch and we did not have it!” (Sarah Miller)
Haha I’ve tried to explain to my nephew (age 10) as to his many “jokes” that even though everyone in our family thinks they are a comedian none of us are actually funny (except me).