Knowing

By Rebecca Stetson Werner

By the time she had grown sharper,…, she found in her mind a collection of images and echoes to which meanings were attachable—images and echoes kept for her in the childish dusk, the dim closet, the high drawers, like games she wasn’t big enough to play.

from What Maisie Knew, by Henry James

There was an antique chest in my childhood room at the foot of my bed. I used to sit on this chest—attending to posture, hand positioning, and embouchure—two feet planted on the wood floor, while I practiced my flute, the symphony orchestra pieces, the descant parts for the piccolo, the classical pieces I worked on for solos and auditions.

I also sat there, cross legged and folded onto myself, one elbow on my knee, when I pulled the beige trimline phone on the longest extension cord available into my room, the receiver propped on my pillow. While I riffed the flute part to Duran Duran, my best friend did the same, but in awesome harmony, on her end of the line crackling with the exertion of extending our across town connection through that twenty-foot cord.

A few years ago, my bedroom became an office, as happens to the smallest room in the house when children grow up, and I spent time sorting through that chest. Lifting the lid for the first time in years, I smelled my grandparent’s house, from whom this chest had been inherited wafting from it. On top of the chest’s contents were a collection of ziplocked bags that surprised me; my mother had placed them there, saved and labeled as she cleaned out closets and drawers and nooks in their home. One bag held my Brownie uniform, pressed, the badge sash showcased. Below that, the prairie dress my mother and I had made together, during my Laura Ingalls Wilder phase. Then, the snazzy orange and gold asymmetrically off-one-shoulder leotard, with, well, a diagonal stripe of yellow fringe, with not quite matching, spray painted orange ballet shoes, my costume the year my jazz dance class danced to the Eye of the Tiger. Also, the felt hand puppets I crafted as a visual aid for my middle school book report on Jane Eyre. Yes, I do realize middle school is not the appropriate time to present your book report as a hand puppet soliloquy, but then, middle school is also not the time to be reading Jane Eyre, so apparently I was just letting my freak flag fly. The black felt glasses dangled from Mr. Rochester’s chin.

Once I’d excavated below this perfect collection of my seventies’ childhood, I came to the items that I’d placed in the trunk myself over the years I lived at home, before I left for college. The first item was my trusty, and in some places, now rusty, folding metal music stand, the kind with a telescopic pole and a music holder that collapses like an umbrella, the legs folding up and snugging against the pole. I used this stand to practice in my room, but I also carried it with me to rehearsals, to music camps, and overseas when I travelled with my music groups. Wrapped around the pole was a carefully wound piece of narrow white adhesive tape, the kind with the almost lacey edge, the adhesive still strong, but oozy and gooey in its age. On the tape, in my younger-self handwriting, was my childhood name, now replaced with Rebecca: Becky Stetson.

Below that stand, I came to what I was looking for, my mementos: dried prom flowers, ticket stubs to concerts, fragments of poems, a pair of bright blue lightning bolt earrings I bought at Hampton Beach, some pictures from photo booths with friends, all of us permed, hair sprayed, lip glossed and fabulous, the strips of photo paper now curling and yellowing. A smooshed penny a friend had handed me, asking, Can you keep a secret? The penny that revealed she was freshly back from breaking school rules by sneaking away during recess to retrieve the coins she had laid on the railroad tracks that ran behind our school. I could, and despite my concern, I had. Inside my royal blue bedazzled and bestickered Trapper Keeper, I found a torn page, the early draft of a poem I wrote late one night while listening to Peter Cetera on repeat through my giant face squishing headphones, about a boy who had broken my teenage heart, a poem that later inspired the Shakespearian-ish love sonnet assignment I had in college, when he and I were still entangled, back then the best model I had for love. And under them, a small stack of letters, each one written in the same small handwriting, folded carefully as though to contain the words they held that were never spoken aloud.

Dear Rebecca, they all began. These letters to me, about places and events and feelings that happened so many years ago, are written to a girl I no longer am, but using a name that I have now claimed. Jarred by the mixing of past and present, this small stack of letters sent me immediately to a certain place in the woods, down a long unpaved road.

•••

We were often running late and driving fast in our borrowed and beaten family cars when we bounced, squeaked, and scraped down an unmaintained dirt road, taking curves we knew by muscle memory. Our real lives were in various public schools. A cloud of dust billowed behind us in the growing darkness, trying to keep up, until we lurched to a stop, that dust now having the advantage of movement, enveloping the car in a dry unfocusing haze. The road ended in a large parking lot bordered by a river on one side and a steeply graded and heavily wooded hill on the other. Cut into that hill were crooked stairs made of railroad ties leading to a low one-story building. The double doors to a large gathering room in that building opened wide, light spilling into the woods; a curtained window in a door to the small office beside it glowed but dimly.

Pulling into a parking spot as others skidded into theirs, emergency brakes screeched, and after a quick check of our hair and a glance into our own eyes for reassurance in the rearview mirror, doors flew open, and we unfolded lengthening legs and planted our feet on the dirt. We stretched, assessed, and observed each other for a few brief moments before we reengaged in chaotic movement, calling to a friend across the parking lot, teasing, and laughing. We rushed to the backs of our cars, grabbed for the worn leather wrapped handles of black cases of various shapes and sizes and hauled them out, then reached back in for our uniform black vinyl music folders with our free hands. Adjusting ourselves to the familiar weight of our instruments, whether they were flutes or french horns or drum sticks, we slammed the trunk shut and lugged our instruments and tardy selves breathlessly up those stairs. All to pause in the doorway from woods to inside, blinking as darkness became light.

The room teemed with movement and sound, a low breathy murmur of voices, chatting, flirting, and a steady pulse of blushes, glances, turning of knees and widening of eyes toward and away. The sudden jarring sound of furniture being slid across the concrete floor percussed the din, brass instruments making blatting approximations of body functions, cases being slammed shut and music stands toppling over, the rising and falling of warm-up scales. Jolted back into forward motion by a smile from a friend I found in the crowd, my assigned seat beside her, I entered the shimmering blob of happy energetic teenagers in all their oafish pimply hormonally gorgeous glory.

There remained a few empty seats in our arch of chairs, those of the officers of the symphony, still in a meeting together behind the closed door between us and the small adjacent office. That office, I knew, was stuffed with files and a desk belonging to the one adult out there in the woods each night. Once a week, eight folding chairs were carried by eight teenagers, many of whom were my friends, and stuffed amongst the clutter of that office for a weekly meeting before the rest of us arrived. The officers, the symphony’s version of the popular crowd, who dated other first chairs, were selected for solos—my stomach fluttered and a blush rose when I squeezed past them in the black narrow halls of the concert hall dressing rooms—were rumored to have outside gatherings and special events with our director. I was never a part of that small group, despite moving from last chair in the flute section to first during my years there, and I was envious of them.

A few minutes before the hour, the door to the office opened, and out spilled the small group of officers. As they moved through the door from the cramped quiet space to the large noisy room, mid-sentence with each other, a private joke or whispered comment passing between them followed by a look over their shoulder back into the office, their eyes and attention passed from each other to the synchronized rumpus before them, to us, the until now unsupervised and unruly crowd.

In moments, their tense composure, edgy reserve, and self-conscious swagger morphed as they grabbed their instruments and music and slid into their own places, cast grins and quick words to those nearby, and an easy loosening and perfectly teenagery slouch returned to their bodies. We non-officers made biting envious comments to each other about the injustice and unfairness of who was chosen by the director, typically boys, to be officers. But friends nonetheless, we swallowed them up, and we swirled and pulsed and giggled and sagged and bleated until at the same time each rehearsal, two minutes past the hour, when a long sustained floating A became discernible amongst all the other noise. Slowly, as though filing into line, we placed our folders on our music stands and swung them open, pushed cases under our chairs, straightened our posture, and phrases and warm-ups and noise faded as each musician began to tune themselves to that note. The director emerged from the office as the last of us made our pitch adjustments and walked to his position in the center of our half circle configuration, pulled his baton from his pocket, opened his own black music folder, and then, and only then, looked up at us. He could expect to see all of us, quiet now, looking right back at him. We were ready to play.

It was a flawed place, competitive, stressful, and it operated on favoritism and unspoken rules. But we were thankful for this place nonetheless and for the music we could skillfully make together. We came from public schools where the music programs were underfunded, nonexistent, troubled by difficult behaviors or missing brass sections, where clarinets squeaked when phrases were technical, trumpet players blatted and lost their embouchures mid solo, and cymbals clanged grandly and unintentionally comically, just after the final beat. More importantly, we all loved this place for what it held for us beyond music.

For that teeming rhythmic mass that we entered each rehearsal, in a place in the woods far away from where we spent the rest of our days, and for some of us, far away from our other selves. Where we could interact with each other without much adult supervision, play around with our growing independence and competence and desire to be connected, seen, and feel close to one another. In this place I worked out the art and power of careful attention, of observation, and how to wield it, watching sideways as I put together my flute what was new in the room each rehearsal, a new flirtatious coupling perhaps, someone who seemed a bit off—I was figuring out where I wanted to be in all that. Where we could imagine or act out our antics within a small and safe group, and experience all the earth-shuddering boiling waves of happiness, anticipation, hope, failure, and pain that is the music of the teenage years.

•••

There is in every child at every stage a new miracle of vigorous unfolding, which constitutes a new hope and a new responsibility for all.

Erik Erikson

I’m struck by just how much detail I remember about this place from so many years ago, the distance of time, place, and who I was then seeming so vast. There’s a well known phenomenon in memory studies, referred to as the reminiscence bump, in which we remember more from our adolescent years than from any other time in our lives. Much has been learned in the past few decades about brain functioning and development, and particularly about the unique changes and processes that are characteristic of the adolescent brain, developmental changes occuring in levels of arousal, reactivity, and emotionality. During these years, the influence of experience on the brain is particularly strong, and teenagers remember more, both the thrilling first encounters and the mundane moments. The adolescent brain becomes more sensitive to and aware of social information, more interested and responsive to reward, and less responsive to perceived risk, likely controlled by changes in the the brain’s reward system, specifically the dopamine system. Adolescents are more attuned to the world, more likely to be influenced in enduring ways.

I’m able to call up the smell of those woods, the feeling of navigating those strangely spaced stairs, too short and shallow to be able to run up using my normal stride, too far apart to skip a step in between, the flutter of my stomach in those seconds between turning my car’s engine off and pulling on the car’s door handle, caused by both excitement and anxiety.

I’m made anxious all over again remembering the rehearsals when the director imposed unannounced practicing inspections, during which, after obvious wrong notes came a few too many times from a particular instrument section, our director became calmly enraged, a combination I found terrifying, slowly placed his baton on the music stand, and left the room. A few seconds later, we heard a slow motion scratch, as he dragged a chair from his office and returned to his conductor’s stand. And then, he pointed that baton at each member of an instrument section, one after another, and had you play that section alone. If you flubbed, whether due to lack of practicing or for me, the sudden onset of full bodied prickling of nerves, uncontrollable sweat, and fingers that refused to move, our director gestured with his baton a shameful half do-si-do with the person beside you, moving down in moments the ranks you had slowly, arduously, intentionally toiled to move up for years.

There was a brief period when I eagerly waited for a boy to pick me up and drive me to those rehearsals. I waited for him in the large picture window of our house in a cul de sac, and upon his appearance round the turn at the end of our street, I dashed out of my house and down the hill to his car, as he hopped out and flung open his roof for our drive. As we zipped down the street, my hair blew in my mouth and flicked into my eyes, though I could still see my parents’ panicked faces watching from that same picture window, scanning for a seat belt, tires that were all inflated, two teenage boy hands on the wheel.

Those days we flew down that long dirt road hitting every pothole squarely, spinning out on the sharp turns. For that brief time, I had someone to run up those steps toward the bright spilling light and enter the noise with, together. Where the regular beat of the room was augmented by sensorial spikes from the stomach fluttering thrill of finding him across the room watching me, sensing his eyes on my back, sitting two rows behind me, the thrill when he jogged over during breaks, saxophone around his neck, and skillfully slinked around the music stand and into the empty chair beside me for a quick chat and a brushing of our hands against each other.

And it was in that room that I lost that first boyfriend to the first clarinet player. The girl who sat straight across from me for a year, just the director’s music stand between us, that stand disappointingly unreliable in helping me hide from her adoring eyes for my now ex-boyfriend who still sat straight behind me. During breaks I practiced controlling eye gaze and facial expression, whispering animatedly to my friend on my right and neglecting anything to my left to avoid taking in their lusty canoodling against the line of folded chairs in the corner.

There are so many parts I can pull out of the auditory stew of that room and the world it opened to me. I’ve drawn on this place, this time, and all of the experiences and feelings and firsts I had as a result of it. These experiences are uniquely mine, and I pull them out at different moments for different purposes. As a parent, I use the pain, loss, awkwardness, and simmering yuck to remind myself of how huge this all feels to my children as well. I sometimes completely ham up the band nerd part of my past, when I am trying to amuse them. What I know from back then: that no lost love ever chooses to move on with someone you do not run into often. I think of the trips where we traveled and performed in other countries. The pictures I found online of the cool kids, including that boy, obviously in his after me state, which was curiously much cooler, longhaired, arguably hot, and not mine, playing hacky sack, while in the periphery, I found me, permed and not so fabulous, sitting with my kind but nerdy friends snort laughing at jokes in the shadows of the Alps.

I had my narrative I had woven about this place, in the woods, at the end of a long road, where we went and left our parents behind and felt things more strongly than we ever would again. About what it held for me, the opening of myself, the growth, the feeling of belonging, of being seen and held and let go. Now, it also holds explanations for both who I have become, and who I have chosen not to be. It holds the people and things that I no longer have in my life, like the smell of hairspray and burning hair, a childhood nickname. Observing it across these years and from afar, my own teenage children standing at my side, I feel the strength a place like this gave me, but also the power it held over me.

•••

The developing brain is sculpted both by passive exposure and by active experience. That means that before your brain has fully matured, we can be affected, in potentially permanent ways, by every experience, whether it’s positive or negative, whether we understand it or not—in fact, whether or not we are even aware of it.

from Age of Opportunity, by Laurence Steinberg, Ph.D.

Dear Rebecca,

It’s an email from him, but as I read it, the text changes into his small tight handwriting in that stack of folded letters, the convertible driving lanky armed saxophone playing boy from thirty years ago. His character has been re-sorted multiple times over the years, from love to villain, friend to past. That boy, his car, his attention to me. He was the one I chose to stand beside in those years of growth, caring and hurting and being changed by each other. Who wrote to Rebecca back when I was still Becky, somehow knowing enough, more than I did then, of who I would become.

Have you heard about our band director? he writes one day, after we’ve exchanged a few emails, reading in each other’s messages who we have both become, as well as tentative glimpses at who we were to each other back then.

No. What? That’s all I write, but in my mind I am instantly and unwittingly thrust through a door of yet unrealized possibility. I know what he is going to tell me, his question enough to allow what was passive to become active, to open my eyes to other details in that room that had been there and encoded, but never in my full awareness. And soon, from across the country, this man writes to me of what he has learned, of allegations of our director’s sexual misconduct toward children, of secrets, of hurt, charges made but never proven. He’s reaching out, pulling me to stand beside him, a person from his past who saw what he saw, who needed this place as much as he did, to re-sort and discard and insert this new possible truth. We stand together, on opposite sides of the country, knowing very little about who each of us has become, and look back. I think back on gossip, glances, and silence, and I realize that what I interpreted as favoritism, or sexism, was potentially something far worse.

As we re-enter that room of adolescent haze and first experiences together, walking through it now as adults, adults with teenage children, suddenly it’s the light behind the office door that’s more in focus than the dizzying whirl of the larger space we shared and stirred. I turn to this man, holding the echo of that boy for him and he the echo of that girl for me, with whom I had my first intense relationship, a relationship I am beginning to realize formed amidst darkness and confusion, oozing between us and within us and around us in that room, a part of our own growth. And I realize. This place that we protected as uniquely our own, when we were there, and after. It did not protect us.

I wonder what I knew and didn’t know. What my limited experience and exposure kept me from understanding. What I attended to, as I was developing my own control of attention, observation, and influence. I grew up, married a different boy, became a parent, and watched my own children be whisked away while I observed from my own windows. And still. It was not until the question was raised by a boy from my past that I ever connected the things I learned and experienced later to what was happening beyond my awareness back then. That boy who knew a bit of my future pulled me back to better know, to attach meaning to, my past.

•••

What do you do when your story gets refocused and rearranged? What do you do with the telling of something that you feel shame, sadness, remorse, guilt, and yes, relief, about? How do you accept that a place, a person, a decision, a time, can allow such vigorous unfolding and potentially cause such debilitating harm?

Only now, as an adult, can I begin to fully realize the awful possibilities of things that can happen when vulnerability and power collide. By protecting this place as ours, as a refuge to grow and to change, in this messy, reactive, encircling, feral world we lived in at that age, we interpreted what we saw with the capacities of a child’s mind, through the lens of our self focus and experience. We held back information that might have allowed other adults, with their more mature understanding and experience of darker truths, with their awareness of things outside of that room, as less egocentrically and hormonally motivated people, to have sensed or realized that something was very wrong.

These days, there’s much discussion in the world about how these things happen, how a culture of abuse, of misused power, imbalance, physicality, and need, creates conditions in which so many small offices with closed doors can exist. As growing numbers of these rooms, rooms framed by walls and rooms framed by access, information, and privilege, come into focus. I’m beginning to understand the forces that keep these doors closed. And I am realizing that we all have the power to, and a role in, hurting others. By such simple acts as what we attend to. And what we do not.

I’m turning my awareness now to that door to a small office of my childhood and filtering out normative adolescent developmental noise, focusing, listening now to the vulnerabilities and losses and hurt that can be within that amalgamated sound as well. When back then it was all about the sound, the reward, the responsive movement between people, now I’m hearing more in the silence, the pauses, the turning away, the action that was out of step with the overall mass. I’m holding that all, adjusting, trying to learn to listen better.

We have a lot to learn from our own adolescent selves as adults caring for children in the grip of adolescence. We have a lot to learn from our children about who we are, and what we are capable of, as well. My daughter is reading the Book Thief by Markus Zusak, about a family in Nazi Germany during WWII. I’m editing her term paper, and she has chosen the following quote to write about:

I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race—that rarely do I ever estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant.

from The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak

She’s now the age I was when I first noticed that boy across the room. She’s grappling with this quote and the ideas it holds, thinking about the coupling of ugly and glorious. She has the words, the exposure, the concept that these are parts of one another. But I still think, that when placed in a room of brilliant noise, she wouldn’t recognize the darkness. For this, for so much, I am grateful. Do we have a right to ask our teenage selves, or our own teenagers, to be hyper vigilant? To open their eyes to potential evil and danger? Do they lose something if we do?

•••

REBECCA STETSON WERNER lives in Portland, Maine, with her husband and three children. Her essays have been published by Full Grown People, Taproot Magazine, Mamalode, and Maine the Way.

I’m with the Band

[This is kind of art you get when your editor is a former band geek. —ed.]

By Rebecca Stetson Werner

In the enormous domed metal building—a cavernous space dominated by three regulation size basketball courts where adults coach the kids’ teams, shouting to be heard above the din—I find the court for Nicholas’s game and quickly sit down on the bleachers. Every once in a while, a dissonant buzzer shrieks, so awful a sound, so jarring it makes my scalp tingle, and I curl in on myself in anticipation of the next blast.

Nicholas’s good friend passes him the ball. He catches it, sort of, but his grip is not quite firm enough, and it barrels on through his hands and down onto his shoe, bouncing out of bounds. I hear a groan and a snicker from somewhere to my left. I fight the desire to turn and glare at the person. Nicholas smiles, forcedly, and I see him apologize to his friend.

Then he throws me a pained look. Hoping to communicate with him as the one person in the crowd who knows and holds his vulnerability, I try to return my best version of what proves to be an impossible expression: a blend of a smirk moving into a softening around the eyes and then a goofy grin, with a bit of a shoulder shrug.

But I am not sure I get the expression right, and I may have missed my chance to connect and communicate with him. Because today, from the moment I entered the arena, I have retreated to the sidelines, taken a stance as an outsider. I am tense, self-conscious, distracted, and frustrated with those around me.

While all the other parents on the bleachers chat and yell and gesture and growl, I am caught up in my own head, spinning through a series of questions. When did this happen? How did we get here? When did we stop wanting our children to play nicely together, stop insisting on apologies when they hurt one another, stop valuing kindness and social skills above competitiveness and drive? And when did it become a good play to foul someone on purpose? When did we stop calling careful with that stick across the playground and start shouting check him?

“Out of the paint!” one parent bellows. Another shouts, “Boards!” every time a player shoots. I have no idea what they mean and wonder if I may be eavesdropping on a bizarre carpentry-focused reality show. I amuse myself for a bit by trying to overlay this crowd’s behavior onto a playground scene from when our children were younger. I imagine what it would have been like to sit on the benches next to the swings with coffee cups in our hands, interrupting one friend’s narration of her clogged mammary gland to shout to one of our kids: Swing harder! Pump those legs! Come on, work those monkey bars! Share those Cheerios!

I’m tempted to turn to the parents beside me on these bleachers and offer an explanation for myself: I was in the band.

•••

In high school, I was a band geek, although there were lots of other, less kind names for members of this motley gang of musicians. On Friday nights, when the popular kids would sit in the bleachers with their French fries and sodas and cheer for their friends on the football team, I was there, too. But off to the side, clad in a royal-blue polyester men’s uniform, helmet perched atop my head, its plumes long ago snapped in half, yellowed, or simply lost.

On school days, I stood when the intercom called for the pep rally participants to go to the gym, and I left the room with all the Blue Knights in team jerseys and school colors. In the gymnasium, however, I was absent from the groupings of chairs in the center of the polished wood floors. Instead, I sat First Chair, adjusting my piccolo to a well-tuned B flat and offering it to each member of the pep band. Then I’d sit down again and await our turn to accompany the cheerleaders and play our school’s fight song.

And it wasn’t just pep band. I could also be counted on to maintain the spacing and pace of the most complex marching band formations, my whole row guiding left toward me, peering across the music holders affixed to their bent elbows. In the two-person pit orchestra, I routinely covered three woodwind instruments during school musicals, and would lean across the flute, piccolo, and oboe that lay in my lap so that I could reach the keys of the synthesizer. I must admit: I am a bit embarrassed for myself right now as I write this. Total nerd. But these musical talents did help me pass a bit socially, counterbalancing my polyester uniform and allowing me to relate to the jocks and popular kids. Sadly, these impressive skills were not sufficient to produce a flurry of prom invitations.

At some point during high school, I began singing, a sensible extension of my musical activities. Although some of my most important relationships were formed through singing groups, I never felt completely at ease in the choirs I joined. So I wasn’t surprised when, after her school choir concert, our daughter Julia unintentionally voiced what I also struggled with when singing. I asked her what it had felt like to be on stage, to stand before an audience.

“Well, I liked it when I played the xylophone,” she said. “I knew what to do with my hands. I didn’t know what to do with them when I was singing.”

Like me, it seems, Julia may be an instrumentalist at heart. I was accustomed to holding and playing instruments on stage, to having something protective between me and the audience. I often carried my black cases with me to keep my instruments warm enough, or because they didn’t fit in my locker, also conveniently giving my hands purpose as I moved through my school’s crowded hallways. I used to practice fingerings for scales on my desktop. It gave me something to do while I chatted with the more gregarious kids before classes began. Even now, when I am feeling nervous, my adult fingers long for the feeling of my oboe’s cold wood and silver. I can still call forth the smell of cedar and beeswax and saliva wafting up into my face as I open the case. I can even hear the creaking of the hinge as it opened and the snapping shut of the lid to my reed box. I mentally run my finger down the turkey feather I used to swab my oboe dry after I played.

But singing? As Julia said, it’s just you and your voice on the stage. But I pushed through this unease, this vulnerability, for whatever reason, and it led to something, someone, for me.

•••

My husband, Jonathan, and I met in our college’s choir. He was a dancer and a singer in high school. He tells me of an awkward stage involving leg warmers and acne medication and asking a friend when football rehearsal was over. When we met on his first day of college, I was his assigned greeter, or what we called a hand holder, sitting with him while he waited to audition for the choir that I had already joined. What I noticed about Jonathan—after overcoming my fascination with his strange fashion choices, including a do rag, white t-shirt, tightly cinched pants and shirt cuffs—was that, though I was there to make him feel less nervous as he waited, he was not nervous at all.

The next time we met was in the basement storage room of the performing arts center. I, in my role as choir manager, was responsible for fitting the newly selected men for their tuxedos. This was my first time measuring inseams for men’s attire, and Jonathan, third in line, intervened. Clearly I looked as confused and mortified as I felt, awkwardly holding a measuring tape, trying to figure out how I was going to determine pant lengths for all these young men I did not yet know. “Have him hold the top, and you hold the bottom down by his ankle,” he suggested.

Ah. Ankle. That’s good. I can handle ankles.

But I think the night that our relationship moved from friendship to more than that was at the famed a cappella karaoke night. That evening, we sang each other’s songs. Which is not a euphemism. We actually sang each other’s solos from our respective a cappella groups. There were a lot of red plastic Solo cups in people’s hands that night, though not in his or mine.

He actually volunteered to sing my song, confidently and in full voice, which was a folky Tuck and Patty love song. Jonathan knows how to work a room. But I was then involuntarily pushed up to the front of the crowd as his group began the accompaniment to his signature song, “The Reflex” by Duran Duran. He typically performed with full choreography, and there was clearly some expectation that I would shimmy along with his group as they boogied down. I was completely terrified and uncomfortable and breathless and uncool and not at all uninhibited by the contents of a Solo cup. Yet he stood in the middle of the crowd and mouthed the words for me, smiling warmly the whole time.

In that moment of my vulnerability and his strength, my discomfort and his ease, and during many other moments in the next few years in which we flipped and flopped roles of lending support and revealing weaknesses, our friendship grew into understanding of and love for each other. We were able to give each other what we needed when working through our most difficult, most vulnerable moments.

There was the night, sitting in the middle of our college’s clay tennis courts, in which he—overwhelmed by his work and the high expectations and his exhaustion—confessed, “I’m not going to be able to do this.” And I told him he could, and we did. Together. We created our us and, eventually, our family. We sang Tuck and Patty while rocking our babies years later. And our kids still think we are so weird when we lapse into the fle-fle-fle-fle-flex refrain on road trips.

Back then, we didn’t think about selecting someone who had skills that complemented the other’s. We didn’t anticipate the need to tackle our own home improvements or the requirement that we support all of the different homework subjects. Or that one person’s musicality should be rounded out by the other’s athleticism. And therefore, given our poorly planned love, our house is repaired with duct tape and the kitchen faucet drips. Yet we have inadvertently managed to rock the homework subject coverage at the kitchen counter. And, although our three children each fall in their own unique place on the continuum between gregarious and introverted, luckily, between Jonathan and I, we truly understand them.

Yet without question, our weakest collective skill set is athleticism. Jonathan is a self-described great blue heron with sore knees when asked to assume an athletic stance. And I am awkward and clumsy and often find it difficult to walk across a room without tripping. Of course, as with home improvement and homework coverage, engineering well-rounded genetic loading for one’s potential offspring is not typically how one goes about choosing a mate. One is much more likely to be drawn to another who likes the same things, someone who also shows up to the same a cappella karaoke event.

•••

This us, Jonathan and I. What we know from experience, despite our lack of sports expertise, is the importance of allowing oneself to feel and express one’s vulnerability. And we know the importance of where you place yourself in a crowd. As a couple, we are the result of the push and pull of social dynamics playing out while two people connected amidst a crowd’s pulse and noise. And we know how coming together—finding each other through an extended moment across the room—can evolve into a life together. A dance in which two people stop synchronizing themselves with those around them and fall into their own rhythm. Jonathan and I? We wish for nothing more than these moments, these connections, for our children.

Lately, I have been returning to that nervous, uncertain glance Nicholas shot me across the basketball court. About who I was, or perhaps wasn’t, for him in that moment. And about how Nicholas saw me, sitting among the spectators as well, caught up in my wonder at how our children are getting older and at how parenting requirements change with time. I lost sight of how this is all still about the connections, about forming the closest and strongest relationships we can with each other, relationships during our childhood serving as a springboard for embracing and moving out into the rest of the world. I want to change how I receive his searching look when it next comes my way. Though I know this will not always be the case, our children are still young enough that their raw and vulnerable glances are still directed at me.

Nicholas’s glance has also sent me back into my memory of that moment, albeit a more grown-up moment, between Jonathan and me so many years ago. Of the feeling of finding Jonathan across the crowd. And how that look moved us forward, shored us up, and helped us live. And the desire for connection with Jonathan is still there. I still hope for our eyes not to pass over each other, searching through the mess of parenting and work and distraction and stress. For our eyes to meet and linger, for this look to make the noise around us quiet. Once these intense and precious few days of parenting these beings has shifted and they move outward, that Jonathan and I will still be us, still finding each other, as the crowd thins and moves on. And for our growing children to see this, to know we are in the crowd for them now and for each other, available and strong. And for them to someday find this for themselves with another.

•••

REBECCA STETSON WERNER lives in Portland, Maine, with her husband and three children. She has contributed to Taproot and Grounded Magazine; this is her second essay for Full Grown People. She writes about parenting, children’s books, and life in their very old home at treetoriver.com.

Into the Woods

By Gina Kelly www.ginakelly.com

By Rebecca Stetson Werner

Dear Lucy,

I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand a word you say, but I shall still be

your affectionate Godfather, C. S. Lewis.

Introduction: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

I am packing for several days away from my family, away from my husband, Jonathan, and our three children. I am going to spend much of that time in a hospital, I know. I am preparing for this by carefully considering what I will need and what I need to leave behind. I stand before my closet, my Wardrobe, and consider my options. I pull out two skirts. They strike me as nicer than my typical jeans and perhaps they will somehow help me feel more comfortable, more grownup, more respectable in the hospital world I am about to enter. Maybe I’m reaching for a fur coat as I pass through the Wardrobe and into Narnia.

I move from the closet to my nightstand and gather my laptop and cell phone and coil up their power cords. I take several folders and books of work I am in the midst of. And then I grab a book of fiction, thinking I might have a lot of time on my hands, and I toss it into my shoulder bag. The one I grab is from the pile of middle-grade-reader books I have recently collected from the library for Julia, our daughter. Books that expose young readers to the world outside their family, with themes of the difficult but doable, dark but with a promise of a happy ending.

Julia and I are working our way through this stack, both of us happily devouring the stories. So perfect for her because she is nine. So perfect for me because apparently this is what I need right now. As I enter this new stage of my adult life and grow up a bit, and I reach for the fairy tales of my childhood to help me walk through this new terrain and find a path through the dark forest. Just as C.S. Lewis promised. They are my sustenance right now, and, like a gingerbread house, they have me enchanted and captivated.

So. Two skirts, a cell phone, and a child’s book to keep me company during a very adult journey. I register the irony, and also how it seems just right.

Somewhere within me, down deep, I know. I know it is very important what you select for a journey. In your bag will be the only things you will have when you face problems, uncertainties, riddles, witches, and wolves. What seems random, what seems thrown in for another purpose, or by chance? Could be what you trade for your very life.

At least that’s how it works in fairy tales.

•••

As with all great art, the fairy tale’s deepest meaning will be different for each person, and different for the same person at various moments in his life. The child will extract different meaning from the same fairy tale, depending on his interests and needs of the moment. When given the chance, he will return to the same tale when he is ready to enlarge on old meanings or replace them with new ones.

Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment

My father has been gone from the hospital’s surgical waiting room for quite a while. Really, for a long while. Though I am not sure this is actually true. It feels as though I have been here alone—alone but surrounded by strangers who are separated from me by their own internal struggles and worries about their own loved ones—for hours.

My mother is in surgery, a minor surgery, a surgery resulting from her age, a “tune up” as we explained it to our three children when I told them that I was going to be away for two nights in order to be with Grammie in the hospital. I am here just in case. Here to keep my father company. Here to try to make sure my mother moves more easily through the complicated sequences of hospital care. Here to get her home as quickly as possible.

I have come to that place in my life: I am caring for my own children, big enough to not need me at all moments of the day, but often needing me more, needing me to be figuring, wondering, considering with them in more complicated ways. This time of tending my children blurs and overlaps with the beginnings of tending my parents. Helping them out here and there.

And then, my father returns to the waiting room from a trip to the bathroom and from a walk out to the car to find something to pass the time. He gives me a small smile and walks over to our chairs with his lopsided gait, never quite having regained his surefootedness after his knee surgery a few years ago. He eases into the chair beside me and says, “I should have left a trail of breadcrumbs. I got a bit lost.”

I look at him, assessing his seriousness.

He does not seem upset. If he was lost, he seems to have handled it. And then, I look down at my hands in which I’m holding the fiction I grabbed as I packed at home. It had remained tucked away in my bag until, alone in this room, I had dug it out in order to help me ignore the pain and sadness of the people around me, to drown out the daytime talk shows blaring on the TV in the corner of the room. To hold my gaze so I could give myself and those around me a sense of false privacy.

Its title? Breadcrumbs, by Anne Ursu.

In this moment, I realize that this book is my Floo Powder, my portal between two worlds. My magic beans, my potion in a vial, my key tied around my neck opening the last door I need to pass through. From the moment I started to prepare for this journey, and really for every moment, every major event of my life, there is a steady undercurrent of story. Moving like a river that guides and explains, flowing under the surface of real life. These fairy tales and children’s stories—with their themes and roles and relationships, their adventure and struggle with maturation and separation and needs and desires. They are told to us when we are young and are here with us in every conscious moment. We retreat to them, draw upon them, quote them, and use them between us as a shared experience and vernacular to guide us.

Fairy tales, given their oral storytelling origins, hold common truths. In fact, they must. For in order for one narrator to decide to pass them along to another, tales had to have been deemed good stories. Had to hold themes and roles and problems and resolutions that resonated with their audiences. They were told again and again until eventually they were written down. And then read again and again, until they became a part of our cultural history, and of our personal narrative and compass for our own lives, internal and external.

I look over at my father, my former woodsman, to see if somehow he knows, if he is referencing my book’s title. But he is not and does not know that I am reading this modern fractured fairy tale. He is instead listening to his own internal map, relying on the network of story that is within him as well, trying to make meaning, trying to understand these unfamiliar woods by following the rules of those storied woods he does know and has visited before. Hoping that perhaps he will know what to do now.

He and I have been adjusting ourselves to each other in these past hours, figuring out who sits and who stands near my mother during admission. Who gets the first kiss goodbye as my mother is wheeled off to surgery. Who answers the phone when my mother’s name is called in the waiting room. Who pays for snacks from the cafeteria. Who is in the lead and who is following behind on this path. It used to be him leading, always. But today, as uncomfortable with and as ill-suited to the task as I may feel, I think it may be me. If my father is not the woodsman, then I may not be the little girl anymore. Even if these woods are dark, and the nurses and wolves are scaring me a bit.

My father, as many do who reference this story, seems to have forgotten that the trail of breadcrumbs was faulty. On their first trip to the woods, Hansel cleverly drops white pebbles to lead them home. It is on their second trip that he uses breadcrumbs, his only available material, and these impermanent, edible, and disappearing trail markers are what ultimately cause Hansel and Gretel to get lost in the woods, unable to return home. Only then, faced with this problem, does Gretel rise to the occasion and lead the way on her own self-determined path to their happy ending. Somehow it is troubling to me that my father has forgotten that we don’t want to leave breadcrumbs, that what he needs is something more permanent. And inedible.

So far? My role is to hold things. I have placed my mother’s car keys in my shoulder bag next to my cell phone and have tucked her wedding ring, the one they snipped off her finger in case there were complications, into my change purse. Before I did so, I checked the engraving. The nurse had not cut through the inscription, my parents’ initials, followed by the date of their wedding. Somehow I am relieved. And like any fairy tale, each item I collect has some kind of meaning, some kind of purpose, each statement a window into underlying wishes and needs.

•••

This is what happens on journeys—the things you find are not necessarily the things you have gone looking for.

Anne Ursu, Breadcrumbs

My phone vibrates, a text from my brother. He is at work, a doctor, several states away. He hasn’t heard from me. My father and I have been waiting here for six hours for what we were told would be a three-hour procedure. I have not texted my brother for a while with an update. Because I am trying to sit still, trying not to move. Movement might be interpreted as panic by the imaginary wolves of possibility in the room with me. I am waiting for some information. I have been hoping not to have to send a message admitting that I have no idea what is taking so long. I know right now where my father is, but I have lost my mother for a bit.

Despite the states separating us, my brother and I are here together in this new place. Trying to figure out how to make this shifting role with our parents work. And how it will work between us. Because we are still the same people, the same children. We are still on the same path, walking together, he the older brother, me the younger sister. Our roles, our history, the story of our childhood together cannot be ignored as we take these next steps.

My trickster brother, my fellow backseat rider, has grown into a brilliant and successful adult. He actually saves lives on a daily basis. In his role as Hansel, his focus is on the world in front of him, and he moves through it with strength, skill, and confidence. He expects, as darkness falls, for the white stones he wisely laid earlier to begin to glow, to keep us safe, and he expects to know the right thing to do.

I’m not sure he would ever leave a faulty trail of breadcrumbs. That’s my role. I am much more likely to leave behind a trail of the accidentally vanishing variety, birds eating the crumbs and making our way home impossible. And this mistake would not shock anyone who knows me. I have been given the role of observer, wanderer, emoter, but rarely leader. My ear is more likely pressed to the forest floor, listening to the rumblings and undercurrents and meanings that are held beneath the surface of the action above. When I try to walk the path that Hansel would blaze, I trip and stumble and get lost, because this is not my role and not the path I would choose for myself. But with my lifetime of poorly chosen materials, I am afforded the ability to laugh at myself and not be very surprised to find myself lost in the woods because I was listening to the rhythms below, with no plan for getting home. I look about the room. It is relatively empty. There is no one to ask for directions.

Some time later a nurse and then a doctor come to tell us everything has gone well. My mother is doing just fine and is in recovery. I am relieved. And a bit angry at the doctor for the frozen fitful slumber my father and I have been plunged into for the past three extra hours. I ask a few questions. My father is quiet but asks for reassurances that she is okay. My mother’s doctor looks tired. I try to forgive her. I tell her I hope she can go rest for a bit. She looks taken aback. I realize that this was not the thing to say here. She is the one doing the caring.

We are told we have another hour before she will be ready to be transferred to her room. I tell my father I will be right back, and I go to the bathroom. I text my brother and Jonathan from the stall. I need a few moments of aloneness with my relief.

I emerge and go to wash my hands. I look at myself in the mirror. I reach up to my hairline and pluck a grey hair from where it has been sticking straight up toward the florescent lights. I stare at my reflection for a few moments before another person enters the room.

Mirror, Mirror.

•••

She had done her best to be prepared, but had not anticipated crazy people.

Anne Ursu, Breadcrumbs

Despite all my preparation, packing, and collecting along the way, I had not expected to get into an elevator with my mother, pale and scared looking, still under the influence of anesthesia. Nor had I anticipated where this elevator would take us.

“Did you and Dad get some breakfast?” she asks when she sees me walking toward her. Despite the drugs, she knows her role, her lifetime as the Baker. I feel comforted that she seems lucid. This is a very typical question from her. I answer that yes, we have. And glance at my father. Should we tell her we’ve had lunch, too? I wonder through my eyes at him. He does not answer. Unlike in fairy tales, we cannot apparently speak with our minds.

I squeeze in beside her and hold her hand, lifting my large shoulder bag above the railing of her bed. I turn to her. She is focusing on me. Staring at me. The attention is unsettling. I crack a few jokes and then swallow more, realizing that the recovery room nurses in this incredibly small space with us might see my retreat to being silly as inappropriate. Or more likely, as the rantings of a heartless mad woman. My father is silent, making himself as skinny as possible, standing behind my mother’s head. I am not sure she knows he is there.

“I think I might be talking funny,” my mother says thickly, as though her face is numb and her tongue non-responsive. And then, “Did you and Dad get some breakfast?” Her eyes grow wide, and even more scared as I answer that we have. And lunch, too. “Did something go wrong? Am I okay?” She’s garbling the words.

Her vulnerability is dawning on me. I respond by being overly cheery. I explain to her what the doctor told us, that it just took longer than they had anticipated, but that there had been no complications. I start trying to be funny again. My father can’t hear me. My mother is loopy and confused. The recovery room nurses just look at me. I am babbling.

“Did you and Dad get some breakfast?” she asks for the third time. I turn to my father, who either has not heard her or is really good at hiding his reaction. Are we trapped in some small circle of time together, sleeping in this moment for eternity while the rest of the world moves on without us? Or maybe I am just being childish and this is just something that happens when Moms come out of anesthesia?

This hospital. I was born here. And as if to make this all come full circle, I follow my mother’s wheeled bed out of the bank of elevators and onto the maternity ward. “Ah,” I say, “this is where we met.” I say it mostly to myself. But my groggy mother and her recovery room nurses look at me with equal amounts of confusion and concern.

•••

“Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”

C.S. Lewis

Once we are settled into her room, we focus our efforts on the same things that I imagine my mother and father focused upon when we were last here all together forty years ago: eating, sleeping, and pooping. I notice families outside her door taking their first walks in the halls together, babies pushed before them in wheeled bassinets. I see lactation consultants come and go. I watch some newborns being cared for in the nursery. I run into tired fathers in the kitchenette downing coffee. I think of my children, and of my now-woodsman, Jonathan, to the north of here. And turn back to my parents.

I order my mother meals on the phone and I take my father for a third meal in the cafeteria. On my mother’s ward, the mothers’ ward, we pass by the newborn nursery at its center. I see myself there as a baby and see my own children being given their first baths in nurseries very similar to this one. I quietly register that I am now like my mother in another way: there will be no more newborns for me.

My mother is struggling with her lack of control, of being the one who now needs tending, and her mood is rolling in unexpected waves. As she wakes from her long slumber, we are cast as children, then as evil step-parents, pulled in and then pushed away. Her eyeglasses now returned to her, she holds them up, looks at me through them and then not through them. With glasses. Then without. Over and over. She sees me blurred followed by invisible, and I am not seen well in either case.

I step out and go for doughnuts. I nibble from the gingerbread house for a bit and bring back treats to my parents. Upon my return, I once again enter this shifting, muddy, dim terrain populated by the where and who and when we are, and by what we packed and who all of us have been up to this moment. We crash and bump and collide into all of these selves in the room together. The Woodsman and Gretel, the Snow Queen and the Gingerbread House Woman, the wolves and the birds. Hansel is on the phone, asking me about medications for which I do not know the names. I try to make light, but know that I should have asked about this already. I would like to talk to him about how full and noisy and messy it is here in the room with all of our past and present selves dancing about like wood nymphs. But I don’t. I just go find a nurse to answer his questions.

The chaos in that room. The spilling and boiling emotions. The things that have been felt and seen and said. My instinct is to talk, to process them, as I have awkwardly attempted to do throughout the day. But I choose to hold them instead. And not just hold them, but bottle them, thrust in a cork, and pop them into my bag. That is something I can offer all of us. For now, I will keep my awareness to myself so we can all continue moving forward together. I can wait to press my ear to the ground. I can choose to just keep walking.

•••

Now, the world is more than it seems to be. You know this, of course, because you read stories. You understand that there is the surface and then there are all the things that glimmer and shift underneath it. And you know that not everyone believes in those things, that there are people—a great many people—who believe the world cannot be any more than what they can see with their eyes. But we know better.

Anne Ursu, Breadcrumbs

Finally, I am heading home. My mother is doing well. My father is at the helm. My brother will be here later in the day. We have our happy ending. Yet I know I have now entered unfamiliar woods. And that I am going to have to walk around in them for some time now. And contend with the rustling noises.

When I get to my car, I notice that I have a message. From my father, to whom I have just said goodbye a few minutes before. I dial voicemail and set my phone on speaker. I begin my long drive back to my children, hoping to meet them outside their school, to hear about their days.

I just got outside and noticed there is a steady sleet coming out of the sky. The temperature is hovering at freezing. But as you drive north, it may be slippery. I don’t think it is going to accumulate, but I wanted to let you know. Please drive carefully.

The Woodsman has returned. So I grab a bite of turkish delight. Feel the fur coats brush against my face as I pass back through the Wardrobe. Flick the reins of my Subaru. And head north, toward home.

•••

REBECCA STETSON WERNER lives in Portland, Maine with her husband and three children. She has a doctorate in child psychology but uses it mostly to help her better understand all of her parenting blunders and to help her children choose good books. She has contributed to Taproot Magazine and Grounded Magazine and writes about parenting, children’s books, and life in their very old home at www.treetoriver.com.