From the time I was ten years old, I was the one and only, officially designated and paid nursery “helper” at church. I received a dollar for my work during each church service. Mrs. Wilson, an older woman, was the official nursery attendant and I was her only employee. She never missed a Sunday or Wednesday night for years and years. The two of us handled ten or twenty babies under the age of two each Sunday morning, faithfully passing out Ritz crackers and changing diapers and distracting babies from their distress at being abandoned by their grateful mothers in the church nursery for two hours.
The nursery was located in the back of the church in those days. A window separated us from the sanctuary. I imagine that window was just regular glass, but in my memory, it has turned into one of those mirrored windows where you see only your reflection on one side while the people on the other side have a clear view inside. As we tended babies, I felt like we could see out, but people could not see in, despite that window. Perhaps we had a curtain obscuring our view. But the feeling of being on display, in a fishbowl of sorts lingers somewhere deep inside my psyche.
From time to time, I feel like I’m inside this blog, toiling behind a glass, seeing only my reflection when I peer through the window . . . yet suspecting that I’m being studied by a critical group of people on the other side who have a crystal clear view. Now that people I see face-to-face read my words here, I feel like they’re looking at me, even though I can’t see them.
Obviously, I have delusions of grandeur and think that I am the center of the universe. I am sane enough to realize that this is simply not so.
My 4-year old daughter developed a dread of people when she was three months old. I took her to my mother’s house for Thanksgiving dinner when she was a three-month old baby. I expected to nurse her and put her down for her regular nap on my mother’s bed. My baby shrieked and cried inconsolable tears until I gave up and returned home. She immediately quieted once in the safety of familiar surroundings and went to sleep. She’s hated friendly people ever since. I try to explain that she is slow to warm up and by “slow,” I mean at the speed of a glacier and not one of those melty ones that worry Al Gore so much.
Although she is coming out of her shell and occasionally smiles and chats with random adults and visiting kids, mostly, she is reluctant to interact with people she doesn’t know well. When I dress her on Sunday mornings (or, more accurately, watch her get dressed herself because she is a big girl who not only can do buttons, but who can also whistle), she says, “Mom, will they look at me? Don’t let anyone look at me.” She would like to stroll through life without attracting any attention whatsoever, an invisible girl who appears only to safe people who don’t scare her.
I understand. On one hand, I want my voice to be heard. I want my viewpoint to be valued and my perspective to be validated. I want to feel as if I belong, as if I count, as if I am as valid as the next woman, mother, human being.
Inside, though, I am the girl who knows that people are watching me through the window and I pretend not to notice that I’m being noticed . . . and then, I wonder if anyone’s looking at all, but I don’t want them to catch me peering out. Smile, you’re on Candid Camera!
The trick is to carry on, to speak without considering popular opinion, to think without censoring myself, to frame my world in a way that pleases me, t focus on what seems vital to me and, perhaps, only me. Audience or no audience, the show goes on . . . this is no dress rehearsal, either, but the real thing, the only performance I’m ever going to give.
No one lives this particular life but me. No one can describe this exact moment but me. No one inhabits this sphere and orbits this trajectory but me. This life is unique. That alone makes my story worth recording. When I am gone, no one will slide into this place. I alone occupy this body, this moment, this place in time and space, regardless of whether or not I’m noticed or ignored.
So I write, even when nothing happens of note. I’m leaving footprints, broken twigs along the path, wisps of torn spiderwebs to mark my path.
I wish I’d taken photographs of my father during his last hospital stay. Those last eleven days haunt my thoughts, fragments of images in my memory, but not a single photograph of him in a hospital gown, propped up on pillows, an IV tube snaking into his hand. The trauma burned moments of those final days into my brain; the way his bloated hand clung to the armrest like a pale starfish, his slow-blinking eyes blind to the room full of those who loved him–I have no photographs of anything. No pictures of the funeral, of the people who attended, of the flowers on his grave.
As much as I long for pictures of that long ago week and a half, I wish more that he’d left a trail of words I could follow. I wish I could see the world through his eyes, even the mundane parts, the insignificant details, his private thoughts about matters big and small. He’s a stranger to me, a man who scarcely mentioned his childhood, who never explained his behavior, who hid behind silences and moods for reasons I never knew.
I wish he’d left a trail.
I wish he’d scrawled thoughts into journals. I wish he left a record of his day-to-day existence. I wish I had from him what I leave here . . . footprints left by an ordinary person, living an ordinary life. Whether or not people are watching, life slips and slides away, one moment at a time, until it finally runs out like it did for my dad, only twenty-one days after he turned forty-seven.
And so I leave words to mark my path, a paltry trail of breadcrumbs to show that once I rambled along this path, I went this way, I was here. I was here.
I was here.
Actual Unretouched Photo 