Scorpio Baby
It’s Friday evening and the town is quiet. I walk out to Stapleton along an ancient green-lane, stroke the cheeks of a chestnut horse, wonder whether the hedgerows are full of native or Spanish bluebells. Easter passed, and now the days are long; everything’s budding and blooming and coming to life.
At bedtime Forrest asks, ‘Why do I have to sleep when it’s day outside?’ And then, after a pause, ‘What’s inside my head, Mummy?’
‘Your brain,’ I reply, closing my eyes.
‘What’s inside your brain?’
I work hard to retrieve some information. ‘The amygdala. The frontal and pre-frontal cortexes. The hypothalamus…’
‘What are those? What are they made of?’
‘Sort of like sponge, I think. Like a big fleshy sponge.’
An endless appetite for questions. I’m suddenly aware of my acceptance at knowing so little. I don’t retain practical information; instead I feel everyone’s emotions and energy around me. I work energetically and poetically, and know quite little of the rational realm. But, I have given birth to a soul who needs to understand how the world is engineered, how a clock ticks, what distance means, how animals kill other animals, how an engine starts.
‘I don’t know,’ I find myself saying, over and over. But how wonderful, I think, to be so full of curiosity, waking every day with Zen mind, beginners mind.
As a Scorpio my four-year-old is also drawn to darkness. Armies, spears, bows and arrows. Hunting, war, destruction, the atom bomb. My mum took him to the library and they checked out a book called Hiroshima. ‘Mum, this is too old for him.’
‘He absolutely point-blank insisted,’ she replies. ‘He wouldn’t leave the library without it.’
Later, I sneak the book away, but the endless questions remain. ‘What’s Ukraine? What’s a tank? What’s happening to the people there?’ He decides he wants to make a sign saying ‘NO WAR’, so we do, and stick it to his bunkbed. Yellow and blue felt-tip pen on the back of a postcard.
‘When you wear a dress you look like a real mummy,’ Forrest announces one morning, pulling a face at my paint-splattered dungarees. ‘Can you wear this dress and glasses, so you look like a grown-up?’ He is already embarrassed by my appearance. My dad recounts a time when he collected me from primary school in his dusty work overalls. ‘Don’t ever pick me up in those again,’ I ordered. I wasn’t much older than Forrest is now, feeling the same embarrassment. I desperately wanted to be normal, and my dad was so weird. All the things that made him unique, that made him him, all those parts were awkward for me. He was steadfast in them though, and didn’t listen to my mewings. The head-to-toe black outfits, the swampy coffee, the old Saabs, the cheap red wine and French Café Creme cigars. His lateness was appalling to me. The holes in our house. The entire roof gone one year, a flagstone floor pulled up the next, so we lived a while in dirt. He took the front window out and left a gaping hole there for four years, right where everyone on the school bus could see. The door disappeared next, and was replaced by a heavy green curtain to block out the cold. I was deeply ashamed of this oddness, this roughness.
Now, as a parent myself, I see nothing more important than holding fast to my own idiosyncrasies. I guess my dad taught me that. It is not for Forrest or Holden to design me, nor for me to design them. I am allowed to embarrass them. I am allowed to take them to meditation centres instead of Centre Parcs, and on pilgrimages instead of bucket-and-spade holidays. I miss weirdness. I want more of it in my life. I want to talk to my dad about art and ancestors, late into the night with a bottle of red wine in his strange outdoor kitchen.
