Invisible Leaps

Why To Play Hooky In January

“Jean, you have to clean your room today.”  

Jean is sitting on my legs; I am under winter blankets, still in bed. The light is dim, gray, January. 

“I object.” Jean replies, in an accent without geography and with a deep voice. Her fingers are pressed together beside her eyes with pinky afloat, as if she were holding an invisible teacup. 

“Who are you?” I ask.

“I’m Jean’s lawyer. Mr. Potatopants.”

“What’s up with your hand?” 

“I’m holding my spec-tacles.” She savors the word.  S-P-E-C-T-A-C-L E-S. 

“Mr. Potatopants, your client made a strange experiment in her room and has to answer for it.” I am reaching for my coffee. “It’s a mess in there.”

“I object to my client cleaning her room.” replies Potatopants.

“What are your rates, counsel? I don’t think your client can afford you.”   

“Indeed, indeed.” She feigns outrage.  Indeed, indeed is her new catch phrase.  Everything is indeed, indeed. She is giggling so hard that she and her spectacles roll off the bed. 

“Jean, let’s play hooky.”

“What’s hooky?”

“Ask your lawyer.”

Hooky is, of course, where I don’t go to work and Jean doesn’t go to school and we just hang out together.  We’ve just put popovers, Jean’s fourth favorite non-ice cream food (pho, lo mein, dumplings, popovers in that order) in the oven for our breakfast.

I begin the process of taking my new January resolution vitamin. Jean watches me, like a hawk, like I watch her. 

“I want one of those.”

“They’re for grown-ups. Look at it, it says for WOMEN.”

“I’m a WOMAN.  How RUDE.” Jean is joking and wide open, standing on a stool pouring tea. She looks to me with both excitement and guilt, spooning an enormous amount of honey into her mug. Children make fantastic, completely invisible leaps ahead – as this one appearing now in the kitchen completely metabolized in the turn of a head. This leap, although it must have been percolating more slowly in some subcutaneous, unconscious place, does not show signs of the labor of the forward motion. It simply arrives. This leap traded training wheels for trail speed and reads chapter books out loud, carting at least one hardback everywhere it goes. This leap is committed to rules and friends and is at work on a podcast called “Life Stories” at school. This leap makes up songs about boogers and says things like “Mom, how could you think of buying that at a time like this when prices are going up.” This leap is relentless in its comedy, sincerity, funny faces, and the pale, freckled beauty behind it. This leap foreshadows the person who will not be relying on their mother to make their way in the world.

Me – I’m not keeping up with her shine. I am under the winter blankets of my mind. I cannot be present enough to catch the number of butterflies made by this small person in my house, and I’m frustrated with myself for it. Maybe that’s why I kept her home from school today. Life is blowing right by, every moment, all the time. Whoosh. I’m dizzy and off-center. I’m in the blah which comes after your birthday party where you realize you love and are loved, all rosy on wine, and there’s no more party coming for a year. Or is it the post-holiday blah, or the back to the grindstone blah, the January blah, the I heard the news blah. I’m not depressed – I know how to identify that feeling. It’s a more sleepless feeling. A nebulous tightness in my chest. It’s 2024. I read the paper. I’m anxious.

A friend is at the kitchen table with a glass of wine in her hand on Hooky Day Eve. We are adulting. Jean is no doubt listening, until she can listen no longer. She enters the dining room in an oversized Hello Kitty sweatshirt and turquoise roller skates with an announcement. 

“Mom, I think I have anxiety.” Jean has a friend at school with anxiety. She also has friends with phones, friends with older siblings, friends with pierced ears – until now that's the one that really got to her. 

Our focus turns to her as intensely as if she were a wounded little bird who just flew in the room reciting multiplication tables.

 “Is it school? Is it money?” Jean is always observant about money. She reprimands me for not splitting when I pick up the check.

“Did anything happen? Did something scare you?” says the friend, as much Jean’s friend as mine.

“Do you miss Daddy? Do you have a fever?” 

“Are you Ok?”

“I don’t know,” she shrugs. “I’m scared there will be aliens in the bathroom at school. I never go in there by myself.”

“Come here and let me hold you.” She crawls in my lap, skinny legs and feet larger than mine in ten pounds of roller skates.

“I think I just wanted attention,” she admits. 

“That’s okay, sweetie.” Even the walls of our house seem relieved, the chairs, the candle – the funny, plucky kid who wants to do everything herself has returned to her place at the table.

“I have a friend at school who has anxiety,” she explicates to my friend.

“We can keep talking about it. What else did you hear about at school?” I speak into her hair.

“Instagram.”  

“What!!?” I am no longer feigning shock. 

“Dating Apps!”

“How do you know what a dating apps is, CHILD?”

“Everyone knows what a dating app is, MOM.” She looks at me like I’m a fool. Her arms, still around me, shake with giggles. She is happy to be in the conversation.

Jean belts the theme song to her favorite show about a team of magical beings who are the self-appointed guardians of the universe. “We are the crystal gems; we always save the day.” She has explained the plot to me, and I still don’t understand it at all.  It’s a world that remains only hers, like the world of mine which remains blurry to her. The grown-up world of headlines, wars, bank balances, aging, fears about futility and what it all means remains off stage for her, however much we talk our way through things. I had planned to start my January with the usual Capricorn bang; goals, health kicks, forward progress, plans!  Two weeks in, I’m a bit of a bust. I’m in the wind, not with it. I take the feeling to my office where I take things I don’t understand to put them into words. The conversation I have with myself is something like this: What the fuck is wrong with me? Why am I procrastinating like I was full of lead? Why am I not writing? Why am I not excited? What am I resisting? Why do I do things for free? What am I doing at all? What actually makes a difference in the noise of the world? I’m 49. I’m supposed to be a grown up. What do I want the next pieces of my life to look like?

I’m anxious. It snuck up on unsinkable me. Maybe I just want attention. 

I’m anxious about returning to the transactional world of the music business. I’m anxious about giving all of myself to music while stamping out any expectations about somebody liking it. I’m anxious about AI making my job irrelevant. I’m anxious about whether people will show up for democracy in 2024 when there's fighting on a new front every day, about whether creative interventions might help make any kind of difference at all. I’m anxious about what happens if I don’t try. I’m anxious that nothing matters. My therapist tells me “grind culture” and a list of things to do are as addicting as any other substance. I’m anxious about that.  

None of this thinking has made for something that will help me sleep.

It’s nearly bedtime on Hooky Day; we are in pjs. Jean has watched self-appointed magical beings save the Earth, the universe and galaxies unknown for far longer than I intended. She misses her friends at school. She’s looking forward to tomorrow. I convince her to do YOGA with me. She lights the candles and downward dogs and twists for about half of the class, then decides it is boring and begins hopping around, inventing balance challenges that elicit huge anti-yoga crashes until a dog enters the instruction video. 

Jean is enraptured. “It looks like he’s doing yoga! That dog is doing yoga.”  

The dog buys me a few last stretches as she imitates dog yoga.

“Mom, can I watch one more show?” 

“Absolutely not.”

While closing the house, I hear a weeping. I am startled by its intensity, the amount of tears on Jean’s face, the forlorn look in her eyes when I find her, after covering distance without knowing how.

“It isn’t about watching tv, Mom.” she shakes her head.  A sob comes out.  Her wet eyelashes make tiny black triangles. “It’s just that life is so intense. I don’t like it.”  

I swoop her into my arms, tuck her under the covers, pull close beside her. Oh my god. 

“It’s too intense, I don’t like it.” 

“I know you feel everything.” I mean what I’m telling her. “But Jean, the good is just as intense as the bad.” I mean what I’m telling her. “And one day you will know that seeing and feeling everything with intensity is a gift you can give back to the world.”  I mean what I’m telling her, however hard it is to navigate, even as a 49-year-old pretending to be a grown up.

“I know everything isn’t –” she struggles for the words – “supposed to be intense. It’s just that I worry so much about everybody. About you and my friends and me and everybody. I just need some things to not be intense. I just want to hear a story and not think about it.”  

“Baby, be gentle with yourself.” I wipe tears, rub cheeks, stroke shoulders. In this moment, a leap. I know that Jean’s feelings and inner life are very real, but that also my nerves have pronounced themselves through the very thin and porous membrane existing between a mother’s emotional life and her child’s. She keeps a close eye on me; she’s felt my anxiety without having words. In this moment, despite the list of daunting worries of January 2024, I become the self-appointed guardian of showing my daughter how to rest, give, and love no matter how intense modernity becomes. I will teach her how to care for herself in the only way I can teach her anything, by modeling it for her with honesty myself, no matter how many mistakes I make. I am no longer anxious; now everything is clear.