The second semester of pre-school

(it could be worse)

oh yeah, we totally both feel things.

So, this week, our kid went back to pre-school and I went back to writing for money. I knocked off a piece for The Daily Beast and cooked up another good one that’ll probably come out in two weeks somewhere else.

Thankfully, I was on deadline for The Daily Beast when I dropped my kid off at preschool. Because he was crying about being left and I felt like a cold slice of hell for being the one leaving him.

But I couldn’t dwell, you know, gotta work. So I knocked that piece off and my head crept back up on me. I’m worrying once again — as I’ve worried constantly of late — about his first memories, particularly of his first memories of me. I don’t want them to be negative. I don’t want him to have any notion of abandonment. Not even a notion of it. But then we pick him up and he’s sad and so we have to talk about these things. We have to talk about sadness.

How do you even talk about sadness? Where do you locate it? It’s not like saying ‘oh look, you bonked your foot. I know what it’s like to have a hurt foot.’ Because sadness and abandonment, unlike a bonked foot, affects us personally. It feels like nobody else is feeling (or ever has felt) that particular pain. I remember feeling it, remember feeling homesick at wrestling camp, in fifth grade, alone on my own for the first time and I knew, of course I knew, that it was perfectly normal. And yet it felt like a personal injury. Like something that only I was going through. You, being a human being, also remember these private sadnesses.

Also this week, I went to see Garth Greenwell speak about his new book, Small Rain. He was in LA so I went to the bookstore. He’s a big name and Colm Toibin was interviewing him so the place was packed. I could only see because I’m 6’3 and so can stand in aisles, peeking over shoulders.¹

But anyway, Greenwell was talking about his latest book, Small Rain, which is about a poet who’s maybe dying in a hospital and he (Greenwell, not the protagonist, although maybe also the protagonist, I haven’t read the book yet) suddenly realizes that everything he knows — the efficacies of iambic pentameter and free indirect discourse — are useless in this setting. They won’t keep him alive for another moment. Machines, medicines, these will keep him alive. What good is intricate knowledge of the Beckett trilogy when faced with cancer?

And I think about this a lot. About how being ‘a writer’ is useless. About how loving books, filling your world with books and being able to talk about them is, essentially useless. If you filled your world with stocks, I tell myself, you’d be a millionaire by now. Even if I filled my world with plumbing how-to videos, I’d be more profitable. I can explain terza rima but I can’t fix a car, what the hell good is that?

But then I took my kid to preschool. And he was crying and feeling all these things and that was the moment for the writer. I thought of Greenwell’s short story from his book Cleanness where a professor tells a heartbroken student:

These feelings, all of them, they will get easier, they’ll stop being the only thing you feel, they’ll fade and make room for other feelings. And then, in time, you’ll look back at them from far away, almost entirely without pain. As if they were felt by somebody else, or felt in a dream.

And, in the story, it doesn’t comfort the heartbroken student; but it comforts me. And, as I told it to my kid, I could tell/experience that it comforted him. The fact that this was a realm I could talk into. Like, we (writers) don’t know much, but we know what it is to feel. It’s not that we feel any deeper and we’re certainly not any better at resolving them (or else we wouldn’t have to write about them), but we examine them. We try to know exactly what makes them tick. We’ve probed those depths. We’ve stared into our own fucking abysses from time to time. We know what it is to wrestle with sadness, how to recognize it and how to talk to it.

So we get home, we talk about our feelings. And it’s a new thing for both of us. I don’t know if you know what it’s like to have a tiny version of yourself feeling emotions for the first time, but it’s a wild ride. I tell him that it’s okay. All of it is okay, it happens to everybody and it doesn’t mean any less that it happens to him — which is a hell of a sentiment to communicate to a two-year-old, so it takes some time. But we get there. We get to the other side of our sadness. And, while that doesn’t make it any better, hopefully it makes it easier.

1. Such a normal thing for me now, but, every time I go to a reading, I think about how cool it is that I can do this. I used to see authors at Kramerbooks and Politics & Prose in DC and now I can see them at Book Soup or Skylight in LA. But like, if you’re not in city, you never get to see your favorite author. I remember the first one I saw, in college — Anne Lamont — and thinking well hell, there are real-life writers in the world. And that’s never really left me.