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~ Just another way of stalling on my other writing

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Tag Archives: imaginary friends

Living Dolls

17 Friday Jan 2014

Posted by lionsofmercy in Blog

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Tags

childhood, Christmas, imaginary friends, prodigy, siblings, toys, writing

Before my family of origin reached a certain level of no-return disintegration, we had Christmas, and I had birthdays; and I could count on getting presents as naturally as I could yams and can-berry sauce on Thanksgiving. The red bike that Dad had to put together after I was packed off on Christmas Eve. The microscope. The doll (“Beautiful Crissy”) whose hair grew as you yanked it out of her head through a foramen previously unremarked (now in Gray’s as the sulcus crissaeum). The hair was auburn, her eyes were violet, and she succeeded at being almost alive.

Almost.

The sorts of physical things I wanted and did not get were ephemeral child-wishes, unfulfilled because they were just that. I don’t remember any particulars, just that there was a whole layer of the world marked “Baby Stuff,” meaning that they were appropriate enough for my age–but not for Mommy and Daddy’s prodigy, “4 going on 24.” I was taught to scorn and to sneer at other children and their puerile little urges: I was going to Johns Hopkins by way of Barnard, boy howdy!

As might have been predicted, this attitude and the fact that my Stanford-Binet IQ of Far-Too-High might as well have been tattooed on my forehead made me unpopular. So the thing I wanted more than anything else was a sibling, so that I’d have somebody to play with.

But my mother’s uterus was tilted, so none were forthcoming. I grew up alone and lonely–no living dolls to help diaper and love, to boss around, to bring into my complicated universe of talking animals and superheroes.

It worked out in the end, I guess. I had imaginary friends instead, which became the bedrock of my growing up to be a writer. (So much for med school–as it turned out it was Harvard (English) by way of the University of Wisconsin (Art)–I really do wonder if my father, had he lived to be in the audience in Harvard Yard, would have thought the PhD to be as satisfying as an MD. Probably not.)

As a matter of course, my daughter had to have a sibling, so my own far superior uterus plopped forth a little brother for her. And she hated him on sight, and has more or less hated him for the 23 years since. Very little playing together; and her deep mournful desire was to be an only child. I’m told that that’s the way it goes: When dolls become really and truly alive, they bring a world of complications.

As for me, some things never change, and the thing I wanted for Christmas this year was that rubber-band loom I kept seeing in the toy and craft stores. Baby Stuff; I think it’s marketed for the 8-12-year-old market. Instead, I got a superabundance of very nice soap and a beautiful candle holder shaped like a lotus. (My daughter has bad taste in perfectly lovely little boys, but excellent taste in tchachkes.) And thus adulthood–one is very clean and has pretty things, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Especially when one has a little slab of plastic all one’s own, and can (feeling naughty) go to the store and get it for oneself. So there, Mom and Dad.

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Alone with My Thoughts

09 Sunday Jun 2013

Posted by lionsofmercy in Blog

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Tags

family, imaginary friends, imagination, introvert, overcrowded, solitude, sprained ankle, writing

Like I suspect most people who end up writing fiction, I have what one might call (if one pins me to the wall and makes accusing eye contact) imaginary friends. This was long the Secret of My Soul, until I hit 50 and decided that a lot of stuff doesn’t really matter. I mentioned this casually at a lawn party to a delightful woman who then boldfaced shared that she wasn’t alone with her cats either, if one might put it that way. This made my summer. I wasn’t alone anymore.

I don’t make them extra cups of tea (although for a split second in a supermarket back when I was really sick I wondered if the roast were big enough) but it’s handy to have somebody to talk to (to think to?) who has the inside track and can call me on my sheep when said sheep hit the fan. Moreover, when my pals overlap with my fictional characters, I find that I can give them extra depth because I, you know, know them. (This doesn’t always happen. I’m not sure why not.)

But this essay isn’t so much about my imaginary life (the life I imagine), as it is about my imaginary life (the faculty within that births such imaginations). For the first, it centers around “I’d rather not be alone;” for the second, it’s more “Leave me the sheep alone NOW because I can’t think, thank you very much.” That is, I need to be alone with my thoughts.

I share a tiny apartment with two ferrets, two cats, two other adults, and the various toys, books, and art supplies pertaining thereto. The neighbors are . . . um . . . boisterous. Things were at a bearable status quo when my daughter, who describes herself as “surly,” hid in her room all day playing World of Warcraft on Skype with her boyfriend, but then my son moved in. It turns out that he plays World of Warcraft on Skype with his buddies. I play World of Warcraft all by myself, thank you. (OK, I’m in a guild, but all that’s probably another post for another day.)

My son is living in the living room pending our moving to a three-bedroom apartment. I hang out in the living room because I have this sort of ghetto desk out here consisting of an artist’s drawing board propped on a TV tray, because my desk (which takes up I-am-not-kidding half my miniscule bedroom) is covered with jewelry making cruft. My son and I get along very well (he isn’t surly), but when he’s not Skyping with several people at once, he shares his random thoughts with me. He has a lot of random thoughts, because I gave him the genetic gift of ADHD.

Moreover, things at work have conspired to keep me in the center and out of my office, and I’m um, stressed. I need to be alone with my thoughts, and have acquired an inner surliness of my own. My imaginary friends are cowering somewhere beneath my corpus callosum.  I can get a little inner peace by working on my artwork, but my own ADHD yips when it’s more than an hour and a half of that.

However: I have a nasty sprained ankle, gotten while tripping over a bag of old clothes and other detritus that I (in an attack of pre-moving virtue) was actually chucking. And I have found that I’m lucky not to be alone.

Several years ago, I had this idea (which I only wish I could blame on an attack of mania) that fat me could perform high-impact activities like jogging and club-style dancing. I micro-tore my Achilles tendon, which I ignored until I had a lump the size of a prune–and an orthopod who ‘splained that enough was enough, and my butt was going to be on the sheeping couch for six weeks, with crutches to be used to so much as go to the bathroom. I surfed up a terrifying blog on the surgery, with pictures (not linking you because it traumatized me, and I like autopsy shows) and decided to play against character and behave myself.

I lived alone at the time. I watched all of Buffy and all of Angel on Netflix, knit myself a giant knee sock to go under the nasty chafing boot, wrote a lot, and whimpered when I made myself tea, let alone had to go to the grocery store. It sucked.

But this time here I am, with the son making me the tea and the daughter cooking without much fuss. Even the kitten curls up with me at night. And it’s pretty swell. So I’m writing this with Pandora on my headphones cranked up to a suitably isolating level, and I can at least talk to you. Stress happens, and I’m lucky to be having it in a family that loves me and shakes me away from being alone with my thoughts, which all in all is good for me.

Sometimes.

Nova Terra

just another way of stalling on my other writing

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