What Children Know

Madelyn comes back from the coop with a dozen brown eggs speckled with straw and chicken shit.  Her work is done. The day stretches before her with hours of free time for checking things out and making art. Out of nowhere, she asks me to paint with her. Madelyn is not yet three and an invitation of this kind is precious and unexpected. It had never happened before. She says that my names are Susie and Grandma and asks me to open the dark green paint. We select a pale purple piece of paper and begin applying the green, me in swirls and curlicues, Madelyn in thick patches of the foresty color. After a while, she starts to feel the blue so I open that small plastic container and the two of us start to go over the woodsy green with an aquatic blue. Several times, she says “this is beautiful” and indeed it is. It begins to look like a seascape, underwater, like the warm pool she swam in before she was born.  But I’m trying not to label, not to interpret. “This looks like seaweed. That looks like fish.” For her, it’s pouring out from inside her awareness onto the paper. It doesn’t look like anything. You can’t compare it to anything else that has ever happened. It’s just about doing something this particular day that gives her pleasure.

Art by Madelyn Rose Brown and Susie Kaufman

It’s magical to watch her playing. She brings no less than six baby dolls down from her house and lays them out on bath towels, walking around with her finger on her lips whispering “Be quiet. My babies are sleeping.” Several of the dolls are naked and they are all, in the nature of dollhood, motionless. It has a slightly ghoulish, war zone orphanage quality, but I’m trying to run with it, trying to get inside her fantasy. I don’t remember any of this from my Chutes and Ladders childhood. The only imaginative play I remember is running the length of the twenty foot living room like a plane taking off on a runway. I was convinced I could fly through the rusty wrought iron grates on the fourteenth floor windows out over the traffic on Broadway and mingle with the old ladies and the pigeons. I also sometimes inhabited a secret world that involved talking to myself which I did for many years, long past its acceptability. I often did this in the bathroom, already a private place. I would stare at the hexagonal floor tiles and wallow in the huge porcelain tub, all the while whispering some story of my own invention. I don’t remember the story. Just the comfort of being listened to, if only by myself. Both flying out of the window and retreating into this interior monologue seemed to be ways of navigating or escaping life as it was. 

Now I’m watching Madelyn from the exalted height of my seventy-eight years.  Frank and I are the elders in the four generation California family. We have a thing or two to teach her. How to rinse the paint off the brush. How to fasten the buckles on her sandals. How to eat spaghetti. But the nuts and bolts support that I can offer is more than balanced by what she can teach me, by her instinct for where art comes from, where storytelling comes from. I admit that I’m a little jealous of this unmediated knowledge. If she leaves her dolls at her own house across the driveway, she sometimes stops mid-sentence and announces that she has to go home because her babies are crying. She’s close to abandonment as all children are. That’s part of the story. 

She’s also looking into mothering and what there is to learn about being a girl, the younger sister of a boy who is devoted to his cars and trucks. I came of age in the ‘60s and had certain proto-feminist tendencies. The stories that appealed to me involved wicked witches. Princesses were my sworn enemy. They made me want to fly out of the window. Madelyn, on the other hand, has cases of pretend make-up that are part of her play-acting. She moves seamlessly back and forth from comforting her babies to collecting eggs to doing exercises on the floor to painting to looking at picture books to preparing dinner with plastic kitchenware. I type our names on the computer screen…. Madelyn and Susie. She is delighted when I show her how I can make them bigger and smaller, green and blue like our painting. There are still so many possibilities.

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Many Voices will appear on the last Sunday of each month and will feature contributions from the community of paid subscribers. In March, seventysomething looks forward to sharing the work of Lyn Chamberlin.

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Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.

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