I’m trying to figure out what I want. 

What I want is to go to a public place and people I know will say to me “Hey how’s it going?”, but they will already know because we have talked so recently and they’ll have Listened. 

This could be called “friends”. 

But, to hear, “how’s it going?” and then some acknowledgement of the time that has passed. So much time that maybe friends shouldn’t be the word after all? Then in this conversation we are, aren’t we? Beginning again. Let’s. So it’s then necessary to think through the trash heap of life, or massive complexity of clothes and food scraps and driving and recent and distant joys and hurts of my life and decide, quickly, about who I’m talking with, and politics, and trust, and how much I feel like talking today to choose how to answer. I generally agree to adhere to the social responsibility of responding to other people when they offer communication, of acknowledging their ideas and curiosities, but I was trained too well to offer back what I think they would most want to hear—a behavior molded by criticism. Finally, I knowish that I owe this new/old friend nothing, and I owe myself more visibility than an edited shallow interaction. So, where to start? 

Calling my life a trash heap is not self-deprecation. I love and honor this pile and know that it is truly and organically growing, sparkling with fermentation, going back into the earth, yet, speckled with plastic trauma that will take all of my lifetime and then some to breakdown. And new loads of unsorted, odd, and disordered items of all textures and dimensions, still relentlessly appearing. All of it. 

I want our multiplicities to show all at once. 

And, here, growing amongst this heap is the most gorgeous of unique, still vulnerable, enigmatic lives. This beautiful and real kid growing upwards and onwards. I’m imagining him as “a flower”, he once self-defined as such, with his own separate stem. And don’t most plants connect and communicate deep down under the ground’s surface? 

Mushrooms do. The analogy is breaking down too; if I’m a trash heap, he should be in the trash species and he, confoundingly, decidedly, does not want to eat mushrooms. 

But, it’s not me who should be describing him. 

What I want is to say is join me, friend, in looking upon my kid with sweetness and amazement. To say, come help me make my love for this one even bigger. I want to say this fervently to all of these possible friends that ask how my trash heap is going. And too often I’m stopped. There are so many landfills. 

—

And, I want for him to shine independently, in this shining time (station), all on his own, and then be able to step back and see himself be wonderful. To love himself by seeing himself “whole against the sky,” which is some Rilke quote that I remember reading when I was somewhere younger in Brooklyn, living an utterly detached life. Rainer Maria Rilke, whom he was almost, but luckily not, named for; it sounds so much like a cloudy day. Of course, it’s hard to see such a crisp outline of a person who pushes the bathroom door open mid-stream to semi-mime the physical predicaments of characters he’s imagining mid-plotline. But that front row seat from the toilet does allow a person to get a good look at, and marvel over, the surprising wrappers freshly tossed into the pile. 

—

I don’t want to always be writing about dance, but I think I am still always writing about dance, because dance is—bold statement—everything that is right about life. Maybe you watched Dance Moms and you disagree with me, but that show wasn’t about what’s happening inside Maddie Ziegler’s dancing body, it was about entertaining behavior. 

Trashy, right? I didn’t watch it. 

Dance is something abstract and exact at once. It’s a new wrapper then a new wrapper then a new wrapper then a new wrapper. It’s open, it’s power, it’s vulnerability, it’s voice. It’s leave-all-your-sh!t-at-the-door ballet class and a tearful adagio and an ecstatic petite allegro. It’s effing Authentic Movement. And it’s primary, it’s a first stop in processing what’s in you and what makes you, when we don’t shut it down. 

It’s something that can be made and developed, it can be shared and even “successful,” as they say, before years later realizing why it makes so much sense for you to be dragging yourself on the ground in that way in that one piece in your 20s and how that choreographic phrase from a one-night gig adds something, one thing, so aesthetically right within the composition of your very own dump. 

Dance is my wish for future generations who are inheriting the question of where to start when describing the trash heap. 

—

Yes, of course, understanding, making sense of, expressing experience—all sorts of art can do this, any medium. There are so many tools and materials that can be found if you dig around in there a bit, in the trash heap. We use what we’ve got. We create as children for the joy and power of making things appear, for the feel of the crayon on paper, the overwhelm of color, the meditation and the visibly satisfying growth seen in repetition. We make for ourselves, we choose the content of our greatest interest and trust the authenticity of our marks. As a parent I witness all (or most all) of these drawings with delight at the proof of this human’s growing humanness and want to hold on to it until every end. It’s taped to the wall or put in the flat file that is under-the-couch only for it to pale in comparison with their current body of work emerging two days later. 

Everything is in motion and we are every moment enough. 

—

And, I want to know what the heck is up with all of Sir Topham Hat’s trains working so darn nervously to be “really useful engines.” Obviously, they’ve caused “confusion and delay,” they are kids. They aren’t, but they are. Punishing those little engines for having been born into a system that favors productivity and the service of their guardians above all else… Gross. Of course, Thomas wants to see that shark car instead of getting his passengers to work on time. 

The selfishness of youth is a developmental truth and appropriate for establishing a stable base of attachment, says the therapists of social media and beyond. Caregivers attend to their young lives and they learn that it is acceptable to have needs, even wants and wishes. But, I have, like so many and so many, been trained to be of use, to exist only for others, and I’m doing the work to stop and get the heck off of Sodor at the same time as parenting, which gets complicated. (Sodor is where Thomas and all the really useful engines work to prove themselves to Sir Topham Hat, if you are lucky enough not to catch that reference.) So, I’m trying to figure out what I want. I’m trying to get used to expressing my whole self. It feels like I’m just beginning to have a whole self, a whole glistening trash heap, against the sky, and then trying to voice this to others while so much of my time prioritizes another… 

I give over and agree to sit on the floor when the stuffies have taken all the good spots on the couch, I carry-on with, albeit slowly and softly, the end-of-day dance party ritual even with Covid, or Norovirus, or whatever February was because he asked me to, and I jump when he calls in the night, and I rarely cook with mushrooms, and I can retrieve the names of Thomas’ friends and list facts of about numerous whales, both prehistoric and extant, but stumble over whatever it is that I’ve been into these days, I don’t remember. In any other relationship bending and agreeing this way would be called codependence. But the stuffies are the someones most available when I want to talk about how proud I am of that kiddo and they are Johnny-on-the-spot when I’m not around to give a hug, so I respect them. I recognize that I am making space for him to be the center of his own world, in a world that wants him to fall in line and obey way too soon. I want to show him unfaltering, unconditional, unending love. I’ll be called Rainer, showering him with love, until he is good at doing it for himself. 

—

He’s making art prolifically these days. He wants to keep all of his drawings, to photo document the intangible, temporal mini-installations that happen at the playground or with the Magna-tiles, to carefully bring home every kid’s menu coloring sheet. Reams of printer paper never going near a printer. He wants to keep every paper without sharing. And this is fair. Because we all know, especially those of us who have taken our work and our souls to BFA or MFA critiques, we love what has come out of us until… We love even past iterations of our thinking and ability, or we have this bodily memory of when we did, until it meets with the inevitable judgment of the world. It was perfect because it was true, and now, you’ve been told that it looks like a fire truck with a ladder and not a passenger train car with windows, as intended. The colors aren’t right for your gender, there should be more, the audience will never see the fullness of the imagined background scenery. They don’t know how important it is for you to dance off to this envisioned place that you’ve only partially depicted whenever you need or want. And now, as we share, what you’ve made so easily becomes not perfect, not enough, not understood, not what was expected, even if it’s sing-songingly enjoyed. 

So we eventually pick-up a how-to-draw Star Wars characters book, we adapt for trendiness or saleability in order to continue in a climate that demands instead of wonders, or we change the music to appease an admired instructor who doesn’t want to see dance made to Paul Simon because of some crappy experience they had with some guy way back when. We alter our art to make it more unquestionable and we practice where to start when someone asks us about it. We call it a statement or an elevator pitch. And then what? We pull in and then what we make is ok, maybe it’s still clever or attractive or maybe it ceases to be art and it ceases to be of you. 

And this shrinking is a pretty good way to deal with all the Sir Topham Hats. When I get a new journal, often my first thought is that I need to write something simple, impersonal, uninteresting on this first page in case someone picks it up and looks at it. A buffer to protect the more vulnerable stuff to come. But then I don’t care what’s in there either. And my sweet one is keeping his stuff because it’s hard to fathom who out there is going to love his drawings as much as we do inside our home. 

— 

But he’s excited that his friends might come to the opening. Or I am. And, he’s been so thrilled to hang out and make art and play Penguin and eat snacks with this group of artists. The social elements of this show have been a full body yes, when the proposal of exhibiting a painting or a sculpture he favors, a hard no. And, I was somehow surprised. I forget because parenting and attending with such devotion can be so isolating. Yet, I’ve cast every dance I’ve made with either people I love spending time with or people whom I’m wanting to get to know. Dance is the landscape where I have strolled, gathering all of my most true friends, who unfurled there with me, without holding phones or carrying coal, showing each awkward and incredible chronological moment to each other, every raw page from the middle before tossing it aside. And, they still stick around laughing about made up language and accumulated jokes and still listening to you talk about your mother. 

I’m struggling to find an ending to this writing, to project to every end with tightness and tidiness, as is the commercial expectation. Day to day I sort through the heap with more ease, more comfort in hearing my own voice whether it’s directed towards friends or not. But I’m here now, you are too. The sky above the garbage is changing colors, getting dim. So goodnight my flower. I hope you dream about whales, and watermelon, and friends, and Gum-bye, and the beach and the sun, and fresh markers. Goodnight.