Street roots., October 25, 2013, Page 13, Image 13

Street roots
13
Oct. 25, 2013
Let . I your children find their own wings
K
Hi...........
Melissa Favara
Melissa Favara
teaches English in
Vancouver and lives
and writes in North
Portland, where she
parents Ramona, age
7, hosts a bi-monthly
reading series, and
counts her husband
and her city as the
two great loves o f her
life.
i amona has two new main things right
now: Halloween costume planning
md professional development.
Essentially, she wants the entire family to
be zombies this year, her seventh
Halloween, and she’s practicing her
research and penmanship skills because she
wants to be a professional writer.
On the first score, we’re not to be just
regular old zombies, because that would be
very boring. Ramona always picks our
common family costumes, and they’re
always multifaceted: Last year we were
Crow Witches, and the year before that, we
were Princess Superheroes (including
6-foot-5-inch Daddy, who wore my most
stretchy skirt over engineer boots with his
cape and tiara). So it’s to be a punk rock
zombie band, unless Ramona changes her
mind before the 31st.
Which, it must be acknowledged, is all too
possible, as Ramona is nothing if not
changeable. The professional writer gig, for
instance, is the plan of the last two weeks,
on the heels of plans to fight fires, own a
restaurant, and be a tree planter (and those
were concurrent desires - she planned to
do all of them at once).
The reason why I think that the zombie
idea might go out the window, or back into
the grave, is that I think it’s a funky choice
for a child who has recently developed a fear
of going upstairs alone because there might
be ghosts. This has been oddly frustrating
for Marshall and me because we’ve worked
ridiculously hard to make her room feel like
a safe place. In fact, in the early days when I
first moved into the house, that room was
legitimately scary. It had cracked windows
and scarred velvet-flocked wallpaper and
lead paint on the floor. Now, it’s pale yellow
and new-windowed and curtained and
carpeted and warm. What’s to fear? And why
does this particular fear annoy the hell out
of me?
I think I’m perturbed because I have so
many genuine fears on Ramona’s behalf, and
my current students are stoking every last
one of them. In my advanced research
writing classes, in which students each
spend 10 weeks on one meaty paper on the
topic of their choosing that I monitor and
aid with, I have students writing and
researching on the following topics: how bad
the effects of the Fukushima nuclear
disaster around the world will be (projection
— kinda bad); cyberbullying of teens (yet
another teen committed suicide this week;
Ramona will be a teen in 5 years = panic);
air quality in Portland and its impact on
children’s health (bad, bad, bad); the impact
of photo manipulation in media imagery of
women on adolescent female self esteem
(bad x 7). In short, whew. And she doesn’t
want to hang out in the pretty room I
painted when I was pregnant and dreaming
of her because of ghosts?
My biggest fear, always, is that Ramona
will turn out unhappy. And this fear flashed
across my brain again this week when one
of my students in my creative writing class,
a talented fiction writer with a lot of great
ideas and ambition, asked me the question,
“How easy will it be for me to make a living
as a novelist?” First, student X, if you’re
reading this, know that I think you have as
good a shot as anyone: I really mean it.
You’re good — really good. But the answer,
and I know this for sure, looking around
among my talented friends and thinking of
my own experience, the answer is close to
truly unlikely. What if Ramona’s ambitions
are also of the kind that face those odds?
After that conversation, I came home and
found on the dining room table a page of
Ramona’s research notes, which were
actually labeled, “resurrch nots.” Apparently,
she is writing a sh o rt story about monkeys,
and her parent-monitored Google session on
monkeys led her to record the following:
“All humens are acshuly monkys! Yes!
You are a monky! But you have uposibill
thums. There are a lot of diffrinses with
monkys and humens, but over the years,
monkys turn into pepol! Can you belev it?
We are monkys!”
Aside from noting the dubiousness of
certain aspects of the research sources, or
Ramona’s interpretation of them, anyway,
and the fact that she’s still quite an
eccentric speller (but so was Queen
Elizabeth I, and she has a whole historical
era named for her), this passage struck me
with the same kind of tenderness and terror
that I feel when I see a fledgling robin that
can’t yet fly, but is trying. That brave, bold
flapping. That defiant gaze. That sense that
so many things could happen to it while it’s
there on the ground.
We’re working on the fear of the haunted
upstairs thing: we’ve cleaned out the closet
and explored it with a flashlight, we dutifully
check under the bed, and we’ve brought
back the toddler era nightlight. I’m
absolutely stoked to find out what kind of
story Ramona will write about monkeys
turning into people. I’m excited to figure
out what a zombie punk band - a cheerful
one — looks like.
And I’ll continue to assist my students in
pursuing the topics that terrify me. I will be
a zombie. I will support whatever course
Ramona eventually settles on, and I’ll let her
do the settling herself. It’s bound to be an
adventure. And I’ll forgive myself for being
annoyed at the fears that don’t make sense
to me while I try to protect her.
Something I’ve learned from years of bird
watching: when you see a fledgling alone on
the ground, it’s really not alone. Look sharp
to the nearby branches, and you’ll see the
parents there, watching, waiting to dive-
bomb a cat or pull up a worm from the turf
for dinner. They mostly hang back, though,
letting the young bird figure it out, and only
intervene when they must, so the kid learns
how to make it out there when they’re not
around. It’s a delicate balance.
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