paisleypiper's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- being nine I keep thinking about this girl I know who, at the age of nine, is hospitalized with anorexia. Her father told me about it today, and he was struggling with the reality that his daughter is in the hospital, away from him. He and his wife can only see her for a while at a special time. Otherwise she is in a regimented program. About four months ago, she took her first solo bicycle ride around the neighborhood. And I saw her, leaning against a fence, protected by a helmet and knee pads, holding her bike, staring at the ground. I stopped, got out of the car, and asked her if she needed any help. We walked back to her house. Her father said �oh, it was her first solo flight.� Since then, she has been on many bike rides. But there was something remarkably restrained about the girl. I thought it was that she was shy, but she always talks to me. I�ve noticed that lately, she has really seemed caught, by what I have not known. I had no idea that girls that age could struggle with anorexia. Her father had mentioned to me several times that she was having a hard time. Ever since her grandparents died and the World Trade Center attack last September 11. This girl is incredibly empathetic and for the past year she has been haunted by not being able to do anything about any of it. She began pulling in, becoming regimented, on a schedule. All summer, she seemed to be doing better. Her father was teaching the music section of a performing arts day camp, which he said was great for her. And she seemed happy telling me about playing a song from Mame. But then she always seems happy around her father. So much so, I have wondered what it would be like to have a dad as neat hers. (He is a really, really wonderful person and so is his wife. They are loving and sensitive parents.) From the red in his eyes and the deepness of his voice, I could tell that he blames himself. That he keeps trying to arrange it and rearrange it in his mind. Wednesday night on the telephone he told me, it is all right, and in the next breathe, it is a mess. Today, two days later, he told me that at first it was completely shocking but now he has to get used to her being in the hospital. Her dog, who is usually right by her side, was in his little studio without her. And the house was extra quiet. As though a lot more sitting and searching was being done than living, which is appropriate in these circumstances. Sometimes it has nothing to do with the home. Sometimes parents can�t make life all right for their child. I keep thinking how hard it must be to be an intelligent, sensitive, empathetic girl in this world. I cannot imagine it, but I can sense the difficulty. I remember being nine and I feel as though the world were different back then. I was in gymnastics every day after school. I swam more laps that summer than anyone at the pool for a fundraising event. So many laps that the people who pledged money did not have to pay it all because the amount was so exorbitant. The kids at school were mean. And I was not allowed to watch Charlie�s Angeles. My friends and I played jump rope and hand clap games every day. Sometimes we played Love Boat and I always got stuck playing Doc or Isaac. That was also the year I built a fort in the brownfield near our apartment and the year I set up a fully operational telegraph system in the apartment that worked on little lights and switches, but no one would learn Morse Code. Finally, it became an eyesore and I got yelled at for stringing wires everywhere. I made custom sleds for other kids in the neighborhood in all sorts of shapes � cars, rockets, etc � out of cardboard and plastic sheeting. But they went too fast and I got into trouble. The piece de resistance was the non-functioning "robot" I built out of six old metal lunch boxes, a ton of batteries, some wheels and other found objects. I positioned it just inside the door and when my mother came home, she screamed and dropped the groceries. �Piper. You stop with these inventions, concoctions, and stupid projects. You will never get anywhere with this crap.� I can�t decide whether I am sorry or not for my mother for having to be my mother. I had to be at before-school by 7:00 so my mother could take the bus downtown. That being, I never had homework. I just did it before school while droopy children stared at Woody Wood Pecker (it is cruel to put a kid through that noise that early in the morning.) I was not particularly outgoing, but kids would permit me to be their friends just out of some sort of amazement at how grateful I was that anyone would want to know me at all. Yet I think even just in these few years the world has changed. I do not know that I would be able to be nine these days and negotiate that complex world. Do kids still play in cardboard boxes? Do they still paint them with tempera paint and transform them into something much more marvelous? What if you don�t like flip flops? A couple years back when platforms had made their big return, I would look at the shoes that little girls wore and wonder how anyone would be able to run in those shoes. Isn�t part of being nine the right to burst out into a full run at any given moment? The right to run and yell simultaneously in the park. Sometimes I think that although some good things have happened for girls, that it is getting harder to be a child. The world is getting stranger and no one absorbs the strangeness of the world more than an intelligent, empathetic child. My sleepy Friday night thoughts are with this girl, in a hospital, without her parents. And her parents at home without her. 11:08 p.m. - 2002-10-04 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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