Don’t Worry about the Rock Orphans
This morning while my son eats his breakfast burrito and pancakes soaked in maple syrup, I color in the leaves of a tree I drew the night before. I color the trunk bright green, the sky pink. I draw a little nest in the elbow of the tree with two tiny bird beaks sticking out.
The drawing started out as just a tree with a sparse background two leaves dropped on the ground. It was a sad drawing. I woke up feeling sad and apathetic, I started drawing so that I would feel better. I often draw at the kitchen table because my son almost always reads during meals. I draw in order force myself to not stare at bad news on my phone.
A sad drawing is not my goal.
“Get your socks on,” I tell him as I walk to the high formica table I use for art projects and open my folder of ripped out magazine pages saved from when I worked at a craft gallery years ago. We need to leave for school now so that he won’t be marked tardy again, but I am compelled to finish what I am doing. It seems important.
It has been a sad couple of months. Two years in and we are all still recovering from the end of our family as we knew it.
The tribulations of life surround us.
But there is plenty of beauty. It has a been a beautiful couple of months too. I witnessed a wedding where the couple jumped out of a plane just minutes after taking their vows as a way to affirm their passionate love for each other. I was awarded a fellowship for a poetry workshop that I am excited to attend this summer. A kind friend lent me money without me even asking because she could see how much I was struggling. My son is healthy and beautiful. I am in love. In many ways I could not be happier.
But the bills keep piling up. I have two graduate degrees, but ever since I gave birth to my two-pound baby eight years ago, my career ambitions are non-existent.
I worry about being a single parent. I worry that he will feel like we didn’t love him enough to stay together. I worry that I accidentally convey stress over money too much and that it is making him grow up too fast.
These are the things I am trying not to think about when I find the perfect picture to add to my piece: a line drawing of a deer surrounded by pink and purple flowers, curled up on the bank of a river. I cut her out and paste her on to the paper. I cut out some round bubble clouds out of the index of the magazine, and cover the whole thing in pink glitter.
When my boy was younger, I made a giant tree trunk from butcher paper and pasted it on the wall, but no matter how hard I tried to get him to color autumn leaves to attach to its branches, he resisted, preferring to zoom his Hot Wheels cars down the slanted floors of our leaning Southern bungalow.
He has colored pencils and markers and books about drawing, all of which get summarily ignored.
But all children are creative. All children are resilient. This is not something they need to be taught.
My son throws back his head and sings “Let it Be” while strumming on the electric guitar I bought him for his birthday. He turned his K’nex roller coaster into a weather doppler. Last night when he played in the puddles, he imagined a rock orphanage where the orphaned rocks gathered together in their own arcade.
I worry about the rock orphanage.
“I’ve never seen a green tree,” my son comments, peering up from his Geronimo Stilton comic book. “It’s not supposed to be an actual tree,” I tell him. “It’s an imaginary tree.”
He accepts this answer, and doesn’t question the fact that I have devoted our hectic morning hour to creating this piece of crooked, imperfect art. We walk to school, down our tree-lined street. It has been raining for the past three days, creating a flooded mini ditch in front of the house where the city has just replaced the fire hydrant. My son’s shoes are wet from playing in the puddles the night before, but for now, at least, the rock orphans are safe.
