Free Pass: On Glimmers, Magic, and Magical Thinking
We get into the play place for free. The man at the front desk types my name into the computer and there it is: a pass. If a friend says you referred them, you get a pass, he says.
Who is this fairy godmother friend, I wonder.
Inside, there are Swedish-looking wooden structures to climb, and costumes hanging from a row of hooks: dinosaur, rooster, flower fairy. Joey, my three-year-old, chooses a galaxy-printed cape in a category he calls “rocketspace.”
There are balloons. There is tea and coffee for the grown-ups. They have my favorite, hot cinnamon, in an orange tin.
I’m transported to Cost Plus (as World Market was called in the 1980s), where my sister and I drank free samples of Good Earth tea in miniature plastic cups while my mom browsed woven placemats and jangly earrings. Every time we drove there, my mom looked up at the big bank buildings on Hawthorne Boulevard and wondered if she’d passed her destination. Then it appeared, like magic. Just when we thought we’d messed up.
On one trip, I stood among the bright-colored, imported wooden toys and thought hard about witchcraft. It seemed that I could be someone special and magical—that I could fly on a broom and cast spells and walk among mortals with a smug, secretive smile—if only I focused hard enough.
*
As a queer lady and a Michelle Tea fan, I’m surrounded by witchiness, but the truth is, magical thinking has gotten me into trouble more than it’s allowed me to manifest good fortune.
On this steamy-breezy summer day, I am fresh off a bloodwork appointment that I made for August 11, knowing I would likely get results on August 12. Was August 11 a lucky day, I wondered, because it was my best friend’s birthday? The twin babies I miscarried years ago had a due date of 11/11/11. Were 11’s lucky for me, or unlucky? Did it matter that the chances of twins being born on their due date are almost zero?
I was diagnosed with breast cancer on November 12, 2012. Were 12’s bad numbers for me?
I’ve had dozens of appointments and scans and blood draws since then. Nothing—and here I pause to knock on the wooden table next to my bed—has indicated cancer. But almost every time, my mind has clung to some detail on my chart or in the world and tried to read it like tea leaves. My body feels edgy, and I look around for information to confirm or deny that feeling. Intrusive thoughts lock in. Fear grows.
As it turns out, the lab didn’t get results back to me until the 13th. And they were fine.
Thirteen is a textbook unlucky number, but I don’t have any particular associations with it. I love black cats (there’s one curled in my laundry basket right now) and I don’t stress when my toddler opens an umbrella in the house. But I have superstitions related to elections, words, and fortune cookies. My laptop and notebook are plastered with blue bullseyes to ward off the evil eye I don’t believe in.
*
A former therapist encouraged me to look for “glimmers” as a counterpoint to my intrusive thoughts and fear spirals. I’ve never liked the idea of a gratitude journal—not because I’m not grateful, but because gratitude prompts the question “To whom?” and then I have to think about a god who “has a plan” that includes cancer, war, and famine. Because I don’t believe in that kind of god, I’m left with the idea of random luck, which feels hollow. I’m grateful for good health. I’m grateful for the roof over my head. I’m grateful for a free pass to the play place. But gratitude, for me, easily tips into thinking about catastrophes avoided, which is just another way of thinking about catastrophes all the time.
Enter glimmers. Glimmers are anything that makes you feel good. (And, okay, the bottle of bourbon on my kitchen counter provided some glimmers while I was waiting for test results.) The therapist who introduced me to them would often say “Notice that” in reference to both positive and negative feelings. I had a tendency toward what she called “intellectualized storytelling.” It was basically my whole personality, manically narrating incidents and ideas in search of a conclusion. I needed to slow down. Be in my body, as they say. Which is very different, I’ve learned, from thinking about my body.
*
On good days, the glimmers come fast and easy, as if the gentlest sun is warming my chest and bathing everything in a soft golden light.
Today at the play place, Joey declares that the rocketspace cape is in fact an Elsa cape.
Are you rocketspace? I ask in our shared language.
No, I Let It Go, he corrects me. He shoots his arms forward and splays his fingers, freezing me with his ice powers. He declares the climbing structure his Big Castle, and sings Let it go, let it go, no hold it back more on his way to the slide.
His soft, sweet voice. The words that, in my post-adoption catastrophizing era, I wondered if I’d ever hear, because they were ever-so-slightly late to bloom. Now, even if his syntax and pronunciation are a little muddy, he is a field in full bloom. Wildflowers and apple blossoms, meadow grass and snapdragons.
*
I come from an Eat Your Vegetables First family. In his eighties and long retired, my dad is more likely to spend his days haggling with Verizon over some detail of his phone plan than vacationing in his RV. When we talk, each of us tells the other to worry less and enjoy more.
When I am deep in Worryland, a small voice tells me that glimmers are not for me. They are dessert people who have eaten their vegetables: passed the test, saved the money, checked the box. What kind of fool would be happy when there are—or even might be—reasons to be sad? I mean, how embarrassing.
I’ve never read Heidegger, but my German therapist has, and tells me that one of Heidegger’s central theories was that we can only appreciate life because we know about death. Then again, Heidegger was also a Nazi, so I guess he appreciated some lives more than others.
Recently, as I was trodding Worryland, a sentence popped into my head fully formed. The light knows about the darkness.
It felt like a revelation, one with which Heidegger would agree, or maybe Jung, whom I haven’t read much of either.
*
On the night, more than twenty years ago, when it became clear that my mom was dying, my dad, my sister, her sister, and I gathered around her hospital bed. For three years, she had gone in and out of remission for stage four ovarian cancer, but no one, to my knowledge, had said The end is near, we’ve done what we can, get your affairs in order. So seeing her with a knobby spine and an oxygen mask, a bowel obstruction having led to pneumonia, came as a surprise.
That vigil comes to me in flashes. The cheap vintage dress I wore, the cot I stretched out on, exhausted but not quite able to sleep. My dad, quiet and tearful. My aunt, loud and tearful.
A nurse asked if she could get us anything. I remember the room being cold, even though it was August. I asked for tea, and she brought it in a styrofoam cup. It was probably Lipton English Breakfast, nothing special. But it was dark and strong and steamy. I let it warm my hands and fill my lungs. It would be years before my glimmer therapist helped me name the strange sensation: You were in crisis, but someone was there to comfort you, and you let yourself be comforted.
Back then I still believed that only solutions were allowed to bring comfort. How could I possibly enjoy a cup of tea when my mom was dying three feet away? When I hadn’t even constructed a proper lie to tell myself, like She’ll be better tomorrow? Did I even deserve it?
That nurse was a light who knew about the darkness.
*
When I get good news or avert disaster, I feel like I’ve gotten a free pass that I didn’t earn. In Ari Folman’s graphic adaptation of Anne Frank’s Diary, Anne observes that her mother practices a verbal gratitude journal, thankful that their family is not on one of the trains heading ominously east. Anne prefers to appreciate the constancy of nature: “To look up at the sky, the clouds, the moon, and the stars make me calm and patient.”
I know that I am wired like Anne’s mom, and that my task is to be more like Anne. Maybe that’s why adults admire childlike wonder. Kids dive headfirst into joy without contemplating their worthiness, without guilt, without considering geopolitical context or their most recent bloodwork. It’s too late for me to access such purity, but my kids can be my sky and clouds and moon.
Recently a former classmate posted about his dislike of Mary Oliver and Sharon Olds, poets known for extracting beauty from life’s brutality. I think I understand what he was saying; that they deliver unearned comfort, or write toward a peace he doesn’t believe in. I don’t know if I believe in it either, though I am fond of both poets. Glimmers can feel like lies. But certainly they are not less true than cancer, war, and famine.
*
Not long after the day of the free pass, I buy Joey a blue tulle skirt printed with sparkly silver snowflakes. He is deep into his Elsa era now, and even though his preschool classroom is full of little (ostensible) boys wedging their feet into plastic princess slippers—and even though I am committed to fighting transphobia—a touch of gender anxiety rumbles within me. Trans people are one of many groups our president and his followers have declared war on, and my kid already checks a few minoritized-population boxes; I want him to have a couple of free passes, too.
My German therapist says little kids love superheroes because they themselves feel so disempowered. A few days after Joey figured out how to unlock the front door, we installed a child-proofing device that prevents him from doing so. Of course he howls when his goals of climbing the porch rails and chasing our cat down the street are thwarted. Of course he wants to be like Elsa, who can build an ice castle just by taking off her gloves and pointing into a snowstorm.
I want that too. What I have, instead, is a three-year-old who is full of rage and despair as real as my own. What I have, also, is his delight. The Elsa skirt comes with him to bed. It goes in the bath. It catches on branches when he traverses the yard. Potty training is a work in progress, so it often smells like pee. Still, it glimmers.
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