Here Be Dragons
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
– William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
I’ve had this vague fantasy in the back of my mind that if Cece survived past the age of two, things might–would just have to–get easier for me. I was raised with significant tendencies towards magical thinking, and it was this type of thinking that kept me in a broken marriage for so long. I still encounter these patterns of thought in myself, and sometimes feel like I’m stepping through a minefield trying to avoid them.
Since Cece turned two in May of 2021, my life has become more complicated and painful in ways I never would have anticipated or projected. Many of these ways have to do with human relationships, which have changed since Lizzy died and seem to continue to do nothing but change. I find myself scrabbling for purchase, seeking a safe place to rest, and relishing the moments when I’m asleep and therefore don’t have to deal with the complexities of my life.
I think I have to let go of this dream vision of a time or a place when things get better, simpler, or happier. After all, things fall apart. It’s what they do. Having a child like Cece should have taught me this lesson. Never rest; never falter; never stop working. There’s a disease inside your child trying to kill her from the inside out.
How dare you think you can relax, even for a moment?
My milk supply eventually waned, so I transitioned Cece to raw cow’s milk from a farm that does rigorous pathogen testing on every batch of milk it sells. The shift in bacteria from breastmilk to cow’s milk caused a diaper rash, which opened into a single small wound, which became infected, which took a week to heal with warm poultices, fresh air, and a topical antibiotic. Growth restriction is associated with nephronophthisis. So I increased the amount of milk and meat in Cece’s diet, including organ meats for vitamin B content. Cece gained weight, but began to suffer from constipation. To relieve this, I increased fiber in her diet, particularly through raspberries. Yesterday, I learned that raspberries have a high amount of oxalates, which can build up in the system, cause kidney stones, and potentially lead to kidney failure.
Keep her healthy. Keep her growing. Keep her alive.
We happen to live in one of four locations in the United States that has a vision-specific preschool, for which Cece is eligible. I always planned to homeschool but am willing to give Cece the two-year experience of learning vision skills with other kids her age with visual impairments. This would also give me a chance to go back to school and work towards making a living to support us. Today, I was told that Cece remains cognitively behind other visually impaired children her age, which means that her vision can’t be blamed for whatever is wrong with her brain. She lacks developmental skills needed to enter preschool next year, and unless we push her harder to get her on track, she will have to remain at home for another year.
One step forward, two steps back. Stop complaining. Just work harder.
Cece has always had a short fuse, but these days, she is spun into a screaming, violent rage in a matter of seconds. Sometimes, it’s because she can’t reach the musical toy in the top drawer. Sometimes, it’s because I can’t pick her up when she wants me to. To punish me, she curls into a fetal position and starts to bang her head on the floor, and if it happens to be on a rug, she’ll scoot herself until she can find hardwood and then bang it against the hardwood. If that doesn’t get a response from me, she’ll throw herself backwards to bang the back of her head against the floor. Sometimes, I can’t get my hand under her head in time to catch it.
Try distracting her with a toy. Try offering her food. Try ignoring her.
Her therapists are as full of tangential suggestions as her doctors are full of obfuscating answers. Everyone is trying to help, and still I find myself bitterly, bitterly alone. There’s a dragon inside my child, I constantly scream, and unless I find a way to keep it satisfied and asleep, it’ll wake up and burn her from the inside out. I cannot rest; I cannot dream; I cannot hope. I have to keep playing this insane game of balancing where I’m juggling invisible balls I can’t even see to catch. No one is there to catch the balls I miss, and everything depends on me. Her life depends on me. Either I find a way, or no one can.
You think you’re such a goddamn martyr.
I’m seeing dragons everywhere in my life right now. There are the internal dragons, constantly trying to rip me apart with their malice, tell me how worthless I am, how much I’m a waste of space. There are the dragons from my childhood, taunting in slithering voices that I am no one; I belong nowhere; I have no home. Then there are the dragons flying around my head, out in the world, dragons of disease and dragons of pandemics, dragons of poisoned food and water and air, dragons spreading fear of raising a child in a world in which both morality and fertility seem to be disappearing.
Stop complaining, conspiracy theorist.
But perhaps the worst dragons are those resting, enormous and slit-eyed, within our very relationships. I’m beginning to fear those closest to me more than I ever have–not for what they can do to me, but for what I am capable of doing to them. It seems like every conversation is a trap, a new opportunity for me to continue to break my relationships or to strengthen them. And unless I spend the time working to mend past damage and prevent future damage, all I can ensure is that it would have been better if I had never engaged in the conversation to begin with.
Or never have been born.
I have said before that I think humans are fundamentally guilty of violating one another’s agency–all of the time. We cross boundaries of free will, constantly, motivated by pride or greed or envy or worst of all–the desire to not be alone. But this is what we are, and I do not see a way of escaping this basic reality. We are alone, and sometimes relationships serve only to highlight that reality with piercing clarity.
Now you’re getting somewhere. . .
We’re alone because everyone has forgotten how to listen. We all need so badly to be heard, to be seen– to be right–that we spend so much time talking or screaming over others until the world clamors with nothing but chaotic, undecipherable noise. We are still standing beneath the Tower of Babel, not understanding why these idiots around us can’t just fall in line so we can finish building the thing that is going to fix everything–that is going to make us like the gods.
“Each person can speak up for himself only after he has first restated the ideas and feelings of the previous speaker accurately, and to that speaker’s satisfaction.”
– Carl Rogers
The art of listening is lost. After all, who conducts conversations like this? Who is so focused on trying to genuinely understand the perspective of the other that he can constantly swallow his own biting retort or searing defense or glowing approval? Who places the other before himself so thoroughly as to request and accept corrections to his inevitably limited comprehension of the other’s spoken reality? Is it not easier to simply dismiss, or correct, or shame the other into silent regret for having been courageous enough to speak?
We are all villains, with hearts as black as stone. That’s why we recognize villains in fairy tales and Netflix shows. Because the human heart is a dark and terrifying place. It’s is a domain of dragons. And we can either find a way to fireproof our souls, or resign ourselves to the reality that our lives must be spent scampering from hiding place to hiding place.
Then the LORD God said to the snake: Because you have done this, cursed are you among all the animals, tame or wild; On your belly you shall crawl, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; They will strike at your head, while you strike at their heel.
– Genesis 3: 14-15
There are biblical scholars who believe that the snake of Eden was actually a dragon, and God’s punishment transformed the dragon into a serpent of markedly less power, but who still retained a heightened degree of cunning. This theory is strengthened by occasional beliefs in the ancient world that dragons were the protectors of sacred trees.
So which is it? Are dragons the penultimate monsters of mythology and therefore psychotherapy? Or are they the guardians of that which is most sacred? Is man the true villain of Genesis? Billions of human lives in cumulative scholarship have not been able to answer these questions to any satisfaction. They are primordial questions. And I fear the answer has to be just as primordial.
There is a clear relationship between fear and dragons. Fear drives so much of human agency, it is sometimes difficult to determine other, more noble motives. Dragons, if left to their own devices, have the power to grow bigger and stronger, to nearly unimaginable proportions. Until, one day, you find yourself in a shattered marriage with a dead child, and the blood-dimmed tide has been loosed across the world.
And again with the self-pity . . .
But one might also argue that spending your life seeing dragons perching upon every building and lurking in every crevice may also result in a slower, more frightening death. To see death everywhere, to fear death everywhere, is to be so focused on the loss of life that life itself lacks meaning. This is the path I find myself constantly walking since Lizzy died. This is the battle within me: to see enough dragons to prevent the bloodshed that can be prevented, but not so many that I am immobilized with fear.
You’d need the sight of a seer.
I am more frightened of the human brain than of the human body. For most of my life, my body has been the enemy, keeping me sick, stripping my will to live, making me feel like a victim. But since Lizzy died, the enemy has been my mind–and human minds in general. They are terrifying, uncharted territory, and neuroscience is still in its infancy. Yet choice arises from the mind, and human choices dictate reality, resulting in suffering and death or life and joy. The human mind is the summit of the will and that which is most sacred within the human person. The body can be violated in every possible way, and still the mind can maintain integrity and freedom, as survivors of the Holocaust have told us. I spend so much time hating and fearing my own mind that I have lost the ability to respect my brain, my freedom, or my patterns of thinking. I am so consumed by visions of dragons within and without myself that my nervous system can never move from sympathetic to parasympathetic–that there are days in which I’m sure it would have been better if I never woke up.
Or never been born . . .
Today, I do not see a horizon of a healthy mind or a world of fewer dragons. I see human life as a struggle that is supposed to be hard and then become harder once you feel you can no longer go on. I think it’s this way to test us, to train us, and to shape us. I think this world is a battleground. I think we’re like Ender fighting in a simulacrum of war, only to wake in horror to the reality that every life we took, every drop of blood that we shed was all too real. I think we’re learning how to fight, how to become strong, and how to battle the dragons of our mind because some dragons are as viscerally real as the endless war into which we are all born.
So you think you’re some kind of hero now?
Solutions, resolutions. I usually try to tie these posts up into something resembling a reaffirmation of the will. But today, I am weak, and I am afraid. I am running from the dragons resting lazily in Cece’s lab results and other dragons that no one else can see. I am afraid that it will get worse and worse the older I get, and that there is no such thing as a safe place to rest. I am afraid that I will destroy every relationship in my life, one by one, because I am so terrified of being alone that I cannot accept that the other is just that–other–from me. And then one day Cece will be grown, and perhaps she will come to hate me because I cannot accept her other-ness. There is a dragon resting in my relationship with her, and if I let it grow to maturity, then I will have lost the one person that I’m still living for.
Or maybe you’ll lose her years before that, and then you’ll realize how stupid and selfish you are to bitch about being alone while she’s still alive.
So I will work harder. I’ll pity myself less. I’ll try to empty myself of self and see those that I love before I see myself. I will shut up, and I will listen. And if it makes me feel more alone, perhaps in the process, it can also make someone I love feel less alone.