Intrinsic

It is said the early years of our lives are the most formative.  Young children, even babies who can’t yet talk, are students of their parents’ every move, interpreting social cues, analyzing facial expressions, documenting how and who to be in this world.  As a young parent by the time this realization sunk in, the window to polish myself up and market only my best qualities to my children I thought might open was painted shut.  They were already knee deep in my relentless drive for perfectionism, incessant impatience, and knew my off-key singing voice. 

It’s also said that as we age, we have a keen desire to be known, and we worry we’ll pass with the very best parts of ourselves still locked inside.  The last page of the last essay in a marvelous collection called “Small Wonder” by Barbara Kingsolver delivers a potent message, “But still I suspect that the deepest of all human wishes, there on the floor of the soul underneath the scattered rugs of lust and thirst and hunger, is the tongue-and-groove desire to be understood.  And life is a slow trek along the path toward realizing how that wish will go unfulfilled.  Such is the course of all wisdom:  Others will see the front and the back, but inside is where we each live, in that home where only one heart will ever beat.”

It’s strange to think that our children can intuitively pick up on so much of who we are, yet we worry that they don’t really know us.  And what of the rest of the world?  Can others glean more of us than we actively share?  Or is it true that we are the only ones who can ever fully know ourselves?

My father has been telling me who he is since the day I set eyes on him.  Overtly, there were those things he intentionally taught as I was growing up.   He ran alongside me holding on to the seat as I wobbled on a bicycle (keep pedaling!).  When he cooked Sunday brunch, I learned how to scramble eggs (it’s all in the wrist).  He bravely rode shotgun offering indelible driving tips (don’t drive over what looks like an empty bag, you never know what might be inside).  We can point to the lessons of the mechanics of life as evidence our views have been shared, the box checked. 

But the lessons of the spirit, taught unwittingly, are arguably more precious and valuable as they allow us glimpses into another’s soul.  They help us validate the deepest desires we harbor and show us it’s safe to bring our gifts out into the world, that there will be a place for them.

My father showed me through his own practice of tinkering and creating that making things brings joy and a sense of pride to life.  I learned that there should be a little corner of the house, maybe a room even, that I can call my own.  The place I disappear to when inspiration hits me and I need to make a big idea real, and in that room I can store all the tools of my trade, preferably in recycled plastic biscotti containers or old shoe boxes carefully labeled in the draftsman’s hand of all capital letters. 

As my father’s daughter I am a collector of anything interesting I might repurpose in some future creative pursuit, and at the same time fully own the fact that I simply cannot throw out even the tiniest scrap of paper as the absence of its beauty is a loss to mourn.  This includes a spool of waxed cord bought at Lee Wards in the 1970’s, or the multi-colored coated electrical wire that came home from the office to be fashioned into bracelets.

I always knew my parents loved each other.   This was not knowledge amassed from proclamations, but rather it came through how they were with each other.   When I was a kid, she would run upstairs in the late afternoon, the click as the plastic blue compact open and shut, a kiss of lipstick and dab of rouge on her cheeks to greet him when he came home from work.   Nicknames for each other that no one else called them.  Him presenting her with a jeweler’s box on her birthday, its contents I was lucky enough to vet during a clandestine trip to the store. 

With my mother’s death, my father showed me how to work through grief and move forward.  I’m proud of my dad for building a new life for himself.   It would have been so easy to hang it up, to shut the outside world out and live in a recliner behind a flimsy accordion door from Menard’s.  In finding the strength to pick himself up and walk a new path, he showed me how it’s possible to have many meaningful and beautiful lives within one lifetime.

As humans we are dynamic and nuanced.  We have a blind affinity for some and can keep others at arm’s length.  Each person we encounter in life responds to different parts of us.  Like facets of a diamond sparkling in the light, what you see depends on where you’re standing.  Maybe it is the only heart that will ever beat inside us that knows us best, but I like to think in the collective, we are fully known.