Act I
By the end of the morning, many tears will be shed, and I will look to Shakespeare’s King Lear for wisdom, but for now, we are just late for school—this time, because of socks. They are snug and green-striped with pink toes, and today, they feel wrong to my eight-year-old daughter. She rips them from her feet. Today, when it is already 10 minutes past time to leave the house for school. She runs upstairs for another pair and finally puts them on, but not the shoes. Meanwhile, little brother, four, has run the opposite way. Both children need my attention simultaneously, and like Lear’s kingdom, I’m unsure how to divide it.
I have been getting over a cold, and my voice is nearly lost. I can only raise it sparingly. But with my voice lowered in volume, they simply ignore me. I strain to call out, “We’re going!”
The older one is back upstairs, looking for a jacket. I corral them outside, carrying the shoes they’ll have to put on afterward. I herd them into my black Nissan, where we sit, pitted against each other, a sock-footed stew of grievances and discontent.
“Idiot,” my daughter whispers as I start the car and begin driving.
Little brother copies her. “Stupid.”
It’s not clear to me who they’re referring to. Each other, me, or simply the stupidity of the whole morning, or existence, a meaningless life governed by clothing and clocks. The intent unclear, I take it personally.
So I lecture them, saying they cannot speak to adults that way, certainly not their mom, that there will be consequences, like no special after-school snack. The older one counters, “It’s disgusting anyway.”
“Fine,” I say.
She turns now from me to her brother, whispering, “Idiot. Dummy.” As we drive, she spots a poster advertising a horror movie. She taunts her brother. “You can’t see it. It’s too scary. It’ll give you nightmares.” He cranes his neck to see the poster. Then, after another block, “We passed it. But you’re too dumb to see it.”
I suspect William Shakespeare would understand. No one can write so well about the pain families can inflict on each other without experiencing a measure of it themselves. (Shakespeare had three children of his own.) And his play, King Lear, more than perhaps any of his other dramas, explores the worst possibilities in families, when parents and children view each other through their own ambitions and insecurities.
It is a play about an aging King Lear, who has decided to divide his kingdom between his three daughters, based upon his daughters’ declarations of love for him. The first two daughters, Goneril and Regan, profess their love for their father. But the youngest daughter, Cordelia, loves him too deeply to articulate. He takes her silence as evidence that she does not love him like the others, and disowns and banishes Cordelia, the one who loves him most. Having chosen wrongly, Lear’s tragedy begins.
Meanwhile, when Lear goes to stay with his daughter Goneril, to whom he promised half of his kingdom, she only wants to get rid of him. He says of Goneril, How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.
Lear’s actions and his curses against his elder daughters are just as selfish as their treatment of him. Yet I can’t fault him for wondering, at least a little, at the quality of love that couldn’t be articulated, wondering if his love was indeed returned.
Act II
I remind my daughter we don’t call anyone stupid. We have to love each other. Even as I say it, it feels hollow. I can’t muster any conviction. I’m so angry, and not just this morning, maybe every morning, maybe most of the time. I am tired of being kind and responsible and collected when I too want to lash out. It’s my duty to be responsible, to love one-sided, while I simmer underneath.
When my daughter acts this way, I fail to see her as the eight-year-old she is. I see only what I’m afraid of—a future teenager I have failed to parent in the right ways. I see an adult going out the door to college, calling her classmates idiots and dummies. Rarely, if ever, calling her mother. I hear the stories she’ll tell about me. I was too lax, with two few boundaries, so they walked all over me. Or I was too harsh. Or I was too chaotic after the divorce, or too strict in the years that followed. Or too in between. Or I was always working or cleaning and didn’t connect enough. She hated my house and preferred her dad’s, where it was easier, where there wasn’t so much drama, or if there was, perhaps the drama was less Shakespearean.
In this version of the future, she has now stopped calling me. She’s waiting for me to apologize for her entire childhood. I want to draw closer, I can almost say the words—I’m sorry—but something stops me. It isn’t authentic. Instead, future-me is silent on the subject altogether. I cannot articulate either my regrets or my love.
In that moment, as I get lost in future versions of ourselves, I decide to tell her, the real eight-year-old, my secret. “I’m telling you what to do now. But when you grow up, I’ll have no more control over you,” I say. “That’s what you want. And it’s true, someday you’ll be gone, I’ll be here, and if you choose to be bad, there will be nothing I can do anymore. That’s why I’m encouraging you to make the right choices now.”
I show her my entire hand, which is the power that she and her brother crave so badly, that they have always had, the power over their own lives and over me.
That quiets her. A moment later, she asks, “Do you think I’m good or bad?”
Now, I have nearly lost my voice entirely. I touch my throat and hold a finger up. She thinks that means stop talking, but it doesn’t. I turn around for a moment, whisper, “The first choice. Good.”
“Oh,” she says, “Yes, I think so too.”
In the second act of King Lear, the monarch experiences the pain of mistreatment by his now-grown elder daughters, who, despite being poised to inherit his kingdom, only want him to go away. Lear is losing his power quickly. The tables have turned.
In some ways, the entire play is about this inevitable reversal of power, known to every parent since the dawn of humanity—that time in which the parent must cede power to the next generation.
Act III
A fight is brewing in the back seat. The girl fights with words, the boy retaliates with his little fists and feet. My son unbuckles now. His booster seat, which isn’t clipped in the way it’s supposed to be, slides out from under him. Furious at the seat and at the world, he flips to one side and kicks at his sister, repeatedly, hard.
How sharper than a serpent’s tooth
The four-year-old continues to kick his sister, and as he does, I don’t see my little boy anymore. I see a big boy, a teenager who has never learned to stop hurting people. I see myself as a failed parent, I, who could not stop him as a child. He is a boy who will kick people into adulthood, because I failed to prevent him while I still had some power over him. The kicking worsens. The older one is curled up against the car door, crying over his furious four-year-old blows.
Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide.
I pull over the car. “What the hell!” I yell, while his little legs continue to kick furiously. “Bad boy! Bad boy!” I turn around, physically separate them. Finally, he relents, sobbing, heaving, gasping. She’s in shock but, fortunately, not truly hurt.
I resume driving toward their school. I can’t decide who started it. They have both been taunting and hurting each other all morning, are both wrong, and I may be wrong too if I try to guess. I know my investigation into the matter may never bring me to the truth. (King Lear, after all, sought to understand the hearts of his children and guessed wrongly.) That is to say, can we ever fully know our own children, and the motives in their hearts? They both accuse the other of starting it. They are both, in an act of revenge, now kicking, pinching, and hitting again, taking justice into their own hands—and legs, and fingers. I fear, long before they reach middle school, I will go mad.
At this point, King Lear, having now been kicked out of both elder daughters’ homes, is left wandering, raving, through a storm, as powerless and alone as a monarch could be. Descended into wild madness, he wanders, the storm blowing through his white hair. French troops are arriving, and war in Britain seems imminent. Lear, showing signs of madness, holds a mock trial to punish his daughters, addressing two stools as if they were Regan and Goneril.
If there is a lesson, it is that the madness was at least in part King Lear’s fault. He was a bad parent, presumptuous, and trusted wrongly. Neither am I the parent I aspire to be. My children’s anger brings out my own. I find it so often impossible to rise above it all. But more than that, it has to do with my inability, whether through rewards or consequences, to stave off the fighting that is part of the fabric of our lives.
I long to rise above the madness, to push it away, to find wiser and more effective words and consequences than what I usually have inside me.
As the fool said to King Lear, Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.
“I don’t want to be around you two right now,” I confess. “Not when it’s like this.” I don’t know what else to say. “This is horrible.”
I think often of how they might imagine me, the mother they rely on to be steady in the storm, the mother who too often ventures into the storm herself, as angry and crazed as they are. Just as Cordelia, to her shock, came upon her father, draping himself in weeds and flowers,
As mad as the vexed sea, singing aloud
Crowned with rank fumiter and furrow-weeds.
Act IV
The fighting dies down. My daughter recognizes this dark moment. “Mommy, I love you,” she says. Then, a second later, “Can I have a chip?” She has spotted the open bag of Pringles in the front seat beside me.
Did the elder daughters love Lear? Or did they just want a share of his kingdom? What is a pure love, if such love exists? I long for the answer.
“Did you mean it, or did you just want the chip?”
“I love you so much,” she professes. “Mommy, how could you really think that?”
And even as the chip hangs over us, the request, the kingdom not to be granted, I tell her, “I know. I love you so much too.”
Amid all of the sharing, the four year old is silent. I wonder, in this moment, what is this love we speak of? Is it an exchange? Is their love for me rooted in the goods and care I provide, or is it something deeper? Yes, and yes, I think.
For the moment, they have both entered a post-fight stupor, exhausted from the effort, resigned to the approaching school day, staring in opposite directions outside their windows.
Should I seek to understand their love and its limits? No. In this way, madness lies. This is what happens when we obsess over the level and extent of another’s love. One must not ask or pry too deeply. I decide, as King Lear discovered, one must shun some questions and simply love, yes, sometimes, in that one-sided way that parents do, which is the only way it has ever been done. And then, simply, to hope it is returned. That, I think, is the only way to stave off the madness.
As the fourth act begins, a rivalry between the two elder sisters deepens. Cordelia alone, as from the beginning, still cares for her father, in a kind of love and loyalty, despite Lear’s treatment, that suggests that love in Lear’s world has little to do with how one is treated. It does not spring from fairness or kindness or the gift of a kingdom. It simply either is, or never was in the first place.
Act V
As we arrive at the school and exit the car, my son is heaving again, tears streaming down his face. And now, I long to keep them here with me a moment longer. Yes, my love is a mystery even to me.
My son tries desperately to get back into the car. I’m restraining his hands while he’s trying to climb back in. I take both of his hands in mine, get down to eye level. I say in a quiet voice, with the last that I have left in me, “I have choices. You have choices. This isn’t how a family is supposed to work. We have to decide between loving and living a good, happy life, or choosing a bad life and hurting people.”
That’s the only way I can think to say it. Perhaps I should just make it about this morning. But this moment feels bigger, everything is repeating like I’m in some kind of morning drop-off purgatory that will cycle forever unless I can think of the right words to say. His big sister is beside me, nodding solemnly. She slips an arm around me. We are at least, for now, reconciled.In Lear’s world, war has broken out, families are divided. Regan and Goneril fall for and fight over the same man. And this is, after all, a tragedy, so Cordelia’s forces fight and lose to Goneril’s and Regan’s. Cordelia and Lear are taken prisoner. Goneril kills herself and poisons her sister Regan. Cordelia is hanged, followed soon by the death of her father.
All the world may be a stage, but this life is not only tragedy, it is everything, and we are just heading to school. Although I often imagine the worst scenarios, my children’s lives, after all, are still in their very first act, when anything can change and no reconciliation is too late.
We exit the car and walk together to the school entrance. I want to be less angry. I decide to model the behavior I want to see, consciously, even when it’s uncomfortable. I stop them. I say to the little one, “I’m sorry I yelled and called you a bad boy. Your behavior was very bad. You shouldn’t have kicked. And I’m still mad. But I’m also sorry because I didn’t want to yell.”
My daughter says she’s sorry too, sorry that she made me lose my voice, and sorry that she said hurtful things. She wants things to be good now, because we are leaving each other, and the separation of the full school day and after care is now upon us.
My son, hearing all this, sees what’s coming. Before anyone turns to him, he says, “I’m not sorry.”
But now, with my daughter beside me, holding my hand and helping me to see clearly, instead of a teenager, I see my son, exactly as he is, still a four-year-old boy. “He’s still learning,” I say, and big sister nods. “We can teach him what it’s like to be sorry, and later on, he’ll know.”
I tell my son that sometime, I want him to think about how he hurt his sister when he was kicking. He needs to think about her during the day and then give an I’m sorry from his heart. “You will feel your love for her,” I assure him. “And then you’ll be able to say it.”
He repeats, wants it to be really clear in case we didn’t hear the first time, that he’s definitely not sorry. He also doesn’t want to go inside the classroom. His sister says she’ll walk him to his class. Good. Here, out in this world, they will need each other most. This is probably why they don’t fight, why they love each other so fiercely when it’s them in the world without me.
The four year old, no longer fierce, stands still and blinks into the sun, immobile, like a lost duck. His sister touches the back of his head and sweeps it over his backpack. She drapes an arm around his shoulder, and walking like that, guides him up the steps with her. Every day she does this, walks him first to his classroom, and then to her own.
We didn’t say everything we’d wanted before they left. For now, I stand at the bottom of the stairs and watch them as they ascend. My voice is nearly gone altogether. Their departure feels quick, but I will work to remember how much goes unsaid. Like Cordelia, the exiled daughter whose love for her father dwarfed her words, I am sure their love’s more ponderous than their tongues.
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