Mariya turned the key in the loose lock of the weatherbeaten red front door, and entered the front hall cluttered with boxes, spying the backpack and big kid’s green and blue winter coat splayed out on the floor where they’d been flung as if in anger or a fit of passion. She thought about the child who had entered the house alone an hour and a half earlier, how he must have felt coming into an empty house again, silent after his day of chaotic and competing energies at school.
How he must have encountered himself in the mirror in the bathroom, and found his own image at once fascinating and intolerable and deliriously enjoyable. She thought about his journey into the kitchen for a snack, and walked into the kitchen to see the detritus of his snack-making littered across dark green countertops, the empty large pudding container and spoon sitting inside it, the fruit snack wrapper on the floor beside the trashcan where he had missed his shot when he tossed it.
She knew he had consumed the snack hastily and gone upstairs to his bedroom, feeling the comfort of his sanctuary and at the same time the loneliness of any child at home without his family. She did not know for what entertainments or stimulants he retreated so quickly to his bedroom, usually bringing food items along with him in dishes that he would have to be hounded to gather and bring back, later.
She thought about how childhood loneliness could bleed over into many things, into a generative sort of boredom that could give rise to new inventions and new ideas, new awareness of the world beyond his immediate comprehension. Or it could bleed over like ink into depression, the sort of paralyzing numbness that leads so many tween and teenagers today into a world of Tiktok and online chatting with strangers and spending more and more time in bed under the covers, in an infinite feedback loop of nothingness signifying nothing.
Mariya looked up the staircase, wondering which pathway her younger child’s loneliness would take. What is the desire path of loneliness in a child? And can it be influenced? Should it be? The child rarely discusses his feelings, but when he does, she is encouraged. He spins questions out of the oceanic currents of his emotions, out of his encounters with adults, with kids his own age, out of his observations of kids and popular culture and television.
She thought, one day, if all goes well, this twelve year old will be at the edge of a transition into college life that will quake through her being, through all of her days with its seeming finality. She looked back at the boxes in the front entryway, at the unused toys and partly-used children’s books and musical instruments set to be given away or sold, and thought about the change that was about to quake through the children’s lives — the moving out of their childhood home. They will never have another childhood home. This is the one. This is the house they may drive back to with their beloveds and besties one day, to show them, this is where I grew up. Until I was seventeen, until I was thirteen. The twelve year old will move with her, but he will not settle into the next home as much as this house where she gave birth to him.
Mariya considered leaving the backpack and coat on the floor, considered letting the boychild luxuriate in his long afternoon of doing god knows what in his bedroom, as recompense for her neglectful mothering. After all, she was not home when he had arrived from school. Again. Because of her job.
But, she thought, his muscles know only how to fling off his backpack and coat, not how to arrange them neatly in readiness for the next day. His muscles need to be taught to do that. Leaving them, too, is neglectful mothering. She placed a foot on the bottom step and called to him, up the stairs.