When you are The Person
perhaps incredibly: Station 11, the winter Olympics, and my eldest son's birthday all in one cohesive post. At least *I* think it's cohesive. Let me know what you think.
On the show Station 11, the actress who plays a young Kirsten looks very much like my eldest son, Ethan, and that fact added a special layer of meaning for me when I watched it last week.
The setting is post-apocalyptic-pandemic (timely!), but importantly, the world is not dystopian. Sure, some really bad things happen; what I remember more clearly are the moments that instead resolve with unexpected tenderness.
Station 11 is a beautiful series (and a great book, I hear) so you can find meaning wherever you are in life. What I took from it was, you need not nurture your grief; it’ll follow you either way. Then occasionally, in quiet moments, you can still reach out your hand and feel it again. Trace the sharp edges of your loss with your fingertips. But the wheel turns, so just keep going.
Twelve years ago, I wrote this:
Kahlil Gibran wrote, "[Your children] come through you but not from you, / And though they are with you yet they belong not to you. /…/For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. / You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth."
As a mother, that "coming through" leaves you changed in so many ways. One of them is that you forever feel slightly alien, as though a part of you is living independently of you, rebelling against you, out in the world away from you.
Though I might be the bow sending the living arrow that is Ethan off in his own direction, the bow without the arrow is vulnerable. The bow is complete in itself, but its purpose is inextricably bound to the arrow. The arrow performs its own purpose, but relies on the bow to direct it even as it lets go.
The tension mounts as Ethan prepares for a life apart from me, a process that began at birth. When the time comes for him to leave completely, when the tension breaks and he goes sailing toward his own purpose separate from mine, I know I will feel fulfillment and relief. But like a bow without her arrow, I will also feel depleted.
Ethan was two-and-a-half years old when I wrote that passage. Tomorrow he turns 14. He is taller than me. Vast forests of ideas grow in that mind of his (most of them from family Dungeonia, order Draconus. On Planet Mathematica). His feet that once fit into my palm are now man-sized. The wheel turns. The arrow flies.
Masterfully split between the early days of a 1-in-1000-survival-rate pandemic and 22 years later, we see Kirsten as both a child and an adult. That’s key: we see both. We’re not “seeing” exclusively through an adult Kirsten’s memory. (Both actresses are brilliant.)
Six years ago, I wrote this about Ethan and the squishiness of time:
I’m not even really listening to what he’s saying. He’s 8 years old, nearing 9, and his favorite topics include video game strategies and convoluted math calculations. But I’m laying here on the couch, next to the Christmas tree, fire crackling, fighting off a sore throat, and he comes over and nestles into the crook of my body and starts talking.
I’m in three, four, five moments at once. As he speaks, his prominent row of pearlescent lower teeth flash repeatedly as his lower lip drops into a valley from which J’s and F’s and ch’s emerge. And so I’m also there with him as a toddler, learning new words like four and five, watching his little lower teeth pop outward and upward, forming those sounds with tooth to the wrong lip. “Four, five,” he would say like a little caveman.
Watching his mannerisms, the specific way he pinches all his fingertips together into an emphatic claw, for instance, or the way he touches a crooked finger to his lips as he says “…I believe,” staring into the middle distance as he works out the truth of what he’s trying to say, and there is his father manifest all over again. …
We’re all shadows and layers of who we were and will be. We’re all shadows and layers of one another.
Station 11 accomplishes this layered view of time. I’d go so far as to say it does the best job of cinematic time traveling since Marty and Doc saved the clock tower AND fixed Marty’s parents’ marriage on the same night in a flying DeLorean.
With the young Kirsten reminding me so much of Ethan, at every turn I was hyper aware of the interplay between adults and kids. Kids aren’t fragile in Station 11. They’re courageous. They have agency. But they also seek out the protective lee parent figures provide for children in their care. Kids know they’re kids even as they do what they must to survive.
Against these thoughts, last night I watched the “women’s” figure skating medals round, and it was a travesty. A 15-year-old Russian girl, hailed as the possible GOAT, crumbled on international television as the pressure of a doping scandal bore down on her. Meanwhile, her 17-year-old teammate threw a truly epic tantrum because she didn’t win the gold, and their other 17-year-old teammate—the actual gold medalist—sat alone, clutching a stuffed animal, unnoticed by any adult for an uncomfortable amount of minutes.
As the scene unfolded almost surreally, all I could think was: the grownups are failing.
Near the end of the series, a protagonist in Station 11 said something like, you only need one person. If you have one person pulling for you, or one person caring for you, or one person looking to you for reassurance and protection, then you have purpose. You can keep going. And you’ll find other people along the way.
On this the eve of my firstborn’s birthday—my eldest son, the one who turned me into a mother, the first person to ever depend on me fully, to have shown me that I will fail but it doesn’t matter as long as I keep trying—I invite you to look around and find a child who needs a person, even if just momentarily. Then be that person.
I’ve both read and watched Station 11. Although I loved the book (and its companion book, the Glass Hotel), the show brought some new elements to it that I enjoyed even more. Episode 7 was my favorite episode, maybe one of my favorite episodes of television. (On the other hand I hated episode 9.) I, too, was moved by the way the show portrayed children as complex, capable people who both contribute and depend on you.
My oldest is 13, and I still remember holding her as a newborn, real, pressed against me and yet a distinct and separate being, and I was crying and my husband asked me why and I answered “because she’s already growing away from me”. He thought I was being funny and overly dramatic, but I was serious and I can still feel what I felt then: a part of myself had broken free of my body and was already on a slow, but steady trajectory away from me. I know that’s good and right, and it’s in many ways easier now that she’s tall and bony and doesn’t smell like a newborn baby when I kiss her head, but that vulnerable and unsteady sense of just letting your heart walk around outside your body never goes away.
This was really beautiful. And makes me want to read/watch Station 11. (The resemblance to Kirsten is extremely there, happy birthday to Ethan!) How lovely, to have this writing from different times in his life to lay out in a triptych like this.
I’m not a mom, but I have a mom; and reading this makes me think of her, and getting to see her soon for the first time in a while, being 30 and living far away — the only trip with just the two of us we’ve gotten to take in close to a decade. We both can’t talk about anything but how impatient we are for it. It’s a wonderful, sad, happy feeling.