Thumbsucker

    Even the role of parent is a performance. A game of pretend. Try to make it til you can retire before sorting it all out, if you can. Because it’ll take you down, if you’re trying to focus on work. Or trying to focus on a primary relationship. Trying to be in love, feel the love. Is it possible to feel the love whilst maintaining composure in the face of chaos?
    I think it’s possible that my fall from grace was quite early and caused the thumb sucking. The thumb sucking, an oral fixation, started before I have any memories, and continued til I was 6 or 7. My father, a social worker in the sixties, in Mantua, the black neighborhood next to ours, had hired a housecleaner and she was the one who told me to stop. He’d not wanted to hire a house cleaner because he thought perhaps it was demeaning (somehow I’d heard the conversation and it stuck with me), but she needed the money to raise her family. Like any kid, I could tell when someone is a mother and she was definitely checking me out. She said to me straight to my face one day, in the living room near the stairs, that I needed to stop sucking my thumb. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. I got the distinct impression as children do that she could see plainly that my parents did not care enough about us kids, and she was going to be the firm mother raising the bar of expectations for me. Its almost as if I could see through her eyes for a split second down a long corridor that stretched fore and back and she saw my mother struggling to raise us four kids, the youngest a runt and yet ignored. As I felt also ignored, thus the thumb. So she was being a mother of all time, so to speak, and actually was quite concerned about my future. She wanted me to know that I could be someone someday. She saw me for real like no one else saw me and I was flattered. I heard all that, what she saw, in the tone of her voice, like kids can do, and I stopped sucking that beloved phallus, in psycho-analytic jargon, instantly. It’s as if the momentary feeling of comfort in suck suck sucking fell away, melted and went down a piss hole into the earth, swirling like a toilet as it went.
    Though, as Buddhist’s know as well as Lacanians, the cravings always return in multiple and different forms, like a monster under the bed, or the perfect shirt to wear on the Amazon website. Or another story from the Guardian to read while doom scrolling about how glaciers in the past can recede from the land much faster than expected: up to 2,000 feet a day which must be loud as Christ on a stick. Evidently there’s ripples in the rock beneath the ocean that satellites can photograph and as a glacier as big as the UK moves, it leaves tracks, ripples in the rock. How ingenious these scientists.

    But just like that Christ nailed down finally, us people nowadays can also learn to channel, it’s just a matter of what you do with it. It can drive you literally crazy, partly crazy, a little bit crazed and slobbery, or one can learn to talk with others and share the insights. Everybody channels, sees the past and future and hears the voices traveling back and forth. What do you think music is, why a hook is so frucking grabby? Or a movie made from a comic based on a story in someone’s head, the superheroes could be archetypes.