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“…I am already ground to dust; my desire
has become to me a bitter pain and a daily humiliation.”
S. Kierkegaard, Journals
“Mommy, what does it mean to yearn?” asks the school-aged child.
She’s reading a chapter-book with the pride of a newly-emerging reader; she tells everyone she meets that she can now read chapter-books. She can slog through them but some of the words are past her comprehension. Like “yearn.”
“It means to want something really really badly,” I tell her, “so badly you can almost taste it.”
I think wryly that I’ve spent an entire lifetime yearning and therefore am the perfect person to ask what it means to yearn. To want something that you know probably does not exist, every day, every moment; your heart wants it even though the evidence of years shows that your desire is that of a preposterous simpleton.
Today I yearn for an inbox that contains meaty letters and not stock tips or offers for nearly-real but ultimately faux watches. I yearn for a shirt that is not already embedded with scrambled egg fragments at 7 am. I yearn to be given joyful smiles in the Home Depot instead of dismal indifference.
It’s amazing how quickly yearning can morph into irritation. Do they ever actually clean the monsters’ fur on Sesame Street? How hard is it to put one’s dishes into the dishwasher? Little girl, why can’t you keep your shoes on your feet for even five consecutive minutes? Why has gmail’s chat function been down since last night?
Why does every sentence I write seem as dull as a concrete block? Why does every photograph look the same? At not even 40, have I run out of words? Can I see nothing new to photograph?*
Why can’t purely physical sensation satisfy my puerile excuse for a soul–why do I demand the twisting together of souls and not just bodies?
This is what it means to yearn. I hope my child, studiously reading on the couch, never truly understands, but I know she will. I’m sure she feels it even now, wanting badly her mother’s attention and getting instead barked commands from me, engrossed in changing yet another filthy bottom or fixing yet another meal for voracious tiny bellies. She knows already what it is to yearn.
It’s times like these that I wish I could still believe in heaven. Surely in heaven, there would be the correct color of beige, a beige that doesn’t verge on pink. In heaven, the shirts would be made of a fiber embedded with Teflon. Eggs would wipe right off! There would be a bridge–however temporary–between our hearts and not just our sex parts. There would be no yearning in heaven.
But I know that there is no heaven but here, right now, in my house, a heaven that I make for myself here on earth. I know this. I have to create it myself, moment by moment, stress by stress; every time I open my eyes I must build it again.
The child hears her favorite song ever** on the blues station. She drops her toys and begins her little bottom-wiggling boogie, her blonde curls shaking, her fat little arms above her head, giggling so hard that her eyes close in the pleasure of the song and the dance and the moment.
This is a start.
______
*”There is no comfort in the world of objects, and Clarissa fears that art, even the greatest of it, belong stubbornly in the world of objects.” from The Hours, M. Cunningham
**Currently Delta Moon’s “Higher Ground.” I love this child.
