The Little Suitcase
by Melina of Daughters of Rhea / Melinda Marsh Heywood
Pavlata
(I've got an assortment of first and last names in my circus trunk....take
your pick....)
A version of this article was first published in
Brain, Child Magazine. Please do not reprint or publish without
permission of the author.
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It is the summer of 1978. A Thursday night in Athens, Greece. I am
eight years old, going on nine. Just as she does every night of the week,
Mom passes a brush through her long, black hair, applies her make-up while
standing in front of the small bathroom mirror, then dons her green belly
dance costume with the silver coin bra and belt. I run around the apartment
gathering up loose ends, locating her purse, finger cymbals, and sword,
making sure she has a good supply of safety pins just in case the costume
needs a quick fix. Finally ready, we set off in a cloud of Opium perfume
for the “Athens by Night,” the taverna where Mom performs. When we emerge
from our building, the Acropolis is lit up and blazing against the purple
Attic sky. Faces upturned, we breathe it in, then press on together through
the tiny streets of Plaka.
We sweep along
Byronos street, then turn onto Adrianou towards Mnisikleos. Mom is a
striking vision with her billowing hair and long velvet cape to cover her
costume. She grasps her sword in one hand and skinny squid of a daughter in
the other. Side by side we stride by crowds of tourists sitting outdoors
taking in their frosty Amstels and munching on pungeant souvlakis. I can
hear the swivel of necks as we pass by. While I loved having a Mom who
needed a sword to go to work, I suspected that the moms who wore nylons and
worked in office buildings by day didn’t attract quite so much attention.
All right, I admit
it. Sometimes there were times I wished Mom didn’t carry a sword to work,
and I always worried she was going to wear some rhinestone-studded nightclub
number to parent-teacher conferences. I used to choose and lay out her
clothes for such school meetings: beige slacks, collar shirt, flats. And
she went along with it, dutifully playing the part, in outward appearances
anyway, of the “normal” mother. But there was no hiding it for long; Mom’s
profession was eccentric and she herself was never held hostage by the
dictates of convention. And while I occasionally costumed her in the role
of the bland mother, I was very proud of Mom’s unusual life and uncommon
choices. After all, only a handful of girls I knew had mothers who could
balance swords on their heads while expertly playing finger cymbals and dipping into a deep back
bend.
Besides being proud
of Mom, as a kid I was also keenly aware of and felt privileged to be a
Berkeley child of the 60s. I could have been the poster child for the whole
artsy/hippie/bohemian/performance “scene” of that time and place: My dad
was a rock’n roll musician who formed the Cleanliness and Godliness Skiffle
Band and played with Country Joe; my mom was a gypsy-artist belly dancer. I
was accidentally conceived on a beach while my parents were tripping on acid
(“not true,” says my dad, “the acid part anyway”), and I came into the world
in the heady summer of ’69. My parents never got babysitters and I went
with them everywhere: I slept behind speakers on huge piles of coats at my
dad’s rock concerts; turned cartwheels in the circus ring when Dad was
bandleader of the Pickle Family Circus, and danced onstage with Mom in Greek
tavernas before hundreds of tourists. I was totally incorporated into all
aspects of their lives and I loved being so involved, even though there were
downsides such as when I had to fall asleep on nightclub side tables waiting
for Mom to cart me home at the end of the night, or when I’d pee on the
piles of coats at Dad’s gigs.
My parents separated
before I was two years old, amicably sharing me in an out-of-court
agreement. Depending on where they were living at any one point in time, I
shuttled back and forth in six-week increments between a commune in
Berkeley, apartments in Oakland and San Francisco, and circus tents up and
down the west coast. By the time I went to High School I had gone to
sixteen different schools spanning Northern California, New York City, and
Athens, Greece. My nickname in the early days was “The Little Suitcase” –
Just put a little handle on my back and I was ready to go! My Mom moved to
Greece when I was seven, and I began to divide my life into six-month
increments with a transatlantic flight in between parents. On my solo plane
voyages I would recite the details of my life to my adult seat-mates, then
judge their characters based on their reactions to the tale: could they
handle my story, take it all in stride, appreciate its bohemian glory? Or
would they nod gently and pity me, the lone little suitcase bumping around
between weird parents.
In my
early twenties, I was a tad rebellious. I met a dashing young man, an
MIT engineer, whose parents
were still married after thirty years of being together. If this was not
shocking enough, I married him in a white wedding gown at a formal church
service (admittedly, there was belly dancing and folk guitar playing in
evidence). My husband and I settled down in a house, and while I never
completely cast aside my finger cymbals, I locked myself up in the Ivory
Tower for a few years before emerging, blinking and blinded by the sun, with
a doctorate. (Mom’s impression of a stereotypical academic: “Look! Its
alive! Let’s kill it!”)
My
parents were, as usual, completely supportive of all my choices. It was all
going swimmingly, my flirtation with conventional domesticity, until, all
of a sudden, I became a mother, and I panicked. Out of nowhere, the
question reared: How could I possibly bring up my daughter in one single
town under the same roof as parents who were living together? It felt odd,
it felt alien, it felt wrong to the core of my being. But there it
was: I completely mistrusted our suburban set-up as the best environment to
raise a child. How could my daughter learn to know and respect many ways of
life, to become self-reliant and resilient, to speak different languages and
balance within herself a variety of world views if she has not experienced
the sometimes destabilizing influence of frequent travel between countries,
between parents, between the world of public school and that of a circus
tent? How can she truly flourish, I thought, if she wasn't able to walk with
me through the streets of Plaka in a belly dance costume?
These feelings were
completely unexpected, and they ran deep: I felt that I was not doing right by her by staying in one place and living in
one house for her entire childhood with her father. All I could visualize
was
a narrow road stretching on for an eternity marked by the continuous
curriculum and uniform pedagogical approach of one school, and I was
thinking, won’t going to the same school surrounded by the same kids from
the same neighborhood for years and years ultimately impede her growth as an
open-minded citizen of the world? At the time, her father pointed out the irony of my
position: here we were living in one of the most privileged, affluent
suburbs of the world with one of the most prized school systems and I was
concerned about our daughter’s education! But there is so much more to
education than the right school.
It took me a couple
of years after first becoming a mother that I realized that most of the questions and concerns I
had about my daughter were really about me. Never mind her being in
one place for the next decade, how could I bring myself to live in one place for the next 10 years? As an adult
living with my first husband, there was always this tension:
there was a part of me that relished stability
and routine along with a fixed personal private home space, and then, all of
a sudden, the part of me springs up that needs to leave – to go to Greece
and visit Mom to share in her ongoing adventures, to do a stint with the
circus for a few weeks and live in a trailer, to hang out in NYC with my dad
and his guitars. I didn't realize that what was really going on was
that my old hippie soul was looking for solace in its roots.
The
Little Suitcase finally grew up, and even though I didn't relish big changes
like moving, I was always mentally preparing for them, always thinking about
what I would need to take with me if I had to live out of just one bag.
Many women have shoe fetishes and buy hundreds of pairs; I collect carry-on
gear and suitcases and store them in my closet. I am always careful never
to get too attached to a certain home or life mode. For a very very
long time this
way of thinking did not apply to my first husband.
In the
first writing of this essay, I uncovered a partial answer to my
parenting dilemma, and I had my parents to thank for it. My mom
and dad didn’t spend my entire childhood worrying about the best way to
raise me. Quite the contrary: they didn’t strategize about parenting at
all, and one could even venture to say that sometimes they were sometimes selfish and
irresponsible parents! It was the 60s, man, it was groovy! Everyone smoked dope around me,
I stayed
up late, and I was regularly uprooting me from schools, neighborhoods,
and friends as a result of their itinerant showbiz lifestyles. But what was
crystal clear to me even at the time was that they were concerned with
living to the fullest their best, most authentic lives and that, because
they loved me so much, they wanted to bring me along for the ride. I
learned early on that the world didn’t revolve around me, but I got to see
so many worlds as a result.
I have slowly figured
out what to do with my life: With my daughter at my side I seek to live the
most authentic life I can; I try to be true to myself, my passions and my
convictions; she can only benefit in the end. If I live my life only
thinking of how to program and design hers such that she is instilled with
the hippie values I cherish, I fail as a mother. Instead, I want to be
an example to her by actively pursuing my own artistic and intellectual
quests, incorporating her into my adventures along the way. My kid has already twirled with me in circus rings
and stadiums all over the world, she has danced flamenco in
the arms of her grandma in Greece, she has strummed her grandpa’s guitars.
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