THE LITTLE SUITCASE

by Melina / Melinda Marsh Heywood

This article was first published in Brain, Child Magazine.  This article will be updated in the near future to reflect new conditions in my life.

  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 effortlessly 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.

Things have changed.  I still recite the story of my upbringing and people’s eyebrows still rise during the telling, but now I am an adult living in relative stability in a Victorian house in Newton, Massachusetts.  I lead a comparatively “normal” life as a University French teacher, free-lance writer, part-time belly dancer, full-time mother and longtime wife of a man straight out of the Brady Bunch.  And I must confess:  I miss my vagabond childhood.  I haven’t forgotten the heartache of always being separated from one parent or the other, the loneliness of the child voyager constantly changing cultures and routines, but I do miss the living abroad, the bravery, the sense of adventure my young life presented.  The experiences of navigating international airports alone at age eight, balancing a tray of lit candles on my head while performing on stage to a live band, or entering yet another new school in the middle of the academic year made me resilient, capable, responsible and independent.  Somehow I emerged from it all pretty well-adjusted, in large part because my parents and their various significant others loved me very much and always expressed this love, and in part because they and the universe gifted me with the tendency to seek out the good in people, to look on the bright side of things, and to take a positive message from even negative experiences. 

In my twenties, I was a tad rebellious.  I met a man, an 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 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, this 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 mistrust our suburban set-up as the best environment to raise a child.  How can 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 isn’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, and still feel, that I am not doing right by her by staying in one place and living in one house for her entire childhood with her father.  All I can visualize is a narrow road stretching on for an eternity marked by the continuous curriculum and uniform pedagogical approach of one school, and I am 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?  My husband points out the irony of my position:  here we are living in one of the most privileged, affluent suburbs of the world with one of the most prized school systems and I am concerned about our daughter’s education!  But there is so much more to education than the right school. 

A couple of years have passed since I first became a mother, and I now realize that a lot of the questions and concerns I have about my daughter are really about me.  Never mind her being in one place for the next decade, how can I bring myself to live in one place for the next 10 years?  As an adult, there has always been this tension:  There is a part of me that relishes 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. 

The Little Suitcase has grown up, and even though I don’t relish big changes like moving, I am 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 some reason this way of thinking does not apply to my husband – he has been a constant in my life for 13 years and that is not likely to change.  I think that is because beneath his conventional trappings he is ever ready to follow me to the next thought, the next adventure, the next country.  I simply can’t bring myself to leave him just to make sure my daughter experiences the challenge and character-building heartbreak of being the child of divorced parents.  So the answer to my childrearing panic is obviously not attempting to replicate the conditions of my childhood with my daughter. 

In the writing of this essay, however, I’ve uncovered a partial answer to my parenting dilemma, and once again I have 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 selfish and irresponsible parents!  They smoked dope around me, they drank, they kept me up late, and they were constantly 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. 

And so I now see what I must do:  With my daughter at my side I must seek to live the most authentic life I can; I must 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 am failing as a mother.  Instead, I must be an example to her by actively pursuing my own artistic and intellectual quests, incorporating her into my adventures along the way.  Indeed, my daughter has already twirled with me in the circus ring, danced flamenco in the arms of her grandma in Greece, and strummed her grandpa’s guitars. 

So maybe there is a way that I can live in this beautiful house in the ‘burbs, remain with my husband and fashion my life as I always have:  as a patchwork of diverse experiences that sometimes take me far away and sometimes keep me right at home.  At times life will be exciting and dramatic, as when we live in a circus trailer and elephants plod daily past our window, and at times it will be quiet and reflective, as when I sit down to write at my desk with my daughter drawing at my side.  And then, when she grows up and has a kid of her own, it’ll be her turn to figure it all out.