by Carla Gunn
Sometimes I wonder why my mother and father got separated. I remember when it happened, though. It was just a few days after they had a big fight, which was just after Dad got home from South America. On that day we were all in their bedroom and my mother was helping Dad unpack, and I was somersaulting across their big bed. I had just learned how to do a backwards somersault, and I was feeling happy because of it, and because Dad was home.
I remember that Mom and Dad were talking and Mom was putting away Dad’s clothes, and then she stopped talking. And then my dad stopped talking too, and I stopped somersaulting because it was really quiet all of a sudden. I sat up and looked at them. My mother was holding a piece of paper, and they both looked really weird. Then Dad asked me to go downstairs to watch TV for a while.
I don’t know what they said when they had the big fight, but I could hear that their voices were louder than normal, and I could hear what sounded like my mother crying. When she came downstairs later, her eyes were red and her hands were shaking. She sat down beside me and didn’t say anything, she just hugged me and I could feel her whole, entire body shaking, and I was really worried, but I didn’t say anything either.
Then, after a while, my father came downstairs carrying the suitcases he had just brought home. He came into the room and my mother got up and left, and my father sat down and told me that he was going to stay with my uncle Roger for a few days and that he would give me a call later to say goodnight.
A few days later, when my mother and I were out getting groceries, my father came and got his things, like all of his books from the study and his desk that used to be his father’s and the big picture of a sandpiper that he got in the Magdalene Islands. Then later my mother sat me down and told me that she and Dad were separating. She said that it was because some people just can’t live very well together. That didn’t make much sense to me. I asked why they can’t get along, and she said they have personalities that are too different from each other.
The thing is, my mother and father seem to have pretty much the same personalities. And they both like the same sorts of things. And they also have almost the same kinds of jobs. And they also both have me. So why couldn’t they just fight and then make up like other animals?
In the animal kingdom, when there is a fight among animals that depend on co-operation to live, they make up. For example, when two chimpanzees fight, sometimes one of the others butts in to help the chimp who is losing. When everything quiets down, sometimes the chimp who won the fight goes over to the other chimp and reaches out a hand to him and hugs him and kisses him and grooms him. This is called reconciliation by primatologists.
Once a teenaged female chimp called Amber went too close to another chimp’s baby and the mother got upset and hit her. But when the mother calmed down, she went over to Amber and kissed her on the nose and let her get close to her baby again.
I don’t understand why my mother and father couldn’t live together after their fight. Fighting is just a part of life. All the animals do it but those in the same social group – like my mom and my dad – mostly make up afterwards.
After my parents separated, my father started working even more as a foreign correspondent. Now he is hardly ever, ever home. Among primates, the only ones who just get up and leave the social group are the kids who are grown up. They go off to find another group so that they can mate. Parent primates don’t just pick up and leave. If there was anyone who was supposed to be doing the leaving around here, it should be me, when I’m older – not my dad.
Tonight before bed I couldn’t stop thinking about Cuddles. I thought about him when I was watching the Green Channel, I thought of him as I was eating my bedtime snack, I thought about him when I was brushing my teeth. I just couldn’t get him out of my mind. It was like he was in there hopping through my brain pathways and each time he made a turn, he split into two and went down two more roads and those roads split into two and so did he and so on and so on and so on until there were thousands of Cuddleses hopping all through my brain until it overflowed and frogs started coming out my ears.
I told my mother this and she got a weird look on her face.
Her lips twitched a little bit and then she said, ‘Phin, why can’t you stop thinking about that frog? It’s a frog, Phin. A frog! Would you like me to look up some information on the web to show you how little frogs know and experience compared to us? Maybe it would help you to stop worrying about him.’
I shook my head no. I already knew all about frogs. That was my problem.
My mother said, ‘You know, Phin, like I said before, you can’t think of a frog as though it’s a person. They’re just not as intelligent.’
I asked my mother if aliens came down to the planet earth and they were one million times smarter than humans, would it be all right to capture all the humans with nets and put them in solitary cages and feed them once in a while and watch them bang their heads against the glass until the day they died?
My mother opened her mouth to say something and then closed it again. Then she opened it again and closed it. She told me to jump in my bed and then she went downstairs to get me her relaxation CDs. They didn’t work. In fact, they made me feel more scared and worried. One CD was of thunder and lightning storms and all I could think of was being struck by lightning. The next one was of the ocean and it made me think of drowning. The next was called Rainforest. That was the worst of all. If you went to a rain-forest these days likely all you’d hear would be the sounds of power saws and big trucks and animals running and howling and crying because their homes are falling down all around and on top of them. That’s supposed to relax me? What I really want is for my mom to let me have a computer in my room so that I can listen to what’s happening at Pete’s Pond.
I got up out of bed and walked down the stairs really quietly. I peeked into my mother’s office and when she heard me I ducked and then ran in behind the couch so that she wouldn’t hit me with her mad rays.
She said, ‘Phin, what are you doing? Why aren’t you in bed? You know I have two hours of work to do after you go to bed, you know that! Why are you doing this again? You’re making me crazy! I have a deadline to meet and I don’t have the time to lie down with you, I just don’t, Phin, I don’t!’
I said, ‘I know, but I can’t sleep and the CDs aren’t helping a bit.’ She sighed a really loud sigh and slammed her book shut and walked me back up the stairs. I ran up them fast because I couldn’t see her behind me. She’s scary when she’s mad.
Sometimes I look at my mother and say Mom Mom Mom over and over again and the more I say it and look at her, the more she doesn’t seem like my mother anymore. She seems stranger and stranger to me the more I stare at her and think the word Mom. It’s almost like she becomes an alien or something and if I do this for too long, I get scared and then I have to look at something else. When I look back to her again, she’s back to normal.
When my mother was mad at me, she wasn’t at all normal. But then she lay down with me and she went back to normal. Especially after she fell asleep.
I listened to her snore and thought about Cuddles some more. I am starting to think of a plan for getting him free. I am going to talk to Bird about it.
My mother told me that after school tomorrow she’s taking me to a psychologist. His name is Dr. Barrett and she says he helps kids with their problems, like worrying about things. My mother’s eyebrows were kind of scrunched up and her lips got a little thinner when she told me this. I told her she looked like the worried one, not me, and that maybe she’s the one who needs to go to a psychologist. She said maybe so, and that she’ll talk to him about her problems too. I wonder if she means me.
I saw on the Green Channel that psychologists sometimes imprison animals in cages and do experiments on them. A lot of scientists who work for big companies also keep animals in cages and test soaps and shampoos and things like that on them. They put rabbits, mice, guinea pigs, hamsters and ferrets in restraining devices so t
hey can’t move and then put chemicals on their skin and in their eyes. Sometimes they don’t even give them painkillers because they want to know how much it hurts. Sometimes animals break their necks or backs trying to escape the pain.
Those scientists say animal testing is absolutely necessary. This doesn’t make any logical sense to me because other companies make the same sorts of things without any animal testing at all. So how can it be absolutely necessary?
My mother said that Dr. Barrett works only with humans, not animals. She means not-human animals. But I’m not so sure about this whole psychologist thing.
I saw Dr. Barrett today. After he explained to me who he is – somebody who can help me feel less worried – he asked me if I wanted to talk about anything in particular. When I didn’t say anything, he did mostly all the talking.
He said, ‘You know what a thought is, eh, Phin?’
I said I did. In fact, since I had sat down on the chair that was too high for me, I had four thoughts:
1. Dr. Barrett smelled like parmesan cheese.
2. I hate parmesan cheese.
3. It smells just like throw-up because they have the same molecular structure.
4. The U.S. military has tried to find a smell for stink bombs that everyone would find horrible but they can’t find one – not even toilet smells.
‘You also know what a fact is, right, Phin?’
I said I did. He asked me for a fact and I told him that a pistol shrimp has a small claw and a large claw, and when it snaps the large one shut, the two halves squeeze water out at such a speed that it’s the loudest sound made on earth by any animal. It can even deafen sonar operators in submarines. Dr. Barrett said, ‘That’s very interesting, Phin. That fact is in your head with lots of other thoughts, right?’
I nodded my head.
‘Well, here’s another thought for you, Phin: right now I’m having a thought about a purple people-eating monster. Is this thought like your pistol-shrimp thought? Is this thought a fact too?’
I shook my head, but I felt like there might be a trap ahead.
‘Because thoughts and facts aren’t necessarily the same, right, Phin?’
I nodded my head.
‘Do you know, Phin, that thoughts make emotions?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘The trick, Phin, is to know that lots of the thoughts that make unhappy emotions like sadness and worry are not really facts at all – they’re just imaginary thoughts. For example, if I was thinking of a big purple people-eating monster and I had the thought that he was following me all around my office, I would be scared. Would you be scared, Phin, if you thought that?’
I said I would.
‘What I do when I have a thought like that is say to myself “a thought is not always fact” and then I put it in a bubble in my imagination and send it away,’ said Dr. Barrett. ‘How about you do that with the thoughts that make you worried, Phin? What thought has been worrying you lately?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’m worried about our classroom pet who is a White’s tree frog who shouldn’t be stuck in a cage here in Canada. And I’ve also been thinking a lot about animals going extinct and the earth dying.’
‘Do these thoughts make you really worried and not able to sleep?’ asked Dr. Barrett.
‘Yes.’
‘Remember, a thought is not always a fact. A fact is something like two times three equals six and how pistol shrimp make loud noises. A thought, on the other hand, can be something that’s just imaginary and can lead to bad emotions like the ones you’ve been feeling lately. How about we put those thoughts in a bubble and send them away? How about –’
‘But they’re not just thoughts. It’s a fact that Cuddles shouldn’t be in a cage. He should be in his natural environment. And it’s also a fact that the animal species of the earth are dying. A quarter of mammals are already endangered. Just check the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species if you don’t believe me,’ I said.
Dr. Barrett stopped talking for a moment. Then he said he wanted to teach me something that would help calm me down. He said it would also help me get to sleep at night. He told me that for each breath I took in and let out I should concentrate on a word that pushed other thoughts out of my mind.
I said, ‘What word?’
He said, ‘How about the word calm?’ I could breathe in deeply and then when I breathe out, I could say the word calm to myself.
I told him I couldn’t use the word calm because it might make me think of the word comet and then that would make me think of one hurtling toward me from outer space.
I told him that comets aren’t as dangerous as asteroids because they have bigger orbits, which don’t bring them as close to earth as often. ‘But that doesn’t make them not dangerous,’ I said. I told him that the chances of an asteroid or comet hitting the earth in the next hundred years is one in 5,000, which is quite a big chance – about the same as dying in a plane crash if you fly twice a year. And that’s likely a bigger chance than a gunman going into our school and shooting at us, which is something my teacher made us prepare for.
He said, ‘Okay, then let’s try to think of a word that doesn’t really mean anything.’
That wouldn’t be a word then, I didn’t say.
He asked me what my word could be and I said I don’t know. He said, ‘Just give it a shot and try out a sound.’
I thought for a minute and said, ‘How about turu?’ I don’t know what made me think of that unword.
He said, ‘That’s a good word. Try it in your head, say turu turu turu.’
So I said turu turu turu, but at the second turu I thought about how that word sounded familiar. I think turu is a culture in Africa or Asia or something that I watched on Discovery Channel. That got me thinking about the book I read on Asia last week, the book about the tsunami. Then I wasn’t at all relaxed.
I told Dr. Barrett I couldn’t use that unword because it made me anxious. He asked why and I told him. He said, ‘Okay, let’s pick another word.’ I thought and thought and finally came up with buba. ‘Good word,’ he said. ‘Say buba, buba, buba in your head and nothing else.’
So I tried it. This time I got to the third buba and then I thought of something that wasn’t relaxing. I tried not to think of that not-relaxing thing by saying buba again, but it didn’t work. I said buba buba buba buba fast and then faster and faster. It felt like there was a rock band of aliens chanting buba in my head. And they weren’t pretty aliens – in fact, they were really scary, each with ten tentacles coming out of its head and ten mouths that each said buba. The more I said buba, the more real the aliens became. And how much scarier can a scary thing be than right inside the most important part of your whole body? The only thing I can think of that can live without a brain is a cockroach – and that’s only for about nine days.
I moved around in my chair and Dr. Barrett asked what was the matter. I told him that buba reminds me of bubo, which is a type of infection of the bubonic plague.
Dr. Barrett said, ‘Okay, how about the word piece?’
I told Dr. Barrett the word piece would remind me of pieces of things, like bits of animals.
‘No, I mean peace as in peace and love,’ said Dr. Barrett. ‘But okay, that’s enough for today. We’ll try it again next time.’
When I got home from school today, my mother said, ‘Come here quick, Phin, I want to show you something cool.’ I started to take off my jacket, but she said, ‘No, you might want to leave that on, Phin, it’s really, really cool.’ I just rolled my eyes at her and she said, ‘Don’t roll your eyes at me like some muley old cow.’
I sat down beside my mother and she showed me a letter Grammie sent with a picture that my uncle John took of her skating on the river. The river looked like a big plate of glass. She said in the letter that she could see right down to the bottom of the river because the ice was so clear. She said that she skated about two miles down the river and
back and that the river hadn’t been that perfect for skating in fifteen years because mostly it’s covered with snow in the winter, but not this year.
I told my mother that’s because of global warming. Farm animals’ farts and burps make up 17 percent of the methane gas in the atmosphere.
‘Phin, doesn’t your brain ever get tired? Doesn’t it sometimes scream, “Please stop! Stop! You’re killing me in here?”’
‘No.’
‘How about we go see Grammie on the weekend and skate on the river?’
‘Yes!’ I like visiting my grandmother – but I reminded my mother that I can’t skate very well. Actually, when I do it it’s not called skating, it’s called falling. Last time we went to the rink I fell so many times my butt felt like a whacked piñata.
She said, ‘Butt – pardon the pun – practice makes perfect.’
I said, ‘That’s not always true about practice makes perfect. Bird and I have been trying to lick our elbows for two weeks now but we haven’t been able to do it. But Bird gets closer to licking his than I do to licking mine because he has a longer tongue than I do. In fact, his tongue kind of gives me the creeps because it looks like a Gila monster’s except that it doesn’t have a fork in it.’
I don’t think anything is possible if you set your mind to it like they say on PBS Kids. I think the only way Bird and I could lick an elbow is if he licked mine and I licked his. But that would be gross and I’m not going to mention it to him in case he tries to do it.
My mother said, ‘Well, some things are impossible, you’re right, but skating is not one of them.’
Today was a cac day at school. My mother picked me up and I let her drive me home because I didn’t even have the energy to walk. It was like Lyle just sucked it all out of me. He’s like a Dementor in the Harry Potter books except he doesn’t even have to put his lips on me to suck out my soul. In Harry Potter, Dementors have no eyes and there’s a large hole where the mouth should be and they grow in the darkest, evilest places and bring a cold fog wherever they go. Maybe the woman who wrote that book has met Lyle.