For Maurice Sendak, from All the Pierres You Created

The focus of my Tuesday yoga class is hip openers.  Every week she tells us that our emotions are held in our hips (oh, she can’t even comprehend how many emotions I’ve held in these hips, in that wonky space between my hips), and I believe her because how much of my emotional energy of the last ten years has been focused on that space?  Working with that space?  Yelling at that space?  Worrying about that space?  I know that in yoga, mens’ hips hold the same emotions, but part of me wonders if the first person who came up with this theory was a woman.

I wanted to cry today.  I have been holding in tears for a little over a week now, frustrated and unable to release them.  Rather than dealing with an issue, I have been trying to convince myself that I don’t care.  Forget about it.  Don’t deal with it.  And I thought this was the healthier option.  The ability to remove myself, to walk away, is not something that comes naturally to me.  I had to learn how to let go and not try to change the things I cannot change.  To not own everyone else’s emotions as well.

So I kept waiting to cry throughout class, pushing myself hard into the three dragon poses we held for three minutes each.  My hips were open; they were so loose it felt as if my legs were sliding around on threads like wiggling baby teeth in an elementary school child’s mouth.  But I didn’t cry because it was too hard.  Isn’t that strange?  It felt harder to cry than it did to compartmentalize and shut out everything I was thinking.

And then I got in the car and turned on my phone, and an email came through from a friend telling me that Maurice Sendak died this morning.  Where the Adele and hip openers failed, the passing of a great artist and writer made me cry like Tzippy at the end of Where the Wild Things Are,

Oh please don’t go – we’ll eat you up – we love you so!

She has always been the monster I related to the most.  Her name means “bird” in Hebrew, and she to me is the one who feels so deeply cut when people take flight.  I completely understood her outstretched hands at so many points in my life, grabbing at those who choose to leave and those who have the choice made for them.  I wrote about her a while back in a story about how I came to own the copy of the book we read to the twins when they were in utero:

The wild things, after all, are terribly misunderstood. They don’t gnash their teeth and roll their eyes out of hate. They do this out of love. Out of a love that comes from an enormous well of pain because life–as well as our love–is so deeply out of our control. If the wild things actually had the power to stop Max, they would have. But like too many of us know, we can shake our fist at the world all we want, and it can’t bring back what is missing; what has never come.

The overriding message I got from Sendak’s books is a simple word that the narrator gives as the moral to Pierre’s story: CARE.  Whether it was the subtle recognition of Tzippy’s pain, practically begging the reader to take pity on the Wild Things, or the more blunt tale of Pierre and the lion, Sendak constantly tackled the theme of caring, and always fell to the side that caring is good.  It is good to put yourself out there; good to put your heart out there; good to hope, even if your heart comes back stomped on and bruised by people and events.  It’s an important message that he gave to children, perhaps hoping they would take it with them into adulthood: people are fragile, and we need to remember that when they reach out.  We need to nurture their care as much as we need to nurture our own.

And we don’t.  We forget the lessons of Pierre even though the subtitle is “a cautionary tale.”

So I’m going to encourage you today, in honour of Maurice Sendak, to care deeply.  To take the thing you’ve been trying to convince yourself doesn’t matter and put it front and center in your heart.  To pay attention.  To listen to someone else as they’re speaking instead of writing them off.  To consider how your words will be taken.  To send out into the universe all of your deepest wants, to own them and hold them and realize that you cannot convince the heart not to care even if you are capable of convincing your mind.

And then, because what we should have learned from his books is empathy and care, go out today and do a random act of kindness for another person.  And then think to yourself, that’s what I got from my childhood books.  We don’t have to forget those lessons.

For Mr. Sendak: This is Where the Wild Things Are.