Playing House by Lauren Slater Read Free Book Online Page B

to a dance studio at the corner of our street. Maybe I was not in my right mind. Maybe I was. “I’d like to learn to tango,” I said. When I was very young, I had seen a woman tango, and the image stayed with me, her limpid form, the simple spine visible beneath her black bodice. Tango requires flexibility, spontaneity, exactly what obsessive-compulsive disorder was not, and exactly what one needs to manage motherhood.
    My instructor’s name was Armand. He had an oiled black pompadour and slick shoes. “Doublestep, doublestep, doublestep,” he’d cry as he whooshed me across the floor. Armand taught me the intricacies of tango and milonga, the drag and sweep, the circle and swirl. In the center of the circle I pictured my brain, my red-hot head, which I was dancing around, letting it flame and seize without me. Dancing was my meditation. Through it, I learned not to control my mind but to bypass it completely.
    As a new mother, especially a mother with mental illness, tango has been an indispensable tool. There are many times when I am caught in the snarl of my own obsessive symptoms, my child’s needs, and the regular, daily demands of life, and to navigate these currents, one needs a swashbuckling step. Let me be specific. My daughter is a year old now. I no longer worry about her food. Lately, I have been concerned with a particular pattern of stars only I can see in my ceiling. I keep needing to trace this pattern with my eyes. My brain is bad, so bad! Some people say OCD is purely neurological, a tic-like illness similar to Tourette’s. I believe this. My brain seems to have the hiccups; it seizes and cramps. All day I need to count the stars in my ceiling. The worst part is, my daughter needs me, and I need numbers. “Mama, mama, mama,” she calls, but I’m stuck, and then I say to myself, “Drag left, uncurl,” and I picture myself doing it—uncurling—swirling between the stars, back down to where she waits, to where we live, together.
    I take tango lessons twice a week for one hour. It’s a spiritual practice for me, a meditation through movement. I know I am extreme; most mothers go to a gym or to a therapist for support, but I believe the difference with me is one of degree, not kind. What mother doesn’t have to dance between her own needs and tugs, her child’s cries, her dreams, his desires? What mother doesn’t come at this most complex of projects with a handicap of some sort, somewhere? You tell me, what mother is perfect? To my daughter I say this: I am sorry. I am so far from being able to give you all that you need, but know one thing. You have my whole effort. You have my whole heart, for whatever it’s worth. I love you.
    Yesterday, this girl I love did something very strange. We were in her bedroom and she began to knock on the wall, for no reason I could see. I thought, “Oh god, she’s going to turn out like me.” To distract her, I put on a tape. It was Peter, Paul, and Mary singing about lemons. I sang too. The words wooed my daughter, and she, for the first time after a mere twelve months on this blue planet, began to dance. Tap tap. Tap tap. But these were not obsessive taps. These were good taps. Strong taps. Foot taps. Hand claps. She has beautiful rhythm.

6
My Life as a Father
    The first word my daughter said was “Papa.” The second word my daughter said was “Papa”: this is
Papa
with a difficult
p
, not an easy
d
, not
Da-da
, everyday baby mumbo jumbo; my daughter was not speaking mumbo jumbo, she was speaking significance, the thing closest to her heart, Papa first, Papa second, and then, third, “Lila,” which is the name of our thirty-pound sweet Shiba Inu dog, who somehow managed to take up a place on my child’s tongue before me, the mama. “Ma ma, mama, maaa-ma,” I’d say to my girl, and she’d grin back, a chip of white tooth erupting from her red gum, and refuse me. “Papa,” she’d squeal. Her world, right from the start, was all about dad