My favorite stage of motherhood was when my children were young enough to prop themselves upright, and be carried, clinging to me like a spider monkey. I loved the ‘buddy-ness’ of it, a miniature copilot, overseeing one handed dishwashing, one handed laundry, one handed mail retrieval. I liked their little faces inches from my own, whipping around in time with every little turn and pivot.
I was listening to a podcast yesterday and a guest mentioned the term ‘vanishing point.’ It felt like being handed a photo of a high school classmate and struggling to recollect their name and what classes we shared. I realized my life is so far from where it once was, when the trajectory of my career was linear and upright. When the futures of my children followed an easy and clear one point perspective of family, childhood, school, independence, and culminating in the wealth of successful choices achieving adulthood brings. Will she be a gymnastics instructor? Will he get married and have children or solo travel? What will they major in? Will I like their chosen partners?
Jasper’s spent the past month at a residential treatment center. It’s been wild. Imagine being at home one day and seeing out of the corner of your eye a cockroach scuttling from one corner of the kitchen to the other. You immediately call an exterminator because you’ve got cockroaches! The exterminator does what they do and when you head back to your fumigated home they inform you that the cockroaches were the least of your worries. Did you know you also have ants, rats, and a subterranean termite problem that’s caused extensive structural damage to your foundation and subflooring? Well, you do! And now your day, your week, your whole life plan has changed, because this was the house you planned to retire in, to see your grandchildren visit, and now the overwhelmingness hits of costs and navigating inspectors and experts and contractors to fix this massive problem, all whilst hoping the stairs don’t crumble (literally) beneath you in the meantime.
So that’s how residential treatment went! Unbeknownst to me, his problems were structurally damaging, costly, the fix unknown and the outcome not guaranteed or under warranty.
When he was a baby, he was cantankerous. Never happy, always crying. He enjoyed being in water though, so I took to putting my little spider monkey into the sink while I did the dishes. His toes raisined in the water as I slowly rinsed bowls and cups, drawing out the task we both enjoyed.
When I taught students how to draw perspective, I took them outside. Describing one and two point perspectives in words alone loses people’s attention fast. A vanishing point is a point on the image plane of a perspective rendering where the two-dimensional perspective projections of mutually parallel lines in three-dimensional space appear to converge. The language and words get more complex and convoluted from there, but when you go outside, you can easily see for yourself the general idea, that all of the architectural lines in our built environment have shared direction, meeting together far away at invisible points on the horizon.
Is what we see close up and what we miss far away only about physical distance, or is it a shutting down of too much information, too convoluted explanations or damage done? Did you maybe notice a tiny pile of shavings under the bathroom cabinet and hope to yourself that it was always there but you hadn’t paid attention? Months ago, Jasper and I were picking up a few items for the 4th of July and I saw him put a packet of ‘Pop-Its’ in his pocket. Immediately, I exclaimed, ‘What are you doing?! I saw you just put that in your pocket!’ He answered that he didn’t notice what he was doing and took it out, putting it back on the shelf. I chose to ignore the cockroach skittering out of the corner of my eye, because Pop-Its are one dollar for heaven’s sake! Why would he steal Pop-It’s?
When I held Jasper propped on my hip, left hand clutching his fat thigh for stability, his face inches from my own, I’d kiss his smooth forehead every few minutes. So close, easy to reach.
Jasper will be home in two days and the future is scary, filled with shadowed spaces of behaviours and friends who are not friends and a whole outside life that I only see from arms length, or however close he’ll let me get.
I had a college friend that once regaled me with tales of a nightmare roommate that gifted her household with cockroaches. ‘They were inside the toaster he moved in with!’ she informed me. How could one possibly know that a whole fleet of vermin would infest a home, all from an innocuous kitchen appliance?! In two days, when Jasper resumes his life at home, will the lies, the stealing, the drug use, the double life, sidle in too like cockroaches in a toaster?
My students sat and stood outside with drawing boards, squinting and at the ready, with pencils tentatively sketching in light lines, too unsure to make dark steady marks. Drifting from one student to the next, I offered suggestions and reminders to measure the angle, don’t just guess. ‘Where is the vanishing point?’ I’d ask. Mostly vague guesses were the replies as perspective is a particularly confusing drawing theory. The answer, however, is astonishingly simple and gratifying.
Eye level.
The vanishing point, no matter how close you are or how far away, whether you are sitting, standing, or gazing from a distance is always at your eye level, whipping around in time with every little turn and pivot.