Patriotism

We left too late. By the time we got downtown the streets were packed and the parking garages too full. Lyra sang songs in the backseat about the fireworks, and she's dressed in her dinosaur costume from Halloween last year. She hears more than you think she does. She heard me say that this was her first year to see the fireworks. The first year we could keep her awake is more like it. She was excited.

Someone was waiting for someone else to pull out of their parking spot - I know that wait. Five minutes before they're supposed to go off and I'm in a parking garage with a kid who's here to see the fireworks. I send Chris and Lyra off to get a spot. I don't want her to miss them. I personally don't care. I don't care about the crowds and I don't care about the fireworks. Maybe I'm too depressive these years. I used to cry when I'd hear "God Bless America" but those were the days when I still put my fingertips together to pray. Kids believe what they're told, you just can't lie to them, because they'll remember. Kids can lie. You just can't lie to kids. It breaks all the rules, suddenly they don't know who to trust or whether you mean anything you say.

Stupid kids. Lighting off firecrackers with babies around, doing somersaults in the air on a steep incline, slipping and falling. These kids are as old as I am. They don't know any better. Lyra wants to go somewhere else, so we take her closer to the waterfront. They're playing music with the fireworks, in case the one wasn't enough. In case the show wasn't good enough. I know it before she says it: people are everywhere but that isn't the problem; the music is loud but that isn't the problem. The problem is the same as with the thunder - she won't like it. And she doesn't. To her the sounds of our patriotism reek more of the sounds of gunshots and hand grenades. I don't blame her. I don't know what we're celebrating either. She asks to go home and I take her.

Hey, at least we're beating the crowds, Chris says. Yeah. The lady in the car in front of us is screaming - screaming - at the vw van that's winding down the parking garage too slowly. It's brakes are probably bad, I don't know. That thing's old.

On the way home the air is gray and smells of sulfur. I'm coughing. Lyra apologizes. My first fireworks and I don't like them, she says. I tell her it's ok, I don't like them much, either. I tell her she doesn't have to like anything if she doesn't want to. She's not just disappointed, but maybe she is. She's shocked at the boomingness of it all, and all the pretty lights and fancy colors in the world won't make up for it. I'm irritated. Not at her but my own trying. I hate going downtown, paying eleven bucks to park, and dealing with humans en masse. She hates it, too, but instead of thanking her I tell her it'll be great, get her excited, then I take her home when she's horrified. She's not me but she's like me, and I don't know how to act except how my parents acted. Like normal.

I keep trying to love her like she's someone else's child. But when I really love her, and maybe like her is a better way to put it, it's when she's doing nothing different but I'm looking at her, not as a child, but as someone who didn't figure out how to behave out of a book. Who hasn't learned all that yet. And sometimes I don't want her to be different; I don't want her to turn out like me, but then I look at where trying to be someone else has gotten me and I wonder what she'd be like if she just never bothered to try. Smarter, maybe. Definitely.

But where do we go when we only know how to act like normal? How do we act like ourselves? How do we raise our children to become who they are when we don't even know how to become who we are? I don't know.