I hung the lonely pirate today, on the wall in my office.  My mom bought it for me when she and Henry went to the Farnsworth Museum the spring before she got sick.  She bought it for me because she said she thought of me when she saw it.

The pirate looks defeated and lost and alone.  He sits with a talisman of two severed chicken feet tied together by a leather strap beside him. There’s a flask, tipped on its side on a black wool coat that lies on the sand.  The flask appears to be empty.  The coat still has its silver buttons. His head is bowed.  He wears an earring.  His hands are clasped and his arms are wrapped around his knees.  It’s difficult to know whether he is in thought, in prayer or in despair. There is one wave breaking in the distance and otherwise he is the only moving object, the only thing alive for any eye to see.  How he ended up there is a mystery.

Why she thought of me when she saw it is also a mystery to me.  By the time I asked her, the cancer had taken over her mind and she said because she was afraid for me.  I asked her why and she answered that I hadn’t found my root.  I don’t know if she really thought that or whether that is just what came to her befuddled brain at the moment. I just know she said it. And I know that when I look at the lonely pirate I feel both desolation and freedom.  I breathe big and deep and I feel like crying all at the same time.

I remember taking my daughter to a child psychologist after reading Nancy Friday’s “My Mother, Myself” – the chapter where she declares that little girls will treat their dolls the way they wish they were treated.  Tanya had most recently been beheading them and then flushing the severed torsos down the toilet, keeping the heads in her magic cabinet under the bed.  She was five at the time and I could not remember being five never mind playing with/beheading dolls.

Well that was not entirely true – there was the faked homicide that my sister and I staged while my brother was lolling about in his bubble tub; she and I bursting in, apparently entangled in a murderous fight that culminated in her decision to flush me down the toilet.  She was pushing and flushing and I was screaming for him to do something.

My brother was horrified, perhaps as much by the challenge to his modesty as the pending fratricide.  He was limited what with one hand cupped over his privates and all slippery with Mr. Bubble but his effort was valiant nonetheless and we eventually allowed him to save the day.  He and I were closer from that day forward, partly because he had saved me and partly because he knew I had seen him and would tell his friends about the bubble business if he weren’t careful.

But that event notwithstanding I had little to go on with my kindergarten mystery girl so I made an appointment at the child development clinic in Newport News and when the day came, off we went.  Tanya asked me where we were going and I said to go talk to a man.  That seemed fine with her.  I went into the office and stayed for a few minutes until it was clear that she had plenty to say without my help.

When the evaluation was all done the doctor told me that there was nothing wrong with my daughter other than the fact that she didn’t understand her mother.

It had never occurred to me as an option – to understand one’s mother.

So I think of my mother saying that she was afraid for me because I hadn’t found my root and I wonder what would have happened if we had been scooped up and transported to Dr. Indian Man who would question me thoroughly only to declare, in the end, that I was fine but that I didn’t understand my mother.