Out of the Bubble

This week, for the WSL class that my friend teaches (and that I've been flattered to help out with and attend), she assigned the prompt: "If I knew then what I know now..."   I had to think long and hard about this one, not because I had difficulty thinking of a subject, but because SO many topics came to mind.  Isn't this prompt the very truth of life-- live it, learn it?  Anyway, here goes.

  The year was 1996;  I was on the red line T wearing my jeans with the hems cut and purposely left stringy, and my mauve waffle- pattern short- sleeve shirt with a matching flannel over it.  (What the hell was up with 90s fashion, anyway?)  Lots of college kids were riding the T that day, as my friend and I headed over to Cambridge for a tour of MIT.  (Before you start laughing, no, I was not applying to MIT.  This girl, whose 5th- grade science class rocket ship did not take flight, and whose 11th- grade physics class egg- holding contraption did not protect said egg in the free- fall, would never apply to the most prestigious technical university in the world.  My friend M. was applying and I was just along for the ride.)  A day on the subway, traversing the city from Boston to Cambridge-- ahhh, the independence was palpable.  And in just a few short months, I'd be experiencing that independence all the time.  I liked high school, and was sad to leave it behind, but I couldn't wait to dig my heels into fresh sand and find a whole new everything.

I couldn't wait to go to college.  What a cliche, you're probably thinking.  But I remember feeling suffocated, stuck beneath what I arrogantly thought were oppressive shackles-- AKA parents who cared about me. They had me locked down, or maybe, just positioned inside the bubble. 

As a kid, I remember a few tragedies happening: at school, we watched on the old Panasonic TV with the rabbit ears when The Challenger blew up.  A few kids lost moms and dads to cancer or accidents or heart attacks.  But even in writing this entry, and trying hard to remember other tragedies without going to Google, I am falling short.  I don't remember really sad things happening around me.  And the terrifying things I DO remember were the stuff of the news: the Oklahoma City Bombing, the Gulf War-- I'd see the story, shudder, maybe ruminate on it for ten minutes, and then say, "Well, it'd never happen here."

That's the essence of the bubble: the invincibility complex.  And while this phenomenon is correlated to age, it also seems to be, the more and more I think about this concept, correlated to time period.  I think of my parents' generation: assassinations of larger- than- life figures; killings at college protests; a grueling draft for the Vietnam war and subsequent deaths upon deaths upon deaths of kids you went to "grammar school" (as my mom calls it) with; bomb shelter drills in 4th grade.  And now, in the Millennium, 6- year- olds being shot at school, terrorizing violence and death at Marathon races, unprecedented amounts of gang violence, shootings at movie theaters.  The last thing I feel today is invincible. 

So we had it good in the 80s and 90s, right?  Was it a period of relative peace, or was I just so far into the bubble that I didn't know any better?

Because for sure people still died.  Cancer was everywhere even back then.  So were heart attacks.  They had to have been.  But for the maybe two or three kids who lost parents when I was in high school, my mom would offer me comforting rationale when she would see me get nervous: "He must have had a pre- exisiting condition.  That's why we go for annual check- ups."  Or, "That kind of cancer is hereditary."  And I'd take the heartbreaking story and gingerly rest it way back in the annals of my mind.  It was a self- preservation mechanism, but it worked.

Was my mom blocking me from pain, limiting me to the bubble when perhaps it was time to burst out, or was she doing what I am likely to do for my children-- help them stop worrying when worry is not productive?  Does it do any good to take on the burdens of others and wait for them to befall you when you are twelve?  Is it selfish to cast other people's hardships aside?

Maybe home seemed so insufferably boring and constrictive when I was 17 because of the bubble.  On some level, I must have known that I wasn't really IN the world.  And while I certainly didn't want to experience tragedy, I must have been able to feel the earth shifting somewhere below my safely- in- place Birkenstocks, and I had to have been craving a more genuine feel for what was out there. We are convinced at that age that home is so lame, and so are our parents, and we are going to just DIE of ennui.  What we don't see is that the bubble, whether it's 1985 or 2000 or now, is there for our benefit.  Living in the bubble, while seemingly childish, is actually pretty fantastic.

After the Newtown tragedy occurred, I was stunned that my students dealt so well.  A couple of days of tears.  Many questions-- especially ones like, "What do we have here that can prevent that??"  But then they were back to good.  We had counselors at our call to deal with those who felt too afraid to be in school.  Yet, none of my kids sought those counselors.  Within a week, they were back to complaining about the prices of concert tickets and their not being allowed to drink coffee in school.   I think they came close to bursting through the bubble, but that teenage invincibility complex suctioned them back in.  I envied them.

In the months following, I'd wonder what it was like to be sending a senior off to college soon.  Parents must have been reminded of what happened at Virginia Tech.  They had to have been worried that their caring hands were slipping away too quickly from their kids' backs.  Surely, they could see the bubble about to pop.  While I sympathize with my teenage self and my need to leap from the bubble, I empathize now with parents who are loath to set their dear puppies free from the litter.

I wonder now if the bubble varies in its scope and force-- it seems that many factors shape the bubble.  What generation we grow up in, the level of our parents' oversight in our lives, and our own willingness or refusal to leave behind a proverbial security blanket-- all of these things mold the bubble. What's traumatizing is that now I don't see the bubble in my life at all.  I can't even recognize its outline.  While we were children, it always seemed that bad stuff happened to certain families, to certain individuals, and in certain places.  And we commonly felt far away from vulnerability.  But now-- having witnessed devastating and terrifying happenings to people from even those supposedly safe families-- and even going through a little trauma myself-- I have to wonder if people after a certain age are capable of seeing the bubble.  It might be like one of those high- pitched whistles that keep kids from loitering at store- fronts because only people younger than 25 can hear them.

What I know now and wish I knew then was that the bubble was something not to be taken for granted.  I'm happy I was one of the kids who was ready to move on at age 17.  It was fun to be excited about leaving home.  But I'm also relieved that for those 17 years, I felt utterly safe.  I walked from building to building on my high school campus, with no fear of an intruder following close behind me.  Fatal illnesses were in newspapers and medical journals, and in descriptions for charity foundations, not in the families of way too many people I know and care about.   The outside world back then was welcoming.  And it wasn't just about physical safety-- I was free from tormenting thoughts and questions about existence.  I never wondered why I was here, or what my role or task as a human being was.  I couldn't see beyond my immediate world, and the rest of the world was just ready to be unearthed.  Exiting the bubble carried with it a hopeful promise for the future.

There's a line in Death of a Salesman in which Willy Loman says he "still feel[s] kind of temporary."  Clearly Willy wasn't talking about the bubble, but every year when I teach this play I can't help but think of it.  That's exactly how I feel as an adult and a mother.  Everything seems temporary-- there are no promises that things will turn out all right.  Reminders of comfort that existed in the bubble are nowhere to be found: the smell of my mom's brownies on Sunday nights; the theme song to "Family Ties" blaring through our TV above the clunky, paneled cable box; even that tick- tick- tick of the "60 Minutes" intro that hauntingly reminded me I hadn't yet started my homework.  As a parent, I am supposed to now provide those instances of comfort and safety.  I am supposed to create a bubble.

I suppose it's silly to expect a 14- year- old to worry more about anything than whether she's getting the new hot- pink telephone she wants for her nightstand.  It's not realistic to think kids have any sense of stepping outside of their bubbles.  I wish I knew twenty years ago how awesome my safe space was, but I sure am glad I didn't know the safe space would eventually evaporate.