Friday, November 05, 2004
Pajama Parties, Not Political Parties
Ok, Ok – so, Halloween and the election – those were pretty scary. But I submit to you that far more frightening is the aftermath of the following words: “Hey, Mom? Can so-and-so sleep over tonight?”
To host a sleep-over is to walk the gauntlet of parenthood. A landscape of shadows and sucking quicksand stretch before you – the borrowed kid who loses her nerve in an explosion of tears at three in the morning, the seemingly model child visitor who claims your house makes spooky banging noises and announces that your macaroni and cheese is “completely disgusting” because it is cheese-colored instead of electric orange.
But we hang in there because we remember that for kids, sleep-overs are Big. They are often the first true risk of childhood, and the first true test of friendship. Sleep-overs are a way of practicing for the future – trying out new levels of intimacy that lay the ground for future alliances – maybe even political ones. At a sleep-over, you take the risk of changing out of your daytime armor into the fragile shell of your private self. You reveal your tattered jammies, your odd bedtime rituals, and, perhaps, the threadbare blanket you still sleep with “just for fun” (not that you really need it or anything).
As a kid, sleep-overs taught me to understand individuals in context, and with complexity. I watched one friend, whose life I romanticized because she was as beautiful as her fragile, movie-star-perfect mother, being slapped across the face, with no apparent cause, in front of all her friends – a shocking peek into the daily tragedies of her private world. And I remember the crystalline “click” moment in which I understood that the cheerfully chaotic six-child family hosting me one night drank orange Kool-Aid instead of real juice for breakfast and poured generic corn syrup over their pancakes instead of Vermont Grade A, not because they were oblivious to the natural food craze of the Seventies, but because they simply couldn’t afford it.
These early attempts to move from the given, familial alliances of our childhood homes to the chosen affiliations of intimate friendship form the arc of the story of growing up. After all, when you are in the flush of your first real romantic relationship as an adult, you discover that the true intimacy is not so much the over-hyped co-mingling of flesh, but the far riskier co-mingling of privacy – that is, actually (and not metaphorically) sleeping together, with its deeply unglamorous accompaniment of snoring and teeth-grinding, and the morning’s aftermath of bad breath and blanket-face. I remember, on my first overnight with my beloved, the welling hugeness of realizing that as we stood at the sink, brushing our teeth together, agreeing to share our privacy, we were creating a family, a chosen affiliation that would be generative for people beyond ourselves.
And isn’t this also one of the stories of building this country that we must find hope in – a belief (if not always a reality) that instead of a society structured on filial power, citizens might form affiliations of choice, building sometimes unlikely alliances into families and larger coalitions of differences that nevertheless share goals?
I propose that now, when our public lives are so divided, that this is just the right moment to remember the alliance-building lessons of our private pasts. Why not give up political parties for awhile, in favor of pajama parties? If the personal is political, what would happen if we took the risk of seeing one another as we really are in the fragile shells of our private skins instead of in the bluster of our public personas?
Now, I’m not exactly suggesting you sleep with the enemy. But brushing your teeth shoulder to shoulder with them? It may be worth considering. Let’s try a little guided visualization: Close your eyes. Picture your most hated political enemy. (Go ahead; be partisan.) Now, picture that person nervously spending the night with you, perhaps in some slightly shaming pajamas, perhaps holding a tattered stuffed animal for comfort. You take turns in the bathroom, embarrassed by the noises that reveal both of you as fleshly creatures, the same. You settle into your sleeping bags on the den floor with only a flashlight to pierce the unknown, and you launch into a little “Truth or Dare”: Describe a time you had your heart broken. What lie do you wish you could take back? What makes you most afraid?
My guess is that in the dark, in that vulnerable private space, most of us share the same demons, the same hopes. Can we be as brave as adults as we were as children? Why don’t you sleep on it?