Portraits
Little kids’ self-portraits are gloriously naked. Imagine handing a box of Crayolas to a Greek god or an ancient Egyptian cave dweller and asking him to draw his family. His portrait might look much like a preschooler’s: circles thick with noisy breaths of creation, lines zigzagging like the heart rate of a boy streaming down Mount Olympus, hair still damp from the clouds. Preschoolers don’t hide what their parents might not want displayed on the classroom wall. They think their sisters’ crazy hair, their dead pet turtles, and their moms’ round bellies are extraordinary, so they scribble and paint with wet, unclothed honesty.
In my son Sam’s classroom, family portraits hang under the numbers and above the calendars, displayed like facts. His friend Aubrey, for example, doesn’t have any sisters or brothers. It’s just her, Daddy, and Mommy, drawn like bugs with oval, yellow bodies and spidery arms and legs. Evan’s mommy has a smiley face inside her belly, which Evan told the teacher is “the surprise baby in there.” This is written in teacher handwriting in the margins; a teacher myself, I imagine the giggle that accompanied this footnote. Emma’s mommy, I know, is also pregnant and due any day, but Emma has chosen to draw her mommy slim as a twig, holding hands with Emma. There is no sign a baby will soon arrive, and when the baby does come two weeks later, black brushstrokes will replace Emma’s delicate lines.
I save Sam’s family portrait for last. My heart pounds in my neck as I lean in. I exhale through my lips. He is, by far, the best artist in the classroom. I wish my husband were here, looking at Sam’s picture with me, because he would whisper theatrically, “Sam’s is the best one.”
I would nod, but I don’t say things like that out loud. Instead, I quietly post pictures on Facebook to prove that Sam is a hero, even this summer when he was amidst a sea of IVs, blinking numbers, and blaring alarms. A few months ago, just before Sam’s third open-heart surgery, I created “Sam’s Heart Journey”: a Facebook photo album of Sam’s battle with a severe heart defect. According to the photos and comments I posted throughout June and July, Sam’s extended hospital stay was like any other family’s summer vacation. One picture showed Sam eating his first post-surgery popsicle with a grape-stained smile; another captured him saying “Cheese!” for his daily x-ray. Our comments made no mention, however, that Sam gagged with every swallow and that his high voice was barely audible because the surgery had damaged his vocal cords. Nor did we mention that we were miles away from Henry, Sam’s baby brother, who was with a sitter eating microwaved chicken nuggets. I didn’t take any pictures of me, lying alone on a hospital futon, looking at a motionless Sam tethered to machines. I didn’t post how anxiety pills failed to stop me from crying as I thought of how Sam loved to crawl between the sleeping bodies of my husband and me while Henry sighed in his crib on the other side of our wall. At home.
Instead, my Facebook portraits are typically clothed in perfection. How omnipotent we feel as we crop out the parts of our bodies that look too old, too thick, or too sad, as we recast a dull moment in noir or chrome with the graze of a thumb. I dare say the Puritans of seventeenth century Salem would have surreptitiously loved Facebook. They could have taken glistening selfies with their healthy sheep, cover photos of corn reaching up to cloudless skies, to testify that they were, indeed, the chosen ones.
I use my profile picture, for example, to convince others that the sunlight gives me a halo. This photo is my way of telling Holly Goldstein, the meanest, most popular girl in the fifth grade, that I do not, in fact, look like her golden retriever. It took five tries.
My posts of lopsided strawberry birthday cakes, of Sam wrapped around the yellow, ceramic bowl, licking the wooden spoon--those are just in case there’s Facebook in heaven and my mom is logging in to make sure I’m not buying store-bought cakes. For 37 years, she made every birthday cake, Christmas Eve soup, and Thanksgiving turkey, and like hell I’m going to advertise myself buying frosting in a can.
The picture of me in a bikini teaching Henry how to swim--those aren’t about Henry at all. Those are for my ex-boyfriends because they need to know that my breasts are still holding up just fine. They can’t see the red marks on my neck from the tightly tied halter strings.
Some photos are color edited to invent the timeless beauty of a moment. Sam and Henry hanging the Christmas ornaments, for example, are bathed in sepia to connect them to all children hanging Christmas ornaments throughout time in movies, holiday cards, and Coca Cola commercials. I want it look like God snapped this photo with his golden thumb while we were having just another day.
In “Sam’s Heart Journey,” there’s a photo of Sam walking himself out of the intensive care unit this summer. Jason and I are holding his hands, and three nurses behind us are lifting the chest tubes and IVs to keep them from touching the floor. I posted that picture to prove that Sam recovers quickly from his open-heart surgeries, that his life-limiting heart defect doesn’t limit him. That’s the kind of portrait we like to see. The photo was taken at a distance, and I left it that way to keep the pain on Sam’s face, the dark circles under his eyes, blurred.
The portrait on Sam’s classroom wall, though, is unedited. With no cropping, no color baths, it quietly celebrates Sam’s healing. It’s only been two months since his surgery, but the portrait has done away with the oxygen cannula and feeding pump from his other drawings. Mommy is blue, Daddy red, Henry green, and Sam, as always, yellow. Unlike the fragile, wavering stick figures drawn by the other kids, Sam’s people have full, proportional bodies and detailed hands. So many hands this summer with feathery wingspans moved over his body, quick and careful as brushstrokes.
Sam has accurately drawn Henry’s hair sticking straight up (several hairdressers have gravely informed us of the untamability of Henry’s cowlick). Also in Sam’s picture, we are all wearing shirts but no pants. Sam never wears pants, and I’ve stopped trying to edit this from my Facebook posts. Everybody leaves comments about our house being “pants optional,” but his skinny, naked legs and days-of-the-week underpants are part of my daily scenery, as is Henry’s cockatiel hair. I think even Monet wouldn’t dare blur this landscape.
As Henry and I wait in Sam’s classroom for recess to finish, Henry pulls dinosaurs from the yellow bin mysteriously marked “Farm Animals.” He holds each one up to me and asks with his two-year-old slur, “Big dinosaur?”
I let his soft cowlick tickle my palm and say, “Yes, baby. That’s a big dinosaur.”
He parks them like matchbox cars on the round table next to Sam’s cubby. Henry and Sam are in some kind of dinosaur stage right now; they thunder around the house every night, yawping and kicking over laundry baskets. Their eyes are as round as their mouths as they roar, looking at me as if to say, “Isn’t this amazing?”
Even though we need to be home soon so Sam can get his midday heart meds, I never interrupt recess. Sam needs to exercise his muscles. He started physical therapy when he was three weeks old, shortly after his first open-heart surgery, and continued through his second heart surgery and first few catheterizations. He’d scream at his therapist every week, crying as she stretched out his skinny baby arms and later forced his toddler legs up and down our town home’s stairs. He’d hide under the table when she tried to work with him at daycare. There were no Facebook posts of Sam’s physical therapy sessions, though I did post a picture when Sam could finally stand up, holding onto our glass table and looking pleased with himself. The Facebook comments from friends and relatives praised God, thanked the universe, named Sam a hero, as though some angel or Greek goddess reached down to help him shake off the tubes, hospital beds, purple nail beds, blue lips, and trembling legs.
We sent the photo to his physical therapist as well, who texted back, “Finally--all that hard work paid off!”
So I keep my distance during Sam’s recess time, picturing him chasing friends upstairs and down slides, the way the normal kids do. Besides, I like peering at Sam’s artwork without the teachers or parents around. They already know that Sam is not normal. What I need them to know is that Sam is extraordinary. His Facebook journey boasts this, but his self-portrait whispers it like a page from a chapel book.
This summer, Sam spent hours, days, weeks, sketching on his Magnadoodle--a wide, mess-free, magnetic drawing screen. Since he was stuck in a hospital bed, his options were limited, but I like to think he was being given a rare opportunity to hone his craft. He’d barely look up as his surgeon checked his six-inch chest incision and daily chest tube output. Sam silently drew a little boy, the surgeon silently inspected my little boy, and I propped myself on the hospital futon, too full of sleep and worry and admiration to unmute this beautiful moment with a snapshot.
I’d wake up sometimes before morning rounds to the sound of Sam’s voice—high as an elf’s--asking me, “Mommy, how do you spell IV?”
“You spell it ‘I,’ ‘V,’” I’d tell him while reaching for my glasses. I’d sit up to see him drawing a little boy getting an IV, which he had properly labeled. I’d also wake up to him asking me how to spell “x-ray,” and if nurses were the same thing as teachers. He did this the same way other kids draw yellow sunshines and ask how to spell “cat”--with no trace of self-pity, only curiosity. His brain still raced through words, numbers, and body parts like any other preschooler’s mind, as fast as little legs could fly down a hill.
Towards the end of our hospital stay, he started drawing nurses with two giant, side-by-side circles on their chests. I showed one of these drawings to Jason, who covered his mouth and laughed for a minute before saying, “Atta boy.”
“Do you think he’s drawing boobs?” I asked.
Jason calmly picked up the drawing and sat next to Sam on the bed.
“Sam,” he asked, pointing at the circles, “What are these?”
Sam looked up from his Magnadoodle, put his finger on the crayoned circles, and said, “Those are her lungs. You can see them in the x-ray. They are for oxygen.” He returned to his drawing of Lord Business from The Lego Movie. I smiled and teared up a little, the way I do each time Sam says something that other four-year-olds don’t and shouldn’t know, like how to spell “I.V.” He was too young to care about boobs but could identify lungs in an x-ray. I felt profoundly sad and proud.
Interestingly, he never asked me when we were going home. He seemed happy making his bed go up and down with arrow buttons, using the remote control to play The Lego Movie whenever he wanted, pressing the nurse’s button to tell the answering receptionist, “I’m sorry, but I need to take your temperature now.” She always obliged. He started quickly draping his plastic stethoscope around his neck like a scarf, the way the doctors and nurses do.
Meanwhile, I’d crane toward the tiny hospital mirror, trying to figure out where to plug in my hair straightener in the dark shadows around Sam’s bed. Unlike Sam, I didn’t want to look like anyone here. The other heart moms had red eyes, unwashed sweatpants, hair in messy ponytails. I wanted to look groomed, like I could stroll through the sliding glass doors to my world, where I conducted Advanced Placement Literature classes and made Sam’s bed. My world had labeled gradebooks, clean laundry, and placemats with evenly spaced planets and stars. My world was safe and ordered.
The hospital was not. I learned this before Sam was born. I’ve been trembling in hospital rooms at images of Sam’s heart since I was eight weeks pregnant. His heart started off strong; the doctors pointed at the pulsing, tiny, birdlike organ, announcing his heart rate with pride. Then the ultrasounds grew quieter and more uncertain, until my 20-week ultrasound, when the doctor gently pointed out the left side wasn’t growing or pumping. I saw Sam’s heart when he was a few hours old on an ultrasound image, when he stopped breathing and turned gray every thirty minutes. I watched doctors frown at blackish ultrasound blurs that revealed his two-month-old heart growing an infection that was swinging like a punching bag. Over the past four years, I’ve stared down hundreds of images of Sam’s disordered heart, punctuated with phrases like “moderate to severe leakage” and “worrisome narrowing.”
I felt the hospital’s chaos again this summer with one, soul-shaking code blue that made my hands quake like they were trying to hold together a cracked-open world. My Facebook post that day read: “Sam is in good hands. His problems are being treated one at a time, and right now at least, there are options.”
I didn’t mention it was the first time I had heard a nurse shout, or that everyone kept dropping needles and vials in their rush. Facebook never knew I was unable to eat without spilling for two days. I posted only one picture of Sam during that time, and it was of his naked, curved back while he slept. I didn’t want to share the sadness of his front: slumped, mucus-streaked cheeks, taped-in needles, greasy hair, oozing bandages.
But just three weeks after Sam’s surgery, Sam’s chest tubes dried up, his x-rays cleared up, and we carefully ladled him into his car seat to go home. Mystified, we posted a victory video on Facebook after we waved “goodbye,” or “see you later” to the heart families who didn’t get to leave.
At home, Sam continued drawing as a way of exploring the mystery of his surgery and recovery. While the gastrointestinal pump purred out his meds and feeds, he would draw dinosaurs and Lego guys. While other parents posted pictures on Facebook of their children water skiing and rock climbing, I’d post pictures of Sam drawing pixelated self-portraits with his Magnadoodle. He often included his oxygen tank and gastrointestinal tube as extensions of himself, as though he were born with these accessories. People left comments about his “advanced skills,” how he was “an artist in the making.” We still use those half-inch comment boxes to assure ourselves that he’ll be a famous artist one day, so that we can say, hands on our hips and nodding, that all of this happened for a reason: to make him extraordinary. We almost believe it.
Recess is almost over. Muffled giggles and screeches leak in through the classroom door, and the leak grows wider and louder. His class is returning. With Henry babbling softly behind me, I take one step closer to Sam’s self-portrait. In the middle of Sam’s chest is a small, rounded, inverted triangle.
He has drawn his heart.
I have more images of Sam’s heart than I have of family holidays. But this one is the loveliest by far.
With blue-veined fingers and a thick pencil, he has mapped out an unbroken, dime-sized version of his heart. There are no signs of scar tissue, of a wired-together sternum, of doctors trying to finish what nature didn’t. I search for signs of emotional baggage--overuse of the color black, or bandaged body parts. His prognosis, in medical terms, is one of “ongoing morbidity and mortality” (it hurts my fingertips even to type these words), and I worry about how this might surface in his self-rendering. But his portraits, like his questions about the hospital, are quite matter-of-fact. If Sam is dissatisfied with his life so far, his picture shows no signs of it. The extraordinary scars we see are not the scars he feels.
Sam comes bounding in from recess, sippy cup in one hand, sweat and sunscreen making his blond hair thick and stiff. I can see the nubby top of his scar poking up above his collar like a caterpillar. It’s turned from deep purple to light pink over the past few weeks, and under his Superman t-shirt, strangers wouldn’t even know it was there. Perhaps that’s why he sketched his heart in the center of his self-portrait for everyone to look at. How he sees himself is one of the things he can tell us.
But Sam is only four, and he can’t tell us everything. If I think about the pictures I didn’t take--the ones blinking on and off in the recesses of my mind, never to be posted on Facebook--here’s what I can see in overexposed flashes:
Sam’s tired of having a cold, metal stethoscope pressed to his naked skin.
It’s scary when we peel off the “stickers” from his EKG.
X-rays are darkly, loudly terrifying, especially the ones where he has to lie down.
The glass elevator at Children’s Hospital makes everything move too fast.
The stickiness of the ultrasound goop doesn’t really come off until bathtime.
Hospital gowns overexpose him, even his favorite ones with the planets.
Before Jason and I kiss him goodbye in pre-op, he knows he’s about to be separated from the warmth of our hands, and the new hands that touch him will be wearing gloves.
He also knows that we will be here, right here, waiting for him when he wakes up.
But he doesn’t know how to capture these things, and, to be fair, neither do I. No meticulous cropping or color adjustments can make these snapshots fit into the heroic journey I’ve created on Facebook. The photos I deleted or never took create a cold space around the journey I’ve crafted. They revisit me each time Sam’s skin looks too blue, or he catches a cold, and nobody can offer me reassuring comments because nobody knows these moments exist. Yet these are the moments that make me want to hold Sam so tight that his crazy heartbeat sinks through my ribs. I want to climb Mount Olympus with him until the hospital is as small as a pebble, and Sam’s heart is as full as a star.
I teach my A.P. Literature students that scars in literature are metaphors for survival and strength; the physical scar is a portrait of the tough soul that lies underneath. But outside the pages of a book, maybe a scar is just a scar: a raised line of dead skin. There is nothing extraordinary about a scar. It’s ugly, tight, and part of the normal healing process. Sam’s Facebook journey, perhaps, is a scar: a damaged column of color pixels, each numb layer arising from humans playing God.
What we find extraordinary, Sam finds quite ordinary. And what he finds extraordinary is the special fabric of the universe we’ve turned ordinary: how dinosaurs stomped the earth. How soft and tingly the family room carpet feels against naked legs. How the space between two sleeping people is warmer than any other space on earth. How the whole solar system fits on a 17 x 11 inch placemat, black space expanding under comet-like smears of yogurt and peanut butter that I can’t bring myself to wipe away.
KRISTIN LECLAIRE is and English teacher and Lighthouse writer whose nonfiction has appeared in Pembroke Magazine, Literary Mama, The Bohemyth, and Creative Nonfictions's What I Didn't Know.