The surest way to send Claire screaming from the room is to tell her she's just like her mother. Relatives in particular do this on a regular basis, coupling the comment with a smirk that I know from long experience means that I've gotten just what I deserve. I'll admit that there are similarities. When she tried to irritate me by reading a book on atheism in church, it did remind me of how I used to read Teaching as a Subversive Activity in study hall, simply to taunt my teachers. Like me, she loves Shakespeare and Springsteen. She inherited my dyslexia and ADD, and though she missed out on the McDonough nose, she did get the hyperbole gene, handed down from my father.Another trait she inherited is one which I call pathological empathy. I don't think it qualifies as a disease, but it's not much fun. When I was a child, my parents regularly threatened to take away the privilege of watching Lassie because I would cry hysterically, even though Lassie ALWAYS saved the day. At the age of two, Claire would wail when I tried to sing her "All the Pretty Little Horses," with its lyrics of abandoned babies, or "500 miles". So it didn't surprise me when her kindergarten teacher called, concerned that she seemed traumatized when the class watched The Magic School Bus. Puzzled, she explained that she'd never had a child get quite so upset over a cartoon. People think we are weird because we don't have a TV in our house, but none of us can bear to watch the news. While she will now watch crime shows on her computer, I prefer comedy; there is too much real pain in the world to view it as entertainment.
As a four-year-old she begged to become a vegetarian. I held her off until she was seven, when during a trip to the Everglades, I ate alligator tail. She cried and I was never able to get her to eat meat again. When people would ask, she'd say, "Yes, I like meat, I just like animals better." She listened with her ears and her heart when the bishop preached that a child died every three seconds from starvation. She couldn't sleep that night from fury that we adults would allow such a thing to happen. Within days, she and her friends presented a proposal to the Outreach Commission at church, asking for $100 seed money to start a project to raise money for hungry children. They packaged innumerable bags of bean soup mix to sell and have sent thousands of dollars to Haiti over the last five years. She is a gay rights activist, believing that all people deserve to love and marry the partner of their choice regardless of gender.
Her empathy didn't just extend to people and fauna, but to flora as well. Veggie Tales made it difficult to eat friendly creatures like Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber. Our Halloween jack o' lanterns turned to slime on the deck due to her unwillingness to let me dispose of them. Finally I came up with a tale of the Great Pumpkin swooping down to take our pumpkin back home to the pumpkin patch, a myth she accepted gratefully. Then I'd sneak out in the middle of the night and heave the soggy mass into the woods. Although it was irritating, I did understand when she couldn't bear to take our Christmas tree to a friend's Epiphany tree burning party. It had, after all, been a member of the family for a month. And I knew this empathy kept her from being critical when I always chose the tree no one else wanted because I couldn't stand to see its feelings hurt.
I've come to realize that the pathological empathy we both suffer from stems from an overactive imagination. It's why I had foster kids. The thought of any child being neglected or hurt is unbearable to me. Our licensing social worker knew I was the one to call on a Friday when she was desperate for a home to place a child in. She'd start describing the kid, knowing full well I was a goner. I'd imagine this child, taken from her parents with her few clothes in a garbage bag, as she sat wondering where she was going, how she would be treated, and who would sit with her in the scary darkness in the strange house.
It's a painful trait I've passed on to her. She'll probably never get rich. I've made peace with that myself and I hope she will as well. It's easy to be overwhelmed as I often am, engulfed by the pain of soldiers far away from home, Haitians whose world has literally come crashing in on them, Africans who have suffered unspeakable atrocities, children without a home. Claire started early seeing that her actions can impact the world. I hope she will continue and that she will use her photography, her acting, her writing, her determination, alongside that overactive imagination to feel what pain there is that needs to be fixed and fix it. It's the only way to live with it.
