Special to Me
ASHLEY COWGER
"Mama, I feel like I’m special," the eight-year-old says. Her fingers pull taut then release one of her long ringlets as she says it, and the look on her face is earnest, probing. “Do you think I’m special?”
How do I answer a question like that? She is eight, and to me, she is all the clichés about parenting: my light, my pride, my reason. I have done everything in my power since she was born to let her know how loved she is, how much she matters.
And yet. Isn’t that true of all children? You have only to look in the shout-outs section of the nearest elementary school’s play program to see that it is. So many exclamation marks. We are all special to those who love us. But if we are all special, then not one of us, really, is special at all.
So I stall. “Special like how?” I ask, tucking the quilt her Nonnie made for her beneath her chin.
She knits her brow and tilts her head. “Like, I feel like I’m going to be famous someday. I feel like I’m different from other people.”
The consequences of being an only child, perhaps, and the youngest of the cousins on the side of the family we live near. She is like a princess to us, her adoring kin, with her beautiful, long curls, her precocious, inquisitive mind and kind heart. One of her New Year’s resolutions this year is to practice generosity, and she’s currently collecting money to donate to a children’s hospital to help children with cancer. That’s the kind of kid she is.
But still, that question: “Do you think I’m special?” How do I answer a question like that?
Here is my dilemma: do I prepare her for the harsh reality that she is not, in the grand scheme of things, all that special? That none of us are? Not one of us really matters. We are blips in a universe so vast, in a timeline so infinite, it would be absurd to believe that anything any of us says or does makes a difference in any significant way.
Or do I tell her I used to feel that way too? That when I was a child, I thought I would be a famous writer? That when my first book came out, the anticlimax was so great I almost gave up writing altogether?
Do I lie to her, tell her that she is unique? Foster in her the belief that she is somehow important, that she is destined for greatness? Let her believe it a little bit longer, for however long she can? This feels like one of those pivotal parenting moments, where the choice you make could define the rest of your child’s life.
But I just don’t know how to answer a question like that.
When I was eight, I won honorable mention in a schoolwide poetry contest and concluded I was meant to be a writer. My poetry was objectively terrible, it was Seussian in its rhyme schemes, and it had no real meter or stakes. Still, I believed every poem I penned was brilliant, and that it was amazing—was it not?—that these words came from the mind of one so young.
I started writing a derivative fantasy novel when I was ten or so. I would spend hours, an entire day, clacking away on the old Apple II in my family’s basement. I loved the fact that I could be anyone, that the world and its events were completely in my control. I was my characters, for the duration of the writing session. I wasn’t me anymore, but something greater—a creator, or rather, a creative, an artist. And because I was the only one among my group of friends who wrote, I fancied myself a Writer, capital W. I fancied myself special.
As a writer, I’ve experienced a lot of rejection. This essay will surely get rejected many times before it eventually finds its place in some lit journal or other. Yet still, I write it. Still, I will submit. And even though I anticipate the rejection, it will still sting. Rejection is an inevitable and important part of a writer’s life. A necessary evil. It is how we temper our delusions of grandeur, how we remember to always be striving, growing, learning from our mistakes and working to do better on the next draft. It is from rejection that great art is born.
The week I turned thirty, two important things happened: I found out I was pregnant, and my first book was released. The former was so world-changing, it completely overshadowed the latter.
In the coming months, people would tell me “Congratulations,” and I was never sure if they were congratulating me on the pregnancy or the book. Over time, it became clear that most people considered the pregnancy the bigger deal. A small press book like mine—even one that had won an award—was a fairly small accomplishment compared to the fact that I was in the process of creating a living being.
Still, some part of me resented it, if I’m being honest. A huge percentage of the population have children; a much smaller percentage write and publish books. I don’t know exactly what I expected—fanfare? For people to clap when I entered the room? Of course not, but I expected—something. Some sort of acknowledgment that this was a thing that I had done, that this accomplishment mattered. That I mattered for some reason beyond the fact that I was carrying a child now.
My book didn’t sell well for all kinds of complicated reasons—because it was published by a small press who had no money to advertise it. Because I was a nobody with no built-in readership. Because it was only available online and at book fairs and conferences—not brick-and-mortar bookstores (which were already becoming a thing of the past, anyway). Because it wasn’t, at first, available as an e-book (my own aunt informed me she only read on her Kindle and to let her know if the book ever became available in that format).
A few people bought it—some of them even read it—but most of them I knew personally. I gave a reading at the local library, and the number of genuine audience members were outnumbered by the three people I’d brought with me. When it came time to sell and sign copies of my book, the two little old ladies in the audience agreed to buy one copy and share it.
Every year since then, I receive a royalty statement from my publisher—a reminder that no one is buying or reading my book.
Publishing a book is the worst best thing that ever happened to me.
After giving birth, I slipped into a deep post-partum depression that never fully lifted. A year or so after the delivery, my midwife informed me that for some people, the post-partum depression never goes away, it just seamlessly becomes depression-depression, and since I had suffered from depressive episodes my entire life, it was very likely that this would be my lot.
It’s interesting, isn’t it, that it’s so common for women to become very depressed after having a baby. It’s interesting that having a baby is, for so many of us, the catalyst that sends us spiraling into the darkest places in our minds. For me, it wasn’t just that motherhood was so much harder than I’d imagined—I slept, on average, maybe three hours a day, and because I was nursing and working from home, I did the majority of the work caring for the baby. There was none of that 50/50, taking turns stuff we’d heard other couples talk about. If the baby was up in the middle of the night, I was the one who had to get up and feed her. If the baby was fussing all day, I was the one home with her amidst the insistent noise. It wasn’t that my husband was detached or lazy—it was just that I worked from home and nursed, and I never quite got the hang of pumping. When the baby needed someone, that someone was me.
But that, alone, wasn’t what the depression was about. That, on its own, I think I could have handled. It was the stress of having a baby coupled with the letdown of publishing a book, the realization of my lifelong dream, only to discover that achieving this dream didn’t make me happy the way I always thought it would. Being a mother didn’t either. The goalpost seemed to perpetually move, and I realized it might never stop, that it was very likely that happiness would always be just beyond my reach.
My daughter’s question still hangs in the air. She is waiting.
“Well? Do you?” she prods. “Do you think I’m special?”
If I believed in a higher power, it would be an easy question to answer. It’s the kind of question my parents would have had no trouble with: “God made you, and He has a plan for you.” But as an atheist, a realist, a clinically depressed one, too, this question seems not so easy at all; it seems, in fact, like the most difficult question in the world right now.
I think about the galaxy, about planets and stars, some of which are habitable, but only one of which, as far as we know right now, is inhabited. I think about the origin of life on Earth, about the primordial goo and what followed it, about random mutations that result in evolutionary change. I think about all the things that had to happen, by chance, to get from then to now, to this moment, when an exhausted and over-worked mother tucks an eight-year-old into bed and hesitates, conflicted about how to answer a question.
This child, I think, was born of love. She was born of the love between her father and me, but also, the love I felt for my nephew and nieces. The love that caused my heart to ache because there was so much of it, and so rarely did I see my nephew and nieces, and so badly did I want a Jack or Paris or Katie of my own. And then: the odds that one particular sperm will take hold onto an egg, that the child will be nurtured sufficiently in the womb to make it to birth, the odds that, after birth, the child will thrive. That everything that happened, happened just so, that everything came together in such a way to make her her, that she is. That any of us are.
Then there is the way she laughs, which hasn’t changed much since she was a baby—an effervescent giggle that bubbles from deep within her belly and causes her entire body to quake. There’s the way she texts me “Goodnight. I love you,” every night, even though we already said it out loud, and the way she sings showtunes in the shower; the way she has created an entire imaginary world in her bedroom called Stuffyland, of which she is the mayor; the way she calls me out when I say something unkind about another person; the way she makes me—makes the world—better.
You are ordinary and wonderful, I want to say, but I know she wouldn’t understand. So instead, I say, “You are special to me,” and kiss her on the forehead. It is a non-answer answer, but apparently, it is enough for her. She nestles deeper into her pillow, and I step to the door, turn out the light, hold my breath against the future.
