“Imitation Game” - Mohn-Slate
“…. No mama,
Go backward toward me”
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On human nature… and the game.
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“The Falls” by @mohnslate is a rich investigation of life as a woman/creator/mother/wife/person (not necessarily in that order).
After reading it, I found Little Man a total mess. He has three teeth coming in, and on top of the pain he was HUNGRY. But he didn’t want to eat. Because he was mad and in pain. Made worse because he was hungry. Etc.
I had initially found this poem charming (more on that, below!). But, by wanting two contradictory things at once, Little Man reminded me of its very human stakes.
This poem draws out the dichotomy of a child’s confidence and his disempowerment.
Self-assurance appears from line 1, floating there on it’s own, unambiguously declarative: “He’s in charge.” In line 2: “He grins, walks backward.” The child is flexing, exploring how things work, and doing it with impish pleasure (a “grin”). Even in stanza 2 the child reigns: “he frowns” with the same command as his former grin. He issues his mandate: “go backward toward me.”
Yet we know, as readers, what happens after the poem ends. Perhaps not immediately (was there a tantrum? a laugh? a distraction?). But the child will ultimately reconcile himself to existence’s parameters. He has asked for the impossible: “backward away” (line 3), cannot be “backward toward” (line 5). Even that first line, as declarative as it is, is missing a (.) From the outset, the door is open to Nature’s challenge.
That we, as readers, can fill in the inevitable implicates us, reminds us that we had to learn that truth for ourselves. Underneath the humor of a child’s demand is the reality of the human condition: we often want not just the impossible, but the mutually-exclusive.
Which leads me to the title: “Imitation Game.”
Who imitates whom? Obviously, Mother imitates Child. But the game is only fun because it’s normally the inverse. Children are terrifyingly imitative: Little Man (15 mo.) already puts a pillow on his lap to read, stands to eat breakfast, and adores Seltzer **
Reciprocated imitation is a kind of mirror. What, therefore, are we being asked to learn about in ourselves through the child? Perhaps the titular “game.”
I’m struck, with Little Man, that the very things which frustrate him also, in the right frame of mind, make him laugh. Example: during this morning’s game of chase, Little Man was both disappointed that I hadn’t followed him, and ecstatic to find me “surprising” him from the comfort of my chair after he rotated the room. Oh the magic of a circle!
The game isn’t just between mom and baby, but between people and themselves. It’s a game to find the humor in the frustration of a longed-for result. And that humor stems from recognition – so easy in the poem, so hard in life – of the charming, understandable, loving… yet fundamental absurdity of the initial request.