Sweetest Taboo

Downloaded Sade's Soldier of Love album yesterday, and I'm still picking my way through the songs. I seldom buy albums but I felt obligated to buy this one. Partly, because I have a raging non-homosexual girl crush on Sade Adu. I wish she were my mother so she could sing me to sleep. It's possible, after all, she and my mom are the same age. But my mother would never indulge me with singing. Her indulges are more of the material kind, and her baby girl has always been jonesing for the soul.

One of my earliest childhood memories is of illicitly watching Sade's "Sweetest Taboo" video while I was supposed to be sleeping. She wore red lipstick (a given) and stood in front of a huge glass window with tears softening the surreal beauty of her face, making her not just captivating but also amazingly real. Didn't understand what she was singing about but she became real to me.

I got in trouble for staying up late that night. I also got in trouble because I had been caught sleeping with my pillows over my face. I was a repeat offender. It seemed to me that my mother was unduly concerned with the possibility of my suffocating, about my mortality in general. What did she know? My pillow cocoons kept me safe from the dark. And the light which I gained (the light headed euphoria I experienced) was simply a bonus.

Ten years later, I was still surreptitiously building pillow cocoons while listening to my Mama Adu. By then I was in college, and the purpose of the cocoons had been inverted; created specifically to produce darkness, not to escape it. Back then I couldn't get enough of this darkness. Eventually I stopped. Then unexpectedly, as I approached my thirtieth birtday, I suddenly had a desire to once again taste darkness. My darkness?

For months I became consumed with the desire to spend my birthday on the couch with a pillow over my face. Of course, it didn't happen as I imagined. After 20 minutes, it felt pointless if not ridiculous. My cocoon felt neither protective nor insulating, just melodramatic and self-indulgent.

Yesterday morning, I was lying in bed and my son came in to check on me. He is of the morning; bright and sunny is his disposition. He inquired about Wilbur, the polar bear he had given me to sleep with.

"He's right here," I muttered, pulling it from the waves of rumpled bedding.

This seemed to please him. After a few minutes of snuggling and polite chatter, he was leaving me to build a zoo. Fine. He has his life, I have mine. Before he left, he adjusted my blanket and made me spoon Wilbur, who was now our shared substitute baby. He finished his doting ministrations by gently placing a pillow over my head. Strange because I try not to be overtly weird around the kid. Guess some things are inherently genetic. My son, my sun.

"Can you breathe?" He asked while wiggling his loose front tooth.

"Yes." I inhaled and indeed I felt the light.