Watched Where the Wild Things Are last weekend. Not really a movie for kids. Afterwards everyone went to bed melancholy. It is a brown movie which we watched in a brown house during a brown season. The movie leads you to believe that Max’s wild rumpuses are caused by his need for attention after his father either died or left permanently (I missed the beginning of the movie so I didn’t catch all the backstory,if it even matters). The Wild Things are like troubled children masquerading as adults. 

Like with Max, in our temporarily fatherless household, my children have become increasingly disorderly. My ineffective discipline does little to deter their animal nature from emerging and reigning and feeding the same spirit in their siblings, either through needlings and provocations or scuffles and physical abuse of each other. The dirt clod war near the end of the movie elicited the only laughs of delight from my crowd during the whole movie, although they seemed to enjoy Max’s violent play with the wild things after they got over the initial shock of hearing the glum human voices coming out of the big destructive wild things.

Naturally.

Eventually Max realizes all this hurtful play makes the other wild things unhappy, although like siblings they quickly forgive and forget. After a minor rebellion against his kingship, he forms a connection between his mom and himself, as king, in a position of authority. They both want to make everyone happy, but they just don’t know how. In the movie his empathy for his mother sends him home, whereas in the book it seems more like he goes home because he wants to be loved for who he is, rather than whom he is pretending to be, that deep underneath the wolfsuit Max is really a good, loving boy who wants his mother to recognize him.



Perhaps the movie has captured something of the book for some readers, but the movie has a feeling of desperation absent in the book. Even though Max sits and eats cake and smiles at his mother at the end of the movie, she is still tired and lonely, and she does nothing to discipline him for running away. Even giving him chocolate cake instead of a warm supper seems to say “I’m too tired to fix you a proper supper after you’ve been so wild.” Maybe the movie left us melancholy because it hits too close to home, because it is truer to reality than to the dreaminess of the book, where the wild things are fun and controllable by Max, instead of difficult to understand in their childlike irrationality.

Higglety Pigglety Pop, Or, There Must Be More to Life

is a little chapter book by Maurice Sendak that I started reading to the three year old but finished on my own. I was sitting in traffic court with all the other lawbreakers trying to get out of paying their fines when I started reading it in a whisper to the little miss, but I quit when I got frustrated with Sendak’s story of a dog who runs away, even though she has everything, “because there must be something more.” Little miss wasn’t following the story anyway, but watching people make explanations of why they were driving without a license or insurance, so I finished the tale to myself.



The dog, Jennie, eats the flower that tries to convince her to stay. Her journey is entirely led by her appetite: first to a theatre, then a milk truck, then a castle, where she becomes a nurse to a bad baby who won’t eat. She herself is almost eaten by the baby’s lion, until a couple characters she had met before show up to tell her she has enough experience to join the theater. Whereupon she becomes the leading lady, writes a letter of explanation to her prior owner, and lives happily ever after.

Sendak is good at making outlandish events seem ordinary, the text is clever, and the chiaroscuro black and white illustrations add to the dreamlike quality, but this story of romantic escapism seemed to come right out of the lecture notes a friend sent me for his “last lecture,” in which he critiques the romantic belief that happiness is found out there somewhere. I keep seeing this theme everywhere, most prevalently in my own daydreams. Is Sendak feeding a belief that an ordinary life is dull and meaningless, but if you follow your appetites, you might find an exciting life out there somewhere? Whereas naughty Max in Where the Wild Things Are returns home to find his hot dinner, Jennie completely rejects domestic life. (A counterpoint we also read: The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats where Peter finds wonderful snow adventures right outside his window.)

My friend made the point that while everyone longs for happiness and wholeness, for intense emotions, the Romantic believes he must escape his current condition to find them, leave behind the fetters of ordinariness, while the Christian believes they will only be found in union with God. So desiring to escape for the Christian should be a desire for freedom from his condition of selfishness, not from domesticity. The journey is more interior, and intimations of this union are found in the beauty of the ordinary things all around him.

But it is all too easy to imagine “if only” situations, even in the desire to make New Year’s resolutions: If only I do these things, my life will be happier. After the highs of holiday travels, I spent a few doldrum days daydreaming about what our life would’ve been like if, six years ago, my husband had taken a job with one of his architecture professors who is designing beautiful churches, instead of staying in the military. We wouldn’t be making 12 hour trips for Christmas visits. My own romantic fantasy: we’d live in one spot, in a cute little bungalow with a cottage garden, or in a house with enough acreage for goats and chickens (hmm, this is really an alternative domestic fantasy). We might travel to construction sites or take research trips to Europe, but I wouldn’t have to keep starting over, making new friends, sorting through pictures to hang, finding a new parish, a new place to fit in. My husband wouldn’t be leaving for a war zone or earning frequent flier miles on trips to international meetings.


But he wouldn’t be as happy, either, I think, drafting someone else’s designs. Or maybe he would’ve been just as happy doing that, but he is also happy doing what he’s doing now with the Seabees. (Which isn't just warfare construction: he just sent a detachment to Haiti.) And I probably would find plenty wrong with that little bungalow, would want to escape the community I was in, would still complain about messes and having no time. My small discontentments would find other sources.


The January Magnificat editorial by Peter John Cameron, OP, addresses this:

“One of the biggest temptations of daily life is to think that our circumstances are against us. We presume that the reason why we are not happy is because we have been saddled with circumstances that make happiness impossible – circumstances that conspire against us. But then how can Saint Paul say, “I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and constraints, for the sake of Christ; for when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor 12:10)?”

Fr. Cameron answers this with this quote from Father Jean-Pierre de Caussade, SJ,

“What God arranges for us to experience at each moment is the best and holiest thing that could happen to us. . . . You are seeking for secret ways of belonging to God, but there is only one: Making use of whatever he offers you. Everything leads you to this union with him.”

So I guess I should have resolved to look for God’s presence where I am, to find the extraordinary in the ordinary, to surrender to circumstances and let go of impossible,delusional daydreams, and instead admire what we have and make use of it to find God where we are.