Bounce My Life Away
Author bouncing. You can see of video of her passion in DPA+
By Bex O’Brian
If I could have had my way, I would have bounced my life away. A child’s rhyme but my truest self. As it was, I was well into my thirties before my knees gave out, and I had to stop rocking incessantly on all fours on my bed. Bouncing my family called it and, apparently, I was barely two weeks old when, to the astonishment of my parents, I raised myself up on shaking arms and started to rock.
I can’t fathom my thoughts in those early days, I was pre-language after all, but the movement must have tickled some part of my brain. Why walk, crawl, or cry (much appreciated by my father) if I could rhythmically rock? The family accepted this as they did my older sister sucking her thumb, my father needing two drinks before dinner and two after, or my mother’s insistence in sucking the marrow out of chicken bones. The fabric of a family.
This being the sixties, there wasn’t really a class of child psychology, per se. Only Dr. Spock--not that Spock for those of you under sixty--who seemed to suggest whatever your kid was doing was a-okay. But, even if he wasn’t, Mother ran with that.
On and on, I bounced.
Most kids coming home from school grabbed a sandwich and b-lined for the television. I went into my room, put my perfect bouncing pillow (thin so I could grip the edge) at the end of the bed, kicked aside any grit that might rub and create a distraction, found in the first few rocks the right tempo, and off I would go. Hours would pass.
Life outside my to and fro did not exist. Only the movement and my thoughts. Nothing earth-shattering. At least when I was young. The Suzy Homemaker oven, the one that never materialised beneath the Christmas tree or at my birthdays, was there, waiting. Timmy, who was my crush through first and second grade, yielded to my passionate advances.
With time, I discovered the joy of bouncing to my tinny transistor radio shaped like a ruby red apple. The songs of the seventies spurring me on past Timmy and Suzy and her oven, on into adolescence.
My bouncing was so prevalent that all my friends took it in stride. They’d be the ones making the sandwiches in my kitchen and watching the afternoon shows until my parents got home from work and shooed them off, or more likely, set an extra place before having them retrieve me for dinner. I’d emerge slightly dazed, the world around me seeming flat, full of fault lines I either couldn’t control or didn’t understand.
At fourteen, those fault lines wrenched apart. My parents divorced, I was having trouble at school, creating it more likely, and I thought, “Fuck it, why this world when in my room there was another one, much more to my liking.”
Bouncing became my life, not that it wasn’t before. But now, I didn’t have to get a quick one in before school. Now, I could bounce much of the day. Mother was too busy cranking out her column and writing her spots for C.B.C radio Canada to wonder if having her child drop out of school was a good thing or not. Plus, I was reading a lot. That, in her books, was all you really needed to do in life. I am definitely with her on that one.
My bouncing began to have a purpose. I imagined my life as it would be. In those days, it was a film director. I had recently read Peter Bogdanovich’s Pieces of Time. I knew nothing of actual filmmaking, nor had I taken into account that directors are surrounded by other humans; even then, I was a deep solitary, but I had a snippet, one moment of a man walking in a raincoat that billowed out behind him. I played it over and over in my rocking mind. My entire movie oeuvre.
A year passed. The man walked on. Boys I like fell under my sway. Even what I wanted for lunch was imagined, reimagined but never entirely realised. Eventually, other factors in my life convinced me I should go back and finish high school. So I un-kinked my legs and plunged back into life as best I could.
My first husband-- in fact, all husbands and early boyfriends learned to read and fall asleep to the slightly jarring movement of the bed--was convinced it was some sort of elaborate form of masturbation. If that were the case, I would have been the most orgasmed woman on earth.
Years passed. One marriage ended, another began. I rocked on.
What wasn’t happening was my life. Bouncing, I see now, was a way to avoid confronting hard truths. I’m dyslexic. (By the way, why the fuck is the word about the disease impossible for someone with the disease to spell? Shouldn’t it be ‘it’? I suffer from it. That would be most helpful.) But I wanted to be a writer. And, all day I was, in my head.
Then the unthinkable happened. I aged. It would take me a good ten minutes to unfurl my legs after a session by my mid-thirties. Around this time, through luck, I got a job working on a documentary film about the Turkana Tribe in Kenya. Sleeping a tent on a cot, there was no way I could bounce. When I got home from the three-month shoot, I found I couldn’t do it anymore. Not the way I needed, to rock the hours to build the narrative, the story, the time needed to get lost, to live an entire reality of my making.
I began to write. Man, it was awful. Beyond that horror of my idea to page never quite working according to plan, there was all the rejection. That never happened in my head! Thank god for alcohol; at least there is something to take the sting out of being firmly planted in this real world for the last three decades.
Recently, I started seeing a therapist to help deal with a few things, the death of my mother for one. After a couple of sessions, I told her about my bouncing. I was excited. This was the area of my life I knew was unimpeachable.
“You did what? Until your thirties? That’s not normal!”
Maybe. But that was my life.
Bex is the author of the novels (Under Bex Brian) Promiscuous Unbound on Atlantic Monthly Press and, Radius Spuyten Duyvil.
