What Would E.T. Do?

In the woods behind my Christian kindergarten, I once found a Miami Vice ball cap and proudly wore it home. Rushing me to the tub, my mother said I’d infest the whole house with bugs.

“Miami Lice,” she shuddered.

I also learned not to play rowdy with the pale girl whose mother baked cookies at Publix. Not to pretend with the dentist’s son that we were T-rexes settling a score before the killer asteroid arrived. I should stay sensible and clean. Smell honeysuckle on the chain-link fence. Coach banana orb weavers in web repair.

When my mother picked me up from school, I was at the curb holding my Care Bears lunchbox, my T-shirt tucked into my matching shorts, and she might ask when I opened the car door, “Did you roll around in the dirt again?” My answer was always no, that I played like everyone else on the playground.

“Don’t you sit down yet, Greg, you’re filthy,” she said, even though I wasn’t. “Now shake out your shorts and shirt! Kick your shoes! Black earth gets tracked into the house and you ground it up into the carpet and there’s no getting it out. I’ve been vacuuming in ninety-degree heat, and this is what you do to me? How do I get you to stop that?” Before becoming a full-time mom, she’d been an award-winning elementary school teacher but couldn’t grasp that her sons got dirt in their nails. Her breaking point was unpredictable, and it was my job to keep her from getting there. My first name, after all, comes from the Greek word for “vigilant,” but I needed a new name to proclaim my wildness: Chin Chomper. Puddle Stomper. Alien Whisperer. Her name was Priscilla, but everyone called her Pris.

One morning at recess, I couldn’t help myself. I was drawn to the dirt, maybe because soil contains bacteria called M. vaccae that’s like instant Prozac when you sniff it. Settling into a spot away from everyone, I crouched down. Like the paleontologist I saw on Reading Rainbow, I sifted through the mulch with the paintbrush of my hand to find roly-polies. If I was careful in the far corner of the playground, I could stay clean.

I suddenly froze, steam rising from the baseball diamond and the cemetery behind it. Time slowed down; my pulse raced.

Had my mother hit me the night before? Or had she goaded my father into doing it, questioning his manhood until he spanked me too hard on my bed? “Turn over, you brat, you spoiled rotten brat!” he’d roar. “Obey your mother!” (“Nature is doing her best each moment to make us well,” Thoreau wrote in his journal. “Do not resist her!”)

Staring out at the maypole we never used because some parents said it was pagan, I imagined it was a rocket I could ride to Chuck E. Cheese’s for a whack-a-mole afternoon. That’s when an ebony jewelwing, which is like a dragonfly, landed beside my shoe. I gently pinched its folded-back wings like my father had taught me, the toothpick body shimmering and squirming.

As I brought the writhing insect to my face, the mean voices in my head quieted. Entering a numb vastness, I became a new crayon, the Weeki Wachee rhinestone blue of the jewelwing, darker than the aquamarine watch my mother always wore to the beach. “The capacity for induced trance or dissociative states,” Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman writes in her landmark complex PTSD text Trauma and Recovery, “is developed to a fine art in children who have been severely punished or abused.” In other words, my stillness wasn’t necessarily contentment. I wasn’t a Buddha then, and I’m not one now, even after spending close to a year of my life meditating on silent retreat.

Then I noticed froggy babies the size of my thumbprint. Neato! No ribbits. They were Southern toads. Bufo terrestris. Dark green like my grandpa’s army blanket and the pimento-stuffed olives that tasted like pee. Flecked with lichen white and blobbed with ink. Teensy weensy warts on top. Threads for legs. Their yellow-rimmed eyes were as black and full of possibility as the screen of our big Zenith TV.

“You’re it!”

I whipped around—some dweeb had tapped my head and run off. The jungle gym in the distance looked like a cage. As one boy pushed his frenemy higher and higher, the swing set creaked like a haunted house. It was all too much for me.

I turned back to the toads. They were beginning to hop around. Scared, I bet, as I was. Recess was revving up, and I was worried for them.

The only question left to ask—what would E.T. do?

Some months before at a second-run theater, I had seen Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial with my mother. E.T.’s eyes were as blue as hers, his skin wrinkled like my grandma’s. At the time, I looked like a younger version of Elliott, especially when I wore my red hoodie. Along with Star Trek, E.T. is still one of my sustaining mythologies. It’s a fable about mutual rescuing and grace—about trying to understand someone different from you and realizing you’re basically the same. A coming-of-age story for a boy, family, and civilization. A parable of wonder and crisis that taught me things my parents couldn’t.

Its ecological message is underappreciated. To my adult mind, E.T. and his shipmates, knowing the earth is in trouble, are here saving specimens in their interstellar ark. Early on in Melissa Mathison’s screenplay, E.T. collects “a sapling—a miniature redwood, a perfect bonsai, growing at the feet of its elders.” Much of the film was shot in Redwood National Park in 1981, when the logging of old-growth forests made the headlines. Now climate change in the form of more wildfires and less fog is an existential threat to the trees. Our planetary crisis finds a haunting symbol in E.T., white as a powdered donut, dying in a ditch. It’s a scene that’s still burned into my conscience. Our civilized, single-use world—Reese’s Pieces, potato salad in plastic, suburban sprawl, mass surveillance, and mass loneliness—sickened him. As Elliott tells a NASA scientist, “He needs to go home.”

Letting the jewelwing go, I tucked a couple toads between my ankle and gray sock. That compartment was a spaceship, warm and steamy as E.T.’s womb-shaped craft. My homeworld, I thought, would be safer than the toads’ mulch. Just as Elliott, mind-melded to a drunk E.T., liberates the frogs about to be dissected in his biology class, I’d save the toads from trampling sneakers. Earlier that year, a couple days after bringing it home from the school carnival, I found my goldfish floating on its side like an orange detergent pod. The fishbowl had turned into a dead zone—no one had told me the water needed to be changed. That fish was the first animal ever in my care. And I killed it. Its fishbowl was an ocean I ruined.

Toads don’t need an ocean, though. They could have happy childhoods in our house—I’d make sure of that. This time I was going to be better.

My sock and I were on a rescue mission.

When my mother picked me up from school that day, she didn’t say I was dirty. At home she cheerfully made me lunch, microwaving a Kraft Single between two pieces of bread. Grilled cheese, she called it.

“Crank it up, Gregory Pegory!” my mother called out before we ate, meaning I was to turn on the TV as loud as it would go. The soap opera All My Children was about to come on. Around this time in the series, her favorite character, kidnapped by Adam Chandler, is roaming the Canadian wilderness alone after their plane crashes. “You may not come near me! I am Erica Kane and you are a filthy beast!” is all she has to yell at a grizzly bear to scare it away. She soon finds a priest, who carries her in his arms to a glass home shaped like a boxcar.

“How was Mrs. Kilgore today?” my mother asked me.

“She taught us planets. My Very Educated Mother Just…Served Us Nine Pizzas. Mercury, Venus—”

“Okay, where are this week’s worksheets?”

“Earth, Mars—”

“We need to go over them. How many are there?”

“Jupiter! Saturn! Mommy! I have a surprise.”“Sweetie baby Pegory, what, what?”

“Close your eyes…”

“Now don’t be silly,” she said, keeping her eyes open. Recently, I scared her to bits with a rubber roach on the bathroom floor. When she wasn’t scrutinizing or scolding me, we were laughing. Sometimes she stuck out her teeth like Bucky Beaver and pretended to brush and floss.

The microwave beep-beeped.

I pulled down my socks a few inches. She glanced down. “Why did you put Tootsie rolls in there?” she sighed. “I thought you hated them. Look, they’ve melted. That’ll attract ants, you know.”

One blob was stuck to my ankle. The other fell to the dinosaur-bumpy floor.

“That’s not it,” I said, pulling my sock down to my shoe.

As she stooped down to look, I saw the tissues stored in her bra. Her Easter peep-yellow romper bristled all on its own, like the Haddon’s carpet anemones that I’ll see diving decades later in the Pacific.

“One for you, one for me. A boy and girl.”

“Oh, no, no, no!” she cried. Each “no” was spanking the popcorn ceiling, our backyard oaks, and the thinning ozone layer. It all seemed to shatter and fall.

“What’s wrong?”

“They’re dead! In your sock!”

Her howls momentarily quieted to whimpers. “How could you?”

With several paper towels she threw the two lifeless toads into the trash can that was Oscar-the-Grouch green. “Gross!” she screamed, already weeping. With wet wipes, she cleaned the spot on my ankle where the toads had been, all the while making high-pitched sputters, as if having surgery without enough anesthesia.

“I spent the morning mopping this floor, and now you’ve ruined it and I have to wash your clothes. This isn’t fair.”

“I, I didn’t mean to,” I said. “I promise I didn’t, I didn’t.”

She washed her hands again and stripped everything off me but my shirt. In twenty seconds, I was Porky Pig. Silent. Frozen.

“This isn’t fair to me,” she kept saying. “It’s just not fair!”

On the TV blaring in the family room, was that Erica Kane’s other lover, Jeremy Hunter, radioing for help in a French accent? Or was it Adam plotting to kidnap her again and never let her go?

My mother turned on the faucet. Then came the hot center of what would become a flashbulb memory: her suddenly lifting me up, her yelling, the grody weightlessness between ground and running water.

Up in the air I was sick and lost, closer to the windowsill than ever before.

I bawled, finally. She made sure, as always, her crying was louder than mine. I was petrified, since my parents rarely held me, let alone roughhoused with me. Their touch wasn’t safe anyway. Now that I’d killed the toads, mine wasn’t either.

For entirely too long, she washed my ankle with a rough bar of soap, the kind with pumice. She didn’t reach for the Brillo pad, thank goodness, steel wool impregnated with soap.

The memories end there but live on.

Mammals are easily traumatized. And by traumatized, I mean so overwhelmed by an upsetting event that part of us is diminished, seemingly forever. The threat from the past remains, priming us to be on high alert. All it takes, researcher Jaak Panksepp found in a famous experiment, is putting a bit of cat hair into an enclosure of newborn rats: their playing stops immediately. The fur is soon removed, but they never return to the same level of play. We aren’t rats, most of us anyway, and yet the study’s findings ring true when I think about broken trust.

It’s cat fur, though, not the rats’ mother, that’s freaking them out, and their traumatic experience happens only once. When it’s your main caregiver who’s repeatedly traumatizing you and you can’t escape—unlike, say, the trauma of a single car crash—that can lead to complex PTSD, as it did in my case. Bonding with others, which is the foundation of a livable life, has been painful and scary for me, sometimes pure panic—connection and rejection fired together for so long, they wired together. This is why I’ve feared I had to be perfect or else I’d be harmed again. Why I’ve assumed people who adore me hate me, resent me, think I’m gross. My catnip? Out-to-lunch nitpickers who are deeply ambivalent about me.

Unlike a gazelle after a thwarted cheetah attack, I couldn’t simply shake off the trauma right after it happened in the kitchen. My brain kept believing I was in danger. Like the rat pups, I was never the same after the toad incident, the likes of which were all too common growing up.

That day I learned many things I’m still unlearning with the help of nature: that I’m dirty and unlovable; what we love we will destroy; what we try to save we will ruin; what surrounds us isn’t the Divine Mother’s love but the cold, annihilating vacuum of outer space. Love will squash you until you’re suffocated or your internal organs burst, whichever comes first, and you’ll be wiped away, thrown out.

Which is to say the toads were an opening act for a kooky, traumatic upbringing. My mother, for instance, forcibly bathed me once a week until I was seventeen. Imagine it just once and never again: I’m a high school sophomore, naked, my legs considerably bent because I’m too tall for the tub, and my mother is showering me against my will—one minute over the noise of the spray she’s praising me because I’m an alternate to the International Science Fair for my project on water pollution and telling me I can be President of the United States, and the next she’s commenting on my post-pubescent body below her, touching me where I didn’t want to be touched. No one, including my father, rescued me. He let her worm her way into me and pulse there with mortifying intimacy.

Here, life seemed to tell me, grab the dark bottle, put a dropperful of this wildcrafted tincture under your tongue: abuse and privilege, mortification and hero worship. It will burn like a motherfucker—now swallow!

Alongside the clarity of E.T.’s caring example and the goldfish’s earlier preventable death, the toad incident also taught me how easy it was to injure other creatures, that their needs were important.

It’s as if I’m still making amends for killing the toads, for horrifying the only mortal stand-in for Gaia I had: my mother. For so long, I’ve felt outside nature—unnatural and extraterrestrial. I believed I was polluted but, I reasoned, the natural world shouldn’t have to be also. My boyhood home couldn’t be saved, so as an environmental educator and citizen scientist, I’ve tried to help save our planetary home. It’s given me a reason to not end it all even in the moments I hate myself. Often I’ve wished to be totally reprogrammed in mind, body, and soul—to be given a new neurobiology, one implanted with memories of different parents. For parts of my upbringing to be deleted. And yet here I am, at times still riding the struggle bus. Praying for technological breakthroughs that could restore the planet to even what it was when E.T. was first released.

Some days, if E.T. were to ask me to come with him, I’d walk right up that gangplank into the mothership. Ask him to genetically reengineer me so that I didn’t have to be human any longer, maybe more like coral, which is a partnership of animal and plant, or like a redwood with a family of trusted elders. Some creature that can’t be traumatized.

For years, I’ve sent out homing beacons—not from a Speak & Spell toy, buzzsaw blade, and umbrella like E.T. does to call his mothership, but through tortured poems, flashbacks and broken resolutions, screams upon waking from nightmares, eczema outbreaks, recurring ear infections, prayers to gods I knew little about, Craigslist ads, desperate Grindr and Tinder messages sent in the middle of the night.

Get me out of here: my compulsions were an understandable response to my family and yet almost destroyed me long after the threat had passed.

In the two decades of adulthood before she died, more than anything I wanted a mother. One who knew that to hurt a child is to hurt yourself and warp the web of life. Which is to say, a mother more like Elliott’s in E.T, whose name, of all things, is Mary.

Abandoned by her husband and now a single mom, in much of the movie she’s understandably frazzled and disengaged—her children don’t exactly respect her. Later, though, we see her reading Peter Pan to her young daughter, played by Drew Barrymore, and then, holding Elliott close, trying fiercely to protect her children as federal agents in spacesuits appear at her front door. She looks like she’s from the same gene pool as the blond TV moms that as a child I fantasized would adopt me: Florence Henderson in The Brady Bunch, Judith Light in Who’s the Boss?, and Joanna Kerns in Growing Pains.

What kind of mother did Mary become after E.T. left? What had she learned from him, not intellectually but cellularly, from living with a realized being? I see her breathing more deeply, hiking in the redwood forests nearby, eating less pizza, paying more attention to her children. I see her filled with wonder in the most ordinary of moments: glimpsing the mountains in her rearview mirror, washing her hands in the kitchen with water that was once snowmelt. It’s as if she’s recently had a breakthrough psychedelic experience. Life isn’t perfect. Her wakefulness often leaves her, but it always comes back. She’s practicing what I like to call the three S’s: slowing down, softening, savoring. Rather than unwittingly traumatizing her children, which she never did anyway, she tries to meet them right where they are.

It’s no accident that as she reads Peter Pan to her daughter (“Clap your hands if you believe!”), E.T., hiding in a nearby closet, famously says “Ouuuch” when he sees Elliott’s cut finger and reaches out his glowing finger. “The wound is healed,” the screenplay reads. To me, that’s an analogy for the attuned parental love some of us still yearn for. The ouch, in being seen and accepted, is soothed. That healing resonance is pure magic, at least for the child, who thought the pain would last forever. While she can’t make bicycles fly in the air like E.T., a mother can be nurturing more often than not.

Even with the best of parents, beyond early childhood, no one in this life can hold your hand and make it all okay. No shrink or ayahuasca shaman can do that. And no climate scientist can flip a switch to refreeze the Arctic, bring back the Great Barrier Reef, and resurrect the extinct golden toad in Costa Rica. It’s childish to wish for a Planet B or a transformed parent—for a pristine Mother Earth or healed human mother. While you do what you can to help, you know the limits of your influence.

But when you’re in kindergarten, your mother can work miracles like E.T. She can take you to the backyard, by the woodpile under the neighbor’s magnolia, and talk to you about death and life and how to sing to the goddess holding it all. You and your mother can bury the toads. Afterward, she can hold you in her dirty arms.

And your wound? She can heal your wound.