EIGHT YEARS OLD

Last night I watched “The Missing” because I wanted to think about the brujo acted by Eric Schweig, a classic performance. But instead I found myself following the little girl. I suppose she was 8, nowhere near adolescence yet, a clear-eyed witness with very little power. I’ve been musing about how often this age group is the pivot point, the truth-teller, of stories. I remember my own inner life in those years as a painful time. I understood too much and yet not enough. No one paid attention to me, and maybe that’s the key. At about that age the adults decide a kid is able to take care of themselves and the kids are likely to agree, seriously overestimating themselves because they have no way to really understand the danger. Eight or nine is when many kids begin to babysit younger children.

I googled, what else, and discovered eight year olds who:

1. Had been hanged by the Taliban because his father would not agree to kidnapping terms.

2. Learned to sing as a way of comforting a dying mom and now has a career as a gospel singer.

3. Were competing in beauty pageants and had botox treatments.

4. Were being tried for murder: he shot his father and another man.

5. Had been accidentally left behind on a family trip to Lourdes.

6. Was starving herself to death.

7. Was beaten by riot police in Greece

8. Decided to discontinue chemotherapy for her fatal cancer.

9. Was buried with a woman in her twenties and another younger child -- this happened about 70,000 years ago.

In short, an eight-year-old is almost like a small adult and in some cultures has been put to work in ways that make us shudder: in coal mines, as chimney sweeps, repetitious and dangerous jobs on looms and at pottery kilns. We moderns would “never” do that, right? Well, not in suburbia usually.

In “The Wire” there’s a stunning scene in which a sixteen-year-old drug dealer is starting his day in a squat only barely inhabitable and then only because there’s a long extension cord illicitly connected to a power pole. He rouses a roomful of eight-year-old kids who have slept in their clothes under thin blankets on old mattresses. He distributes to each kid a packet of snacks and a box of juice. Then he sends them off to school, checking to make sure they each have their backpacks of school books and have done their homework. To them this is normal and they accept his authority. After school they are lookouts and messengers for the drug dealers.

There’s another scene in which the main police officer’s two little boys, maybe 6 and 8, play spy (“front and follow”) with Stringer, the most intelligent and elusive of the dealers. He never notices them, so they succeed in getting his car license number. The boys semi-understand what they’re doing and why. The father, totally driven by his need to crack this case, never grasps the risk for them if they are identified by Stringer.

Long long ago my best undergrad friend gave me a copy of “The Little Prince,” in which St. Exupery, a wildly reckless and intense pilot, who has crashed in the desert, is kept company by an imaginary boy. The book is a reflection on society and friendship, a fox being the philosopher and a rose being the passionate ideal of desire. It seems that philosophy and desire are key to this age group, and yet that period in a child’s development is called “latency,” as though nothing were happening. I think it is when Anthony Wallace’s “mazeway of identity” first becomes conscious and the child begins to reflect on who he or she is, why that is, and how to become active in one’s own life. Some people get stuck there.

I go searching brain studies. There’s not much about eight-year-olds: “your child is growing quickly”, but this is about the point in time that the physiology of arousal jumps in intensity. Kids that age can read and follow events in movies that are almost too fast for the human eye. But they are not grounded: their core is wobbly. They can’t reflect or interpret. They hunger for adults who will listen. They are particularly vulnerable to predators.

In 1948, the year I turned nine, my father was in a car wreck that smashed his forehead against the windshield. Not only was he subtly changed, but the whole family reconfigured. My mother stretched to compensate. She didn’t notice that I couldn’t see properly and thought I read all the time because that was my personality. I was very thin, my legs ached and I had nightmares. My maternal mgrandmother died of cancer about this time. I don’t remember her, but I remember her funeral. What I overheard could not be construed. And I lost access to a beloved place, the little ranch on Deer Creek. My father at this period lost tolerance and began to react violently to family disorder, even trivial kid stuff. Until then he had been a cheerful man, a family man. He was never a molester.

So at eight I was in a standard average position for a kid that age: exposed to many of the challenges of adulthood, not a baby anymore, and yet not quite able to master the situation. My moral guides were the classic fairy tales, those grim dark Euro-sermons about nasty little girls and the punishments they would earn. That must have been where I got the idea that obsessive devotion was the highest virtue, a religious idea. The notion has not served me well. People don’t like being the objects of obsession. Even institutions have their doubts. Death/sex are entwined in many psychological theories, but usually from the point of view of an adult. For a child they are very much more mysterious and internal, so that they can remain unresolved for a lifetime.

Towards the end of “The Missing,” the stubborn little girl goes to her collapsed big sister who now understands that it’s safe to fall apart. The little sister pushes the hair off the young woman’s face and puts her arms around her, telling her, “Everything is all right now,” soothing as though she were the mother. The viewer feels that this eight year old will not be a damaged adult. It’s not so much the horror of the events, but whether there were a unified, timely, and vigorous confrontation of danger. If you can tell what it is.