I tell my child stories of Peter Pan
All children, except one, grow up.
I can't recall the first time I read Peter Pan. The Disney version may have come first. But I remember being a teenager and putting J.M. Barrie’s novel down on the dining table, my adolescent mind teeming with the dialogue between the Lost Boys and Darling children. Convinced by their sterling eloquence, the justifications behind their ebullient mischief, I had come of age as a reader where nostalgia for childhood was possible.
As the years went by, I reached for the novel whenever the whim struck. Originally written by English author J.M. Barrie, the story goes: Peter Pan flies the Darling children out their bedroom window in London to the fantastical Neverland, where they embark on swashbuckling adventures with pirates and mermaids.
While we were making the uneasy transition after moving from America back to Singapore during the height of the pandemic, I began spinning my daughter stories. Stories of a little girl making an unfamiliar country her new home. Stories of a virus in the air, or of an interesting insect we saw on the windowsill. And since she’d watched the Disney movie, I spun her stories of Peter Pan.
The original story scores badly on the Bechdel Test; Wendy’s maternal focus now seems outdated, old-fashioned. The bloodlust the Lost Boys exhibit towards the Native Indians do not sit well today, and the stories I weave purposefully omit the racist caricatures conjured during a time the author believed the sun would never set on the British empire.
But the evil plots of the pirates still ring bloodthirsty and cruel, and the thrill of leaving your bedroom after the lights are out! Children want the sharp beauty that accompanies the danger involved in skirting the edge, and Neverland is a thrilling place where hostility meets you at every turn. Alligators with ticking clocks in their bellies, scheming mermaids who try to drown you— which child doesn’t want to be whisked away to a world where the condescension of adults gets sublimated into an easy enemy in the figure of a vicious pirate captain?
Disney’s version imbues its villains with slapstick comedy, blunting the teeth of Barrie’s dangerously attractive Hook. This resort to cheap physical comedy has breath-taking results: my daughter reacted with side-splitting hilarity each time Disney’s ineffectual Hook yelled for his schlubby right-hand man Smee to save him from danger. “Smeeeee!” she chirred at the television. “Smeeee!” she twittered from the backseat of a taxi. “Want to hear a joke?” She leaned in conspiratorially, then thrilled, “Smeeeee!” collapsing into laughter, in stitches over the sound tinkling from her mouth: the long ‘e’ and muffled ‘m’!
It was thrilling to spin my child stories without a book in front of us, with me staring straight into her eyes. The stories I wove mixed and melded Barrie’s and Disney’s versions. Sometimes I input scenes from the production of Peter and the Starcatcher I saw staged in Boston’s First Church. I told her of Hook’s cowardly present to Peter Pan; a bomb, gift-wrapped!— she gasped, devastated— and how Tinker Bell tried to get it away from Peter, but it detonated in her arms! How Peter wept when her light was going out; how, when he cried out, “I do believe in fairies, I do, I do!” and the whole of Neverland and every child in the world chanted along with him— my child’s tiny, elfin face crumpled and she clasped my hands, declaring, “Mama, I believe Peter Pan is real. I believe fairies are real.”
In my journal that night, a single line, full of wonder: “How brave it is to be a child!”
Not wanting to grow up! Believing in magic! It was as if a cord between us, weighty but a little slack, had been pulled taut by the presence of a third force, that of Peter Pan; his mysterious child’s figure aloft, potentially listening in at her bedroom window, waiting for the right moment to creep in and rifle through her toys in search of his wayward shadow. I felt like Mrs Darling, who, in Disney’s version of the story, first made Peter come alive for her children by telling them stories about him. In the sequel, when Wendy is grown up, she continues the tradition by telling the adventures of Peter Pan to her daughter Jane. In the dark, as I gesticulated wildly how Peter swooped in to save the day once again, ventriloquizing Hook’s deep growl and Wendy’s prim speech, it felt like I was tapping into the ancient magic of a noble tradition involving mothers and oral storytelling.
At night we clasped hands in the gloaming dark as Peter flew grinning out of my mouth. In the morning my child whispered that Tinker Bell lived in her face mask. When I told her of Peter stranded alone on a rock, the tide rising, unable to fly, how he was for the first time finally afraid (I omitted his deft, dagger-like sentence, “To die would be an awfully big adventure.”), she clutched my hands, desperately needing to know how he would escape this impossible predicament.
In those moments, a feeling of unspecific yearning spread narcotically over me— time stopped, got captured, the way it did whenever anyone inhabited the coasts and contours of Neverland. That is how I tricked myself into believing this would all last forever.
“…will Peter, poised on the edge of a deadly hook, win the fight? And what of Wendy? What weapon will she wield against those terrible pirates? The sword? The grenade?” I pause in my frivolous build-up, prolonging the suspense, then swoop down to plant a firm and conclusive kiss on my child’s brow. “We’ll find out tomorrow!”
“Awww why?” She kicks her blankets and pleads, “I want it to be longer.”
A well-paced narrative requires deferrals, a dry, academic voice in my head intones. Because the best stories are the ones we wait up for, says another, younger and more earnest. But against the hopeful beacon of my child’s face in the dark, the defeated thing that tumbles out of my mouth is, “Because it’s late and I’m tired.”
And the spell breaks. Moments like these, when the curtain is drawn back, I become acutely aware I am less Mrs Darling and more that sad humbug The Wizard of Oz, who pulls the drapery shut not because she doesn’t want her children to fly away, but because she desperately needs a cover-up for the stuttering, improvised flimflammer she actually is. Despite the reckless thrill that speeds through me as Peter zips toothily from my mouth, the work of the imagination tires me within minutes, and the effort to keep weaving the dream strains against the limits of this private theatre I’ve erected, where I recycle old stories and spin them anew.
Or maybe it’s because though I already know how the story ends, I’d like to drag it out a little longer. Why hasten the resolution, the conclusion?
And so I cut the story short with a peppy, “We’ll find out tomorrow night,” firmly insensate to my child’s groaning disappointment, gratefully stumbling back to my room, buying myself another night, like Scheherazade, to spin the next episode in the series.
Still, as I retire into a room without her, I already miss this. By this, I mean: lying in bed with her small body next to me, a story dangling between us in the dark.
My child upsets my sense of order; the self-contained world I draw in my mind, where time alone and my thoughts are precariously arranged on teetering wall shelves. The system I’ve made has been drawn with clear, tidy lines, and she rattles them with each slam of the door, each cannonball into my bed while I’m reading. And I feel my thoughts and routines, the makeshift architecture I struggle to keep aloft, already fragile, shudder in their positions, threatening to come free of their brackets; a danger to us all.
At night taking off my clothes is an exercise in revelation. Small, wilted flowers I don’t remember seeing tumble from my hair. There’s glitter caked onto my armpit, and a butterfly sticker has wormed its way into my bra. In Barrie’s novel, the narrator often breaks the suspension of disbelief to speak directly to the reader, who, in her act of reading the novel, is already implicated in the shared exile from Neverland: “we too have been there; we can still hear the sound of the surf, though we can land no more.”
I shake the fairy dust off myself, knowing too late that I had been given the magic ingredients for flight.
It is always already too late.
“They’re hungry,” my child grasps two dolls and plonks them onto little seats at a table. “Quick Mama, cook something.” I turn to the miniature stove and begin tossing some wooden vegetables into a pot, but they get snatched off the hob before I can reach for the ladle. “It’s dinner-time! Hurry, feed the babies,” I settle down next to the dolls and pretend to feed them a velveted, velcro-ed half-tomato, and she immediately bundles them away. “They’re full, it’s time for bed! Come,” I get up, sit next to the dolls, and give them an obliging pat. “Sing Mama, they’re scared of the dark.” I warble a line, and they are whisked from their cribs. “It’s morning time!” she dictates; a whole day accelerated in the blink of an eye. Playtime on speed. Temporality gone berserk.
Time moves so fast. It goes on and on. But I feel the same, I look the same— there is no discernible change in my body or my face from year to year. But my child outgrows her clothes and shoes, and the fat on her cheeks in a distant memory. Her limbs inch longer, she shapeshifts; she is a different version of herself each day.
And so perhaps one reason readers return to Peter Pan is precisely because he never grows up. He’s reliable that way, forever embedded in preadolescent amber. As such, Peter is always accessible to the teenager who misses being a child, and is a balm for the parent chasing the memory of a child’s infant-smell even when said child is right before her eyes. Peter always gets his happily-ever-after because he stays a boy forever, rollicking about Neverland, with its Never Trees and Never Birds… Ah, Neverland: even the name itself is a giant repudiation, a standing of tiny ground. On the television screen, Disney’s Hook grinds his sword against Peter’s tiny dagger. “Give up, boy!” he growls, menacing. “Never!” Peter cries, slashing Hook away.
“I don’t want to grow up!” my child groans, as I return Wendy, John and Michael back to their nursery in London, doomed to age and to grow into the mantles of lost, adrift adults, while Peter flies back to Neverland to continue playing his games forever. “I want to go back to America,” she asserts. “Why?” “So I can become a baby again!” She baby-talks and I don’t stop her. After baths, she curls up her body and pretends to be an egg just so she can see me perform the very real joy I must feel when her shell cracks and she is introduced to the world. “Mama!” she chirps, a soggy little hatchling, newly arrived.
In Margaret Wise Brown’s The Runaway Bunny, a small bunny tries to run away from home. Its attempts are continually foiled by its mother, who repeatedly says, somewhat creepily, “If you run away, I will run after you. For you are my little bunny.” It didn’t matter where the beleaguered kit tried to abscond to, its mother continued to calmly iterate that she would be there: “If you become a bird and fly away from me, I will be a tree that you come home to”; “If you become a crocus in a hidden garden, I will be a gardener. And I will find you. For you are my little bunny.” “Shucks,” the bunny finally concedes, “I might as well stay where I am and be your little bunny.”
I was repulsed the first time I read the story as a young mother— yeesh! Give your kid a break, lady—and didn’t understand the picture book’s popularity. There was something terrifying about a parent who chased so relentlessly after their offspring no matter how hard the kid tried to leave. I wouldn’t be that kind of parent, I thought judgmentally.
One day my husband returned, face ashen. “I couldn’t find her,” he said. Beside him, our child kicked off her shoes, unrepentant.
“I tried staying still, hoping that she would come back to find me. When I finally decided to leave to search for her, I hoped she didn’t return to the original place to find me gone.”
“I want to go to the places I want to go,” she stood firm on tiny ground.
“But if you run away, I might not be there when you return,” he tried. “I might have gone somewhere else looking for you.”
“I want to do the things I want to do,” she insisted.
“Don’t go where we can’t see you,” I am severe and completely unlike Mrs Darling. “This is very serious.”
My Peter Pan stories at night began taking on a different hue. Empty beds, empty hearts. And I remember now: the coming of Peter Pan is a parent’s worst nightmare. “There never was a simpler happier family until the coming of Peter Pan,” Barrie’s narrator grimly recounts. He is the trickster who lures children away from their beds, a Pied Piper of Hamelin in child’s form. So even as I told my child yet again the story of Peter whisking the Darling children away into the night, I kept her windows firmly shut.
In many cultures around the word, there are more evocative alternatives to the English opening formula to stories “once upon a time”. Roughly and inadequately translated, one might be, “It was so, it was not so.” Another: “It happened, it did not happen.” This is fiction’s great paradox: at once humble and magnificent; the doublethink required to be catapulted anywhere within the vast span of the imagination. One has to hold in her head that the story being weaved is absolutely real, even as one knows it to be false.
One day my child announced, “I want to go to London.” “London! Whatever for?” “Because Peter Pan goes there,” she explained. Suddenly doubt spasmed across her face, “Peter Pan is… real, isn’t he?”
Of course he is, an earnest voice within me wanted to soothe. I believe in him too. This voice sounded like a version of the mother I’d like to be— lover of stories, cultivator of the imagination. Of course he isn’t, jostles another version of the mother I’d like to be—pragmatic, shedder of delusions. He’s just a story.
It was so, it was not so. But against the grave hesitation of my child’s face, the inadequate, cowardly thing that tumbled out of my mouth was: “I believe all great stories are real.” She frowned— of course children recognise a cop-out when they hear one— and did not pursue her inquiry.
Peter Pan became a placeholder for my little ideologies about raising children and art. About aesthetic transport, belief and flight.
So I felt betrayed the day my child didn’t want my Peter Pan stories anymore. “Paw Patrol,” she insisted. “A story where Chase and Skye save the day.” There’s more: instead of your singing, may I listen to a Disney playlist on Spotify to sleep please? Close my door on the way out! I don’t need it open at night now, thanks Mama. Cut to the quick but smiling, I kissed her goodnight and shut her door. I returned to a room without her. I got into my pajamas and read in bed, ignoring how my prepared little Peter Pan story for the night dangled uneasy and unused in my constricted gullet.
Sabrina Orah Mark writes, “We take shelter in children to escape oblivion. We ask the child to drag around the unwieldy weight of magic. To clap wildly. To believe in what we believe in no longer. We ask the child to keep the awe we forgot how to hold.”
“Come cuddle with me,” I ask. She squirms and breaks free, on another bender about ponies that I try hard to enter but can only manage a weak, slight immersion. “You’re my favorite person,” I croon, shooting her a sideward infatuated grin, heart open, but she points to a band-aid on her arm and sobs, “You hurt me!” She tells me I am the most beautiful person in the world and I swallow my temper to grit, “That’s nice,” removing a stray Lego piece from beneath my burning foot. She runs to me with Paw Patrol while I wait dumbstruck with Peter Pan. We try and fail, adjust and compromise; our signals hopelessly askew.
Moons and moons go by before she asks for Peter Pan again. Then moons cycle by after she changes her mind. She wants him. She forgets him. She remembers him. She forgets.
But perhaps now I return to this story also because the Darling children leave Neverland. Because in the end, they want their mothers. In Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, the naughty protagonist escapes his exasperated mother to an island where he has a wild rumpus with monsters. But he tires of the wildness and adventure and returns home where his mother waits, all crossness seemingly forgotten, with supper waiting, still warm. Like Mrs Darling, these literary mothers forgive their heartless children for abandoning them. Their stories conclude with the joy of seeing them again, no matter how much time had passed while they were gone.
But it was not so for Peter. “Long ago,” says Barrie’s Peter, “I thought, like you, my mother would always keep the window open for me, so I stayed away for moons and moons and moons, and then flew back; but the window was barred, for mother had forgotten all about me, and there was another boy sleeping in my bed.”
My father arrives to pick my child up for their weekly Saturday afternoon hang. Thinking of another kid I know who has outgrown spending weekends at his godmother’s, I tell my dad, “I’m sad imagining a day she might not want to go to yours anymore.” A complicated expression is on his face when he replies, “There will also come a time when parents are no longer the first people children turn to.” I nod, imagining a day my child wouldn’t want my husband and I anymore. It was only later that I realized the absence my father referred to had been us: his daughters, breaking our parents’ hearts by doing something as ordinary as growing up; turning our backs on them to flee into those of friends and lovers, moving away and placing oceans between us, making no pretense of ever missing home.
Perhaps the thing that surprised me the most about parenthood is the uncanniness of one generation cycling over another. She screams at me, inching her foot away from the clipper in my hands, shielding a blackened toenail—internally bruised, half falling off, and the years flicker and rewind as I, body now small and light, scream and scramble away from my father, eyes fixed on the clipper in his hands, protecting my crushed, dangling toenail after stubbing it under his bedroom door. My child clambers onto my lap in the backseat of a taxi, talking up a storm, and halfway through my slightly detached replies, the scene backwinds and it is me laying my smaller head onto my mother’s lap, in love with the world, talking about everything under the gorgeous, brilliant sun as her cool hands absently smooth over my hair, wondering about the far-away expression on her face, which I now know was her way of holding herself steady while I breached and pawed down her walls.
At age twenty, I feared this cyclicality. Its script felt like a trap. At age thirty-three, I don’t know what to think. Some days when these temporal overlaps occur, I hazard the frightening thought that this generational circling back feels a bit like consolation: ah, so that was a happy childhood. How strange to recognize through proxy that such a precious thing had been mine.
My child’s name sounds like a wish come true. She twirls around the living room, her favourite red dress swirling around her legs. Her lunch has been abandoned— there’s Yangzhou fried rice mixed with splattered poster paint on the marble floor— and all this dancing while eating is probably going to make her throw up. Still, she screeches, “Look at me!”, sweaty hair clinging to the nape of her neck as she spins. A crudely painted papier-mâché unicorn stands drying in the corner, watching her with googly eyes. Round and round she goes.
For years after my mother died, I couldn’t recall her accurately. My sister sometimes quoted some of her anecdotes during our long-distance calls and I’d go, ‘That’s exactly how Mum used to sound,” while marveling at how I could do something as unforgiveable as forget. After moving back into Limau Purut, it’s become easier to remember her, so inextricable were my impressions of her to the physical house she’d raised us in.
She made a beautiful house to keep us all. And I flew away without a single look back.
Does it matter whether the window closes before or behind us?
I think she’d disagree with Barrie that dying was any kind of big adventure. She‘d probably tell Peter: kid, it sucks. You lose your dignity as well as your mind. You might lose all your hair too. She might also say: word of advice? Just stay in Neverland. Don’t grow up. Don’t have children of your own. You’d have to tell them to go to New York even though you’re dying and you’d prefer them home. You’d have to tell them to chase their ludicrous dreams though all of yours have dried up. You’d probably have to say: go, be free, I’m happy for you. Or: don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine. They’d probably believe you even as they know it to be false— it was so, it was not so— and all you can do is stay where you are, frail with disappointment, sitting alone evening after evening in the lovely garden you made.
Look at me, ventriloquizing her voice, when this sounds nothing like her. If it’s not apparent, I have no idea what I’m saying. The edges of this fabrication are beginning to fray— tonight’s story is almost over.
I stayed away for moons and moons and moons, and when I flew back, my mother had left the window open for me, but she wasn’t waiting up: she was dead. There was no use justifying myself or my reasons, my desperate whys or wherefores. And though she had left the window open, they ended up shut again anyway, all of them— the french doors, the metal grating to the wet kitchen, the small bathroom panes. An ugly alarm was installed and the house she had taken so much pride in lay silent and abandoned for years. The wood grew weak and rotted, the termites trooped in, civet cats made a home at the rear, and her garden was overtaken by weeds and brambles.
Perhaps another reason readers seek comfort in Peter is because he never dies. His story goes on and on.
After she died my sister and I found an old pocketbook of hers in a drawer by her bedside table. On a page, a single line, full of sadness: “The point of having children is to let them go.” “Sorry Mum,” we whispered, closing that quiet little pocketbook and continuing on with our lives. It is always already too late.
Perhaps my mother learnt that a home is not somewhere to keep her children, but a place to clear the window pane so they can safely fly away. Perhaps it is shining the glass so they can peep in when they fly by for a visit. Perhaps watching a child grow up is to speak your pride aloud so they hear, but nurture the sadness quietly within you so they can leave. I don’t really know.
It was so, it was not so. I hold onto my daughter and believe she’ll be this young forever. I hold onto her and know that like I once did, she would fly out the window perch without the courtesy of a single longing look back. I open the windows that had stayed shut for years to let in a little air. The laundry piles up. Dishes undone in the sink. Hadn’t I tried to resist domesticity, wifeliness? Hadn’t I tried not to repeat my mother’s story? In Barrie’s novel, the Lost Boys exchanged stories in the dark. When Slightly proffered one, “the beginning was so fearfully dull that it appalled not only the others but himself.” In the end he capitaluated, stopped telling his story, admitting to everyone, “Yes, it is a dull beginning. I say, let us pretend that it is the end.”
How brave it is to be an adult!
The curtains sway in the breeze, and toys are strewn on the sofa, unkept. Heady scents of vanilla and citrus waft from the oven. The garden is becoming lush. Some days the kitchen island hisses my regrets of the past, and the living room is ominous with the quiet of the future. Still I glance around, calculating: what does this place need? A hanging plant here, some framed art there. Perhaps I could make a home beautiful enough to keep—
But this is no way to live. I push the things I’d rather not think about into the dark, and try to shine a little light. The windows open and shut, day after day. I’m probably holding on too loosely and letting go too tight— was it supposed to be the other way around? Quick, she’s almost home from school. The days she used to scream my name jubilantly from the end of the street are now faint and dreamy memories. Still she arrives and tosses off her shoes. “Here Mama, some flowers for you,” she bestows her tribute; regal, nonchalant. Trampled petals scatter on my palm: ixora, frangipani, weeds. Her voice is high, tinny; still childish, she smells of sweat and dirt. Again I trick myself into believing that this will last forever.
Now, it is my child who tells me stories. She creeps into my bed and searches for my face in the dark. “Once upon a time, there is a darkness that never ends,” she insists, teeth happily clenched for dramatic effect. Her tenses are mixed, past and present collapsed, but her eyes are wide with the storyteller’s conviction; the compulsion, the dare: believe what I am telling you. “Once upon a time, there was a house with too many people.” She has not yet learned cause and effect. Her stories are all beginnings and no end. All she wants, in her bountiful little heart, is to enchant. “Remember the story I told you tonight,” she instructs, grave as a schoolteacher. “I’ll continue it tomorrow,” she promises.
I don’t know how it ends. Neither does she. We’re just making it up as we go, improvising; spinning half-formed tales so the other will look back in the dark—
“I know how it ends!” my child declares knowingly, connecting the last section of a wooden train track. She leads a small train with little people—“this one is me, this one’s you, this one’s Dada”— down the tracks and whoosh! The rickety little train careens down the incline, the miniature little hominids in them rattling around little plastic carriages, reversible magnet connections clinging on for dear life, wooden Brio faces smiling. She leads us round the bend and curve then once again, we painfully climb the incline then— whoosh! Round and round we go; an ordinary story among all the other ordinary stories in the world, and like all lives lived, destined for endings as banal and surprising and strange as their beginnings. I have maybe accepted this.
“Never!” Peter Pan cries, leaving the ghosts of the Darlings behind him to grow up and old. “Never!” Heartless little abandoner. He flits away, as merry and impudent as ever. Heaven only knows why we love him so.