Lottery Ticket
We open our Christmas presents on Christmas morning. That was a holiday shakeup for me when I got married. My family of origin opened presents on Christmas eve. The compromise that has elbowed its way into our tradition is a larger extended family gathering that includes a White Elephant gift exchange on Christmas Eve. The rules include a $5 limit, dice, and directives for swapping and stealing presents. As for me, the only thing worth having that costs a mere five dollars is a lottery ticket, so that’s usually my contribution. The problem with purchasing the very thing I want is that I end up jockeying for my own gift. This year I encountered competition in the form of my youngest son Wendell. This checks out. He shares the Carney feature that delights in the irrational, which is almost never, but still holds out the possibility of, rewarding big dreams.
This year, as the final dice came to rest, Wendell had secured the lottery ticket. His joy was hard to miss. Given its rotating proximity to me, I had already made peace with the notion that I would not retain my lottery ticket. He went to bed with a smile on his face and I went to my wife to get instructions on how to execute Christmas.
According to the Webster’s Dictionary article I just read, the origin of the idiom ‘spitting image’ comes from the conflation of spit and image. Allegedly, spit signified something like a replica in 19th C. which owed its lexical existence to the 16th C. usage of the word when it was observed that genetic similarities were so prominent it would seem one was “spit from their parent’s mouth.” Observers often insinuate that Wendell is a spitting image of me. Chief among the observers is my mom, whose qualifications are years of first hand observation of both of us. What’s interesting to me is not the similarities that are objective like dimples and Levy-like eyebrows, but the subjective like gaits and facial postures that I haven’t used since childhood, but that Wendell seems to unknowingly replicate without effort.
I know that Wendell takes this likeness seriously. On the evening when I was admitted to an inpatient care facility for a mental health collapse, Lindsay reports that she gathered our four kids to break the news to them. There were tears, which I appreciate in the same way someone fantasizes about the magnitude of grief that might be felt at one’s funeral, but there was also this. Wendell asked, “Will this happen to me?” A question derived from his internalizing the repeated message, “you are a spitting image of your dad.”
The other feature we have in common is personality. According to the wisdom of the Enneagram I’m a three and Wendell, until his frontal lobe cements his intellectual and emotive existence, behaves in the style of a three. When you are little, the three’s primary feature is billed as charm, but as one ages it is often seen as something else, bullshit. Still Wendell is riding high from his giftings that come effortlessly, landing lead roles in plays and guest spots as a standup comedian at children’s birthday parties.
There are concerns I have for him. With the early and repeated messaging that tends to be effusive comes ego. I often find myself reflecting on my own father’s admonishments to not be cocky. In my most recent parent teacher conference discussing Wendell, a teacher graciously insinuated that Wendell has a zealous confidence and that sometimes it can be a bit much. The problem for people like me and Wendell is that those truth statements are often coated with a sly smile. A messaging strategy we work hard to elicit, and one that protects us from a deeper fear, namely that we are worthless. Here I should say I’m not trying to be melodramatic. The fear of being worthless is not special to us, it is the diagnosis of all Enneagram threes.
The incessant ingratiating then, is a mechanism whereby we are constantly purchasing insulation from this deeper fear. Having come to terms with it in my own journey I sometimes lament for him when I can see him trying especially hard. This constant performance also produces something else within us, confusion, both about what we actually want and more importantly, what we actually feel. Those became irrelevant in the greater pursuit of discerning what we think everyone else wants from us.
Because of this condition there is a line from Thomas Merton’s famous prayer that has been particularly poignant for me. “I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.” Somedays I think that Enneagram threes, lost in the sea of their own self confusion, can merely eke out a desire to please. In that grasping though, when one finally connects with what’s sincere, the results are experienced as meaningful.
On Christmas morning, when I went to unpack my stocking stuffers, I discovered the lottery ticket. Wendell had won it because he wanted to give it to me. A present, that devoid any kind of income, he purchased through his gaming technique. What I scratched off and won was the fullness of his love.
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