Hello Loves,
This Friday Andy and I will go to the Field Museum Member Night with Dex. But this year, unlike years before, Dex will peel off from us when we drop him off. Or, perhaps, he’ll ride his bike the train and get there before we do. In either case, he’ll leave us behind to wander into the new traveling exhibits by ourselves while he takes his employee badge and uses the staff elevator and goes up to the entomology department where he’s been working for the last ten months. He’ll greet his co-workers and set up in the department as they open their doors and explain the bugs to visiting members—including his parents.
We started going to Member Nights when Dex was very small. Having two families meant that Dex could go to the first of the two nights on Thursday with me, getting there when the event started when the museum closed its doors at 5:00 PM and staying until we shut the place down at 10:00 PM. He could do it all over again the next night with his father’s family. We called it Nerd Christmas, having the run of the whole museum for five glorious hours. We lived for it, the smell of naphthalene in the room full of bird skins, the chance to see the Field’s passenger pigeon specimen, the formaldehyde stink of the fish labs, the dermestid beetles, the dissections. It was a carnival invented especially for people just like us, and we left exhausted every year and so very happy to have been in a place that felt like home.
We have photo evidence somewhere of the very first time Dex went to the Field. He was a few weeks old, swaddled in a baby-wearing fleece against his father’s chest. My mom stood next to them, beaming on the steps in the weak January sunshine. I have a thousand pictures of Dex and the Field since then. I have a few of him at other natural history museums, in Boston, at Amherst College when we got caught in a blizzard that kept us from driving home to Chicago after the holidays, at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City. If there is a natural history museum in any town we’ve visited, we probably went there. Videos of museums we haven’t visited pop up on my very natural-history-heavy TikTok feed and I save them. When we can go to England, I think, next time we’re in Italy, maybe when we can get to France.
I started taking Dex to these places before he could express a preference. I led him to them. And then, surpassing my own interest, he led me. I started taking him to the Field because I was personally obsessed with natural history museums from a very young age. I went to AMNH a lot as a kid, nearly every time my parents made the trek down from the Berkshire Hills to New York, the city where my mother and I were born, the city that looked across the Hudson to where my father was born. I felt like the museum belonged to me. And when I was home, wandering the woods and fields of western Massachusetts, I gathered objects and flora and fauna to make a mini museum in my barn, imagining the next time I could lie under the great blue whale, the next time I could get lost in the dark rooms of dioramas.
The Field wasn’t the first museum I visited in Chicago, that honor belongs to the Museum of Surgical Sciences, a place I’d read about while researching my undergraduate thesis on illness and class in the early 20th century. I loved the small, strange space that faced the blue of Lake Michigan. I’ve loved lots of places like it, the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia, the Glass Flowers exhibit in the Harvard zoology building in Cambridge, that one museum in Kansas City that displays the found objects from a shipwreck of a paddle boat on the Mississippi, the soon-to-be-renamed-thank-god Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. At a reading two weeks ago, I found myself talking in a circle of writers I admired, all further along in their careers than I am. Somehow the Museum of Surgical Sciences came up. I found my chest growing warm with unsaid facts about museums, so many personal highlights and obsessions, so much I wanted them to know.
I often feel like that when topic of natural history comes up. I am the person at the party that won’t stop talking about ecosystemic collapse, obscure medical facts, lists of museums and collections and history. It is hard for me to remember that my special interests aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. As with my writing, I often think that if only I make these things fascinating to people, they’ll follow me on to my other obsessions: conservation in all its forms. These days—maybe thanks to therapy, maybe thanks to my marriage, maybe thanks to hours recovering from a shattered knee while scrolling TikTok—I wonder if the neurodivergence I’ve learned to parent in Dex wasn’t an inheritance I bestowed on him. I am a woman of special interests, obsessions, and hyperfocus, and I was a girl like that too. Not surprising that, being hyper-verbal, wise, quiet, and odd as a child, I somehow slipped through my 70s rural girlhood without anyone ever wondering if I might need a diagnosis of my own.
I’m editing now, not only the memoir I sold in December, The Mourner’s Bestiary, but also an article for an anthology and another for a favorite editor. I am deep in the trenches of my obsessions, of my voice, of my conviction that I can change people if I talk to them enough about what I think that they ought to know. But truly, and not surprisingly, all that I seem to do is to change myself. My obsessions made me the songwriter I became, with lyrics full of science and nature, even in my love songs. My obsessions made me the parent I became, bringing Dex to museums before he could walk, spending hours bent over shrubs full of pollinators, animal carcasses found in the prairie, tiny mussel shells on the beaches of Lake Michigan. Did I teach him my obsessions? Did he re-ensnare me in my own? Were we just deeply lucky to have been assigned to each other, mother and son, loving the same things? Given my parents’ obsessions—trout, geology, Shaker furniture, quilt making, forests, oceans—it is hard not to assign the obsessions of our lives to genetic predisposition matched with a heavy pour of nurture
So, here we all are, me and the kid and Andy, in our house while we all obsess on the things that feel like our truest work, all of us in our spaces studying, writing, working. Today, I’ll edit an essay on bioluminescence, Andy will meet with workers all day, and Dex will prepare for his botany exam. On Friday, we’ll all go to the museum together. Dex will go upstairs and spend the night greeting kids and families just like he was greeted when he was small. He’ll stand in the room where he first met Corrie Moreau, the former Curator of Ants at the Field Museum, who told him at seven that he should come work for her someday. And there he’ll be, working with colleagues she introduced him to. He’ll show us the room where he worked on the Terrestrial Parasite Tracker Project, or maybe the one where he spends Fridays photographing pollinator weevils for Brazilian post-docs. I’ll find my mentee from my job as a mentor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s graduate program, “Meet me in birds!” she emailed this week. It feels something like a full circle. It feels something like I’ve been here all along.
I’ll write soon,
Eiren
I love the Field. *My* first museum in Chicago was the Museum of Science and Industry. I was probably five or so, my paternal grandmother took me to see the Fairy Castle.