My Type: Addicts and Peter Pan

When I was a little girl, I fell in love with a boy, and that love has never left me. I may say there was a boy in junior high school who was my first love, but there was someone even before him, someone whose eyes I've seen twinkling from the face of every man I've ever loved since: Peter Pan. Sometimes in my romances I get to play Wendy and sometimes I play Tink, yet somehow whichever I play, I am always Mrs. Darling too, with a kiss at the corner of my lip that no one can take but Peter.

Before I realized that I'm attracted to addicts, I used to say that what I loved men who reminded me of Peter: men with a boyish vulnerability, a wounded child inside. So, in recent years, of course, I've begun to wonder about the two common threads connecting the men I've loved: addiction and Peter Pan. And I've found that Peter has some deliciously addict-like qualities about him (and Wendy some delightfully codependent ones).

Now, I have to be clear, the Pan I love is not the Disney version, he's J.M. Barrie's own original creation: wounded and cocky, lonely and thoughtless, fearless and needy. I love the boy who lies down in bed desperately wanting to cry after Wendy and the lost boys leave him, but decides it would be crueler to them to laugh instead. I love the boy who lets his tears cascade over Tinkerbell's finger when she lies dying and then forgets he ever knew her after she's gone. I don't love a happy little boy, I love a tragic figure.

I have heard it said that addicts stop growing emotionally at the age they began using their drug of choice; they remain frozen in time, perpetual children in adults bodies. And of course, that makes for a wonderful Peter Pan parallel, but mere childishness is two dimensional; it isn't compelling. For Peter Pan (or my husband) to capture and hold interest there has to be complexity and depth. It's not the childishness that draws us in (or at least draws me in) it's the wound that caused the child to remain behind, fearful of going any further. It's the way he needs and wants a mother's love and care, the way he brings Wendy to the island to fill that void, and yet he despises grownups (read: parents) and expects them to hurt and abandon him, to bar the window against him as he tells Wendy his own mother did.

"Sometimes, though not often, he had dreams, and they were more painful than the dreams of other boys. For hours he could not be separated from these dreams, though he wailed piteously in them. They had to do, I think, with the riddle of his existence. At such times it had been Wendy's custom to take him out of bed and sit with him on her lap, soothing him in dear ways of her own invention, and when he grew calmer to put him back to bed before he quite woke up, so that he should not know of the indignity to which she had subjected him."

What good codie could hear of Peter Pan crying in his sleep and not want to soothe him? And more than that, not love him for it?

But it's more than the refusal to grow up, more than the woundedness that brings addiction to mind when I read Peter Pan now, it's the ability to make fantasy a reality. Neverland begins as someplace entertaining and exciting Wendy, John and Michael dream about. It may come close to them in the nursery, but without Peter to lead them there, it doesn't break through into reality. Peter makes fantasy real for the children.

"In the old days at home the Neverland had always begun to look a little dark and threatening by bedtime. Then unexplored patches arose in it and spread; black shadows moved about in them; the roar of the beasts of prey was quite different now, and above all, you lost the certainty that you would win. you were quite glad that the night-lights were in. You even liked Nana to say that this was just the mantelpiece over here, and the Neverland was all make-believe.

"Of course the Neverland had been make-believe in those days; but it was real now, and there were no night-lights, and it was getting darker every moment, and where was Nana?"

And Peter, like an addict, makes fantasy real to himself.

"The difference between him and the other boys at such a time was that they knew it was make-believe, while to him make-believe and true were exactly the same thing. This sometimes troubled them, as when they had to make-believe that they had their dinners."

In fact, "make-believe was so real to him that during a meal of it you could see him getting rounder."

Like Wendy, I'm entranced by the beauty of the fantasy but I want to enjoy it from the safety of home. I want to protect and care for the boy who so clearly needs it and refuses to admit it, to take him home and tuck him safely in bed with a nightlight on. Yet this would destroy the very image I love: the boy outside the window, looking in at a loving family he can't be part of.