Icarus and Daedalus as a Modern-Day Family Parable

The Myth of Icarus and Daedalus

You all know the story of Icarus and Daedalus. Crazy King Minos keeps Daedalus, the builder of the great labyrinth, trapped on the island of Crete. Along with his son Icarus, Daedalus waits, plotting and praying for release, until the great builder who confined the Minotaur gets a grand and awe-inspiring idea: I'll build wings of wax and bird feathers, and my son and I can fly free. The father and son collect feathers for years — who knows how long — and finally, aloft they go. "Don't fly too close to the sun, my boy," says the builder. But the boy gets drunk on freedom, gains in confidence, and dancing with the sight of birds in the sky, he grows entranced by the light. The carefully constructed wings melt, burning away the wax and dead feathers, and the boy plummets to the ocean. Living on an island and dreaming of flight, Icarus never learned to swim, and he dies, choking on the salt water of the sea.

The moral, as you know, is this: fly too close to the sun, dream too big, and you'll get burned. I remember reading about the boy who made wings out of wax and feathers with his father when I was a little girl, ruining my eyes with reading by my Barbie bedroom light. I loved the picture of the boy and his father flying in my book. I loved reading about how the sun burned the wax and Icarus plummeted to the ground, a bird only briefly. I always liked reading books like that — mythology and stories of knights in shining armor saving damsels in distress, fairy tales.

False flight. Dead flight. Man-made flight and pretend wings.

My father always said I'd never get rich with an English degree, and he was right. But I loved living in my head because it was easier than thinking too much about the environment where I grew up. Dead-end suburban land, my dad called it.

The thing you have to understand about my family is that my father is a gym teacher at a suburban high school. He played football in college, but he was a small man then and never made the pros. He is still short but weighs more than he did back then, though he is still in good shape — better than the gym teacher at my own high school, I can tell you. My dad can play any sport, or at least any sport that counts, which means baseball, football, hockey, and basketball — that's it. My brother can play them all, and he grew up with a football in hand. You can look through the family album and find a picture of him sleeping in his crib with the Nerf football my father gave him as his first birthday present right beside his tiny hand.

Growing Up in a House Built Around Strength

Then come the pictures of my brother growing up — toddling around, dressed in a little football helmet for Halloween, his hands buried in his treat bag. "Oh, he's a growing boy," my mother said. My brother was always the kid who would grab for the second potato, two cheeseburgers when we went through the lunch line, until he decided his body was a temple to football. It really didn't matter what he ate; he seemed to convert it all into muscle, and my father was proud. "He's filling out nicely," he'd say.

When other parents complained that my brother was too rough at recess during elementary school, my father would say those other kids were weak. My father was very big on us being strong. We'd never take normal vacations to Disney World or Europe like other families. Instead, we'd go skiing in the iciest of weather, or camping out in stickiness and heat. When I asked my mom why we couldn't see Cinderella's castle, or Buckingham Palace, or the Coliseum in Rome like my friends, she said we didn't have the money. But I wasn't entirely sure about that. I knew my father was toughening my brother and me. No wimps allowed in the house. I learned how to kayak and how to start a fire with nothing but sunlight, and my brother and I were lean and strong and brown, with rippling muscles like Thoroughbreds.

It is true that my father didn't make much money as a gym teacher, though it was a steady job. He painted houses during the summer for extra cash, and my mother worked part-time as a dentist's assistant. But our house always looked perfect. He was a great builder and very handy — he could refinish cabinets and change the oil in the family car. "Why pay someone to do a half-bad job when you can do a good one yourself?" he'd ask. He built us a treehouse, a basketball court in the front yard, and my brother was always playing street hockey in front of our home. "Car!" he'd shout, and the kids would part like Moses parting the Red Sea.

Growing up, we both had chores. I'd help my mom make dinner, and my brother would help my dad outside. But as he grew older and Little League, Pee Wee Hockey, and Pop Warner Football gradually became more competitive, most afternoons before dinner saw the two of them catching pop flies, practicing a slap shot on the makeshift ice rink my father created by hosing down the lawn before it sank below freezing, and of course sailing the old pigskin back and forth. "Plenty of time for chores when you're trapped in suburbia," said my father, "but maybe not — maybe you have what it takes to get to the top, son."

If you went to high school with my brother, you could pick him out in a second. He was the one who would waltz into class late, puffed up in his varsity jacket. "Glad you could join us," the teacher would say, and my brother would always laugh, even if there was an edge to the teacher's voice.

He dated, of course — he always had somewhere to go, something to do after a game — but never anything serious. He seemed to rise above the concerns of everyone else, so sure that he would get a scholarship, that the world would be his and his future would be served up on a platter. The recruiters would come. Then the girls would come, my father and mother stressed to him — first the recruitment, the offers from the college, the scholarship. Then he could maybe get more serious. During the off-season.

Once he fixed me up with a freshman guy on the football team, and I practically fell asleep the date was so boring — all this talk about pushing around the field, how this team sucked, that team didn't. To be on the football team at my high school, you had to live and breathe the game. It had to be your sun and moon.

My Brother, the Quarterback

Some of the teachers were less forgiving. "One day you'll go too far," his eleventh-grade history teacher said. "Who do you think you are?" his algebra teacher said. And once, his English teacher — English was his worst subject, my best — said: "Where would you be without football, young man?"

Didn't they see that my brother walked on clouds, on water, that he was above the normal laws of man? He didn't need to get a 4.0, only make touchdowns. So long as he met the minimum NCAA eligibility requirements for the SAT, he didn't need to memorize vocabulary words and formulas, or agonize over multiple-choice drills and the five-paragraph essay format. Instead of filling out college applications online his senior year, college recruiters would be calling our house, practically drooling over him like a hungry dog over a bone.

Not that he didn't work hard — he did. Just not in school. Out in the field. Grunting and sweating, trying to get out of the labyrinth of suburban stasis that my father railed against whenever he was angry after a long hot day working in the yard while our neighbors had groundskeepers to groom their grass. "Slaving to the man," my father would say — the "man" representing our four walls with a leaky roof he couldn't afford to replace on a teacher's salary, and all the overweight kids he had to coach during regular P.E. when he'd rather be out coaching a real team, or better yet, playing himself.

I know my father's anger, words, and resentment fueled every rep my brother lifted in the weight room at school. Like building a pair of wings feather by feather, adding to his ever-bulking body sinew by sinew, tendon by tendon, muscle by muscle. Sometimes I swear I could see him growing more muscular as he tore into a PowerBar with his teeth and swilled down whole milk from the red-and-white carton each morning.

I toasted my favorite strawberry Pop-Tarts, carefully cut them into quarters — as if my precision would protect me from something — and sipped regular Coke.

"Garbage in, garbage out, sis," said my brother. "Carrie, girl, your energy is going to totally crap out halfway through practice if you eat like that." I didn't care that much. Yeah, I'd probably eat half a snack bag of corn chips for lunch, throw the rest away and say I was fat, try to pretend I was fashionably dieting like the pretty girls, and then feel like a wet rag after doing wind sprints with my hockey stick after school. But I never saw my body as a carefully sculpted, inhuman machine capable of perfection like my brother did. My legs were just a vehicle to get my life from Point A to Point B as best they could. Deep inside, I had absorbed the lessons my father taught me about the female body — the way he never encouraged me to excel in sports the way he did my brother. There were limits to female size and strength, and your body and fate could betray you. So you had to chill.