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Advice From My Father
Night Moves Discarded Love and Laundry Mom Takes the Slow Road Teenagers in Spring The Forward Motion of an Accidental Death Kindergarten Season Bodies of Water I'd Rather Die by Ice Than by Fire
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Advice From My FatherBy Jeannie Marshall I saw my father one morning as I crossed Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere. There he was–a skinny old man with a little island of hair on the top of his head and a patch of suntanned skin on either side–sitting at a table under the umbrellas of Caffé di Marzio. He was finishing off a cappuccino and smoking a cigarette; his old man's body curved in an arc over the table while he read a newspaper, Corriere della Sera. I was surprised. I would have expected a working man like him to read Il Messaggero or possibly Il Manifesto. They think the quiet and relative stability that ensued after he died was better than the presence of our erratic and charismatic father. They think it all stopped once he was gone. But his influence lingered and is here with me now, present in my restlessness. “Leave me in peace,” he said. “Why don't you just leave me alone?" "There's something I've wanted to say to you," he said at last, "but you never give me a chance." "Don't look back," he said. Only my father could know of my tendency to go over and over and over the past. "Once it's gone it's gone. So don't lose time. Just look ahead and do something interesting with what's left of your life." He ran through a number of such platitudes that are nonetheless true despite being so worn. "Just use it," he said, in a voice that was soft, though not so terribly kind. "You know how, you're just being shy. You are afraid, but you'll never be fluent if you don't practice." He looked at me with those sharp, cool eyes. "Penso che tu stia sognando," he said with such clarity that his voice still rings painfully in my head: I think you are dreaming. Jeannie Marshall worked as a features writer at the Toronto-based National Post for five years before moving to Italy. Her work has been published in The Globe and Mail, Saturday Night Magazine, The Walrus and in Brick, among other publications. She and her husband moved to Rome in 2002 where their son, Nicolas, was born in 2005. Night Movesby Tim O'Connell I arrived home from a meeting, late. Ellen and the boys were in our room asleep, so I got into Devin’s empty bed. I should’ve been glad to have a bed to myself. But after ten years of marriage and two children, I’m accustomed to sharing my bed with at least one, and often two or three people. I felt a little lonely lying there alone, until sleep joined me. About 3:00AM I heard footsteps in the hall. I knew they were Devin's. He and Danny have distinct nighttime steps. Danny's come quickly; he scampers from his room to ours. Devin's are slow and plodding. His shadow self entered the room and climbed onto his bed. He seems bigger at night, in the dark. Tim O'Connell is a husband and the father of two boys. He and his family live in Drexel Hill, PA. Tim works for the Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia in Hispanic Ministry. He's thinking about starting a blog but is concerned about his lack of discipline. This is his first published piece. Discardedby Christine White "We need your discards!" reads the postcard from the Vietnam Veteran's National Headquarters. I imagine it's from my father even though I know it's direct mail. "Please call now," it says, in big bold letters, underlined. They sell whatever is donated and use the profits to support state and national programs. After the word "programs," in parenthesis, the card clarifies, "homeless Veterans, agent-orange related health problems, improved hospital care for veterans with disabilities." They mean men like my father. Veterans who came home with "adjustment"issues. I grew up without him with stories about him unemployed, drunk and homeless. I picture him waiting at the end of a line, maybe ready to try on the beige winter boots my husband never wore, hoping the card reached me, and it did, as a direct hit to the heart. The card says I can call and leave my clearly-marked donations outside and they will come. Not him though. He won't. He has never shown up. What could I give him? What could he take? I picture him in my husband's old sweaters and boots, perhaps using a blanket I stuffed in a plastic bag or reading one of the many books boxed up and left in the front of my house. One mailing thanks the postal resident for tax-deductible donations in support of the "forgotten warriors." Forgotten? Warrior? His last correspondence is dated July 12, 1969. The paper is light blue and white with a map in the lower left-hand corner of Thailand, Cambodia, South Korea, North Korea and Vietnam. The number 274 is circled and he writes, "8 month, 22 days" as if to emphasize the meaning of the number. I was two and a half years old when he wrote that letter to my mother's parents. He addressed them as Ma and Dad even though he and my mother were separated, even though he had been abusive to their daughter and grandchildren. The letter, though not addressed to me, is the only correspondence I have from him. He didn't have a living relative of his own to write him a letter or send him a care package. He was a husband, the father of two, and an orphan by his early twenties. "I was very happy to hear from you and get my first letter. It gets kind of depression "[sic.]" when you don't get any mail," he wrote. "Well today is July 12 and we got hit about 12 this afternoon but we were ready. We try to be over here. I am glad the kids are all right and doing well and Nancy too." "They call this place Rocket Alley" he wrote, "and they are not kidding. The VC always have us jumping and I am even learning their language and it's pretty easy I guess." I haven't imagined my father as smart or descriptive. Each word in red ink sparks my curiosity about the person he was. He signed the letter, "Love, Frankie" and I'd never heard his nickname before, never seen love come from him. He refers to a picture of himself in the letter. He was wearing a patch on his arm which read "595 SigCo" the communication signal group he served. I wish I had that picture now. I stare at the paper. I am a forty-two year old daughter holding her father's forty year old letter. "The lady who predicted Kennedy's death said that the part of Nam I am in is supposed to be the hardest hit of all the war," he wrote, but why? What was he warning of, his potential to be bombed or killed? Why did he include that one line; did he know then how many ways lives are blown apart by bombs that injure but don't kill? "I feel sorry for these people over here. You wouldn't believe the way they live and survive, the way they go through the garbage, you couldn't believe it," he wrote. I am relieved to learn he was capable of compassion. "I hardly ever eat because it's so hot you won't even want to eat. So I give my food to them." For as long as I can remember, his name, his memory, has been treated with anger or irritation. When I was in grade school I'd ask my mother, "What was Daddy Frank like?" And she'd answer crisply, "A drunk. A bum. You're better off without him." As I got older, I'd argue, "But he doesn't have anyone to love, Mom. Maybe he needs help. Maybe he's the way he is because of Vietnam?" "Oh Cissy," she'd say, "He was a drunk before he even went to Vietnam." My mother never complained about his lack of child support, her long hours at full-time jobs and her role as thankless bread winner, yet, her tolerance for conversation about him was low. She would not keep me company as I romanticized and imagined what might have been if he had been in my life. Instead, she hung her solo portrait: the alcoholic failure we were all better without. When I picture him now as a uniformed young man, a soldier who sounds like a father and at least acknowledges his children I am heartened. When I envision his empathy for other people I am reminded he was once as human, complex and mysterious, maybe even sympathetic, as the woman he saw digging through the trash in Vietnam. "You couldn't believe it," he wrote. "I feel responsible for him sometimes," I told my aunt Worry on the phone just yesterday as I was clearing out my office and piling up boxes of photos. I know I shouldn't," I said. "No, you shouldn't," she says. "But I do." "I know," she says. "I mean, if he's not my responsibility, whose is he?" We do silent laps around uncertainty. I think of how often I drop clothes off at Goodwill, how I volunteered for a year at shelter for homeless families in college and how I am a proud progressive and activist. When I see men at red lights holding out cups and begging for money I want to roll down my window and scream, "You owe me!" I want to whisper, "Get it together man," or if I give coins I want to say, "Use this money on your kids not your addictions. You can't con me." I imagine him as younger than me, a lost child in the woods, and yet, I am unable to manufacture enough energy to reach out to him. I wonder if pitying eyes look on him now. Does a young professional woman in an apartment in Boston see him from her window, collecting bottles in a grocery cart, while writing in her journal? Does she wonder, "What can be done for these people?" Does she say on the phone to a friend, "You couldn't believe it?" Maybe she wonders whether she should give him granola bars or cash if he she sees him sitting by her building begging. Maybe she thinks, "Where the hell is his family? He's a veteran for Christ sakes," not knowing the ruins he left before he served, the bombs of violence he scarred our family with even before he went to Vietnam. I don't remember his violence but have heard of the table he upturned, the bones he broke, the time he chased my mother with a knife while she held a crying baby – how she literally ran for cover and out of his strike range. It is not my place to bring him back from the border, plant him in a recliner, hand him a paper and tell him to act fatherly. My mother has moved on. My sister wants no contact. Closure is not possible. There are a few things I know besides his social security number: They are his blood type (B negative), his place of birth (Detroit) and his mother's name (Madeline). I know my grandmother died of cirrhosis of the liver when she was sixty. I know he was raised by her and his aunt, Fran, in the Fidelis Way projects, in Brighton, MA. But the list of what I don't know about him longer. I see him as a family stray who was lost so long ago no one expects he'll return. I hope he has been taken in somewhere, has porches to rest on, bowls he can eat from, shelters where he can go to get warm. I hope people see him and smile, maybe know him by name. When I give money in support of veterans, give coins and get a dark blue felt mini-flower and a skinny piece of white paper, I hang it in my car attached to my rear view mirror. I wonder if he and I still have the same long sloping nose or if alcoholism has changed his into a rounder, puckered and fleshier feature. "Please send me more pictures of the kids," he had written, "It rains so much that your pictures don't last long." Did my Nana sneak photos of us and send them to him against my mother's will? Is that why there are so few baby and toddler photos of my sister, Karyn, and me? Did our pictures melt on the ground of LA Khay where he was stationed? Did they dissolve like notebook paper in a washing machine out there in Rocket Alley? Did they curl at the corners, color bleeding over images before falling onto the soil outside of Saigon? How long did he hold onto our soppy images before letting go? "Well, I have to go out on the perimeter now," he wrote. "P.S. Tell Nancy I hope she changes her mind. She still has nine months to think it over," he wrote not knowing about the baby boy, my brother Joey, who would be seven months old when my father got discharged in the spring of 1970. "Tell her to write me a letter. Tell Nancy to write for the kids" and there's no period at the end of that - the last sentence of the last letter. He did not mention me by name but acknowledged me as his child. He is a fringe father to this discarded daughter. He, through biology, created the dotted outline of me. But the substance of my being, the baby child who became the woman who is now me, was left orbiting. We are not two points in space connecting a clear and solid line. We are planets on the outside of each others existence. I was shot into the dark of night in 1966, not a rocket, but a star left to hang on the perimeter of the sky. I am a light beaming in the darkness. A light he cannot see.
Love and LaundryBy Yocheved Lindenbaum My friends often wondered what the strange piece of playground equipment was in the center of my postage stamp backyard. In the center it had a pole that supported rows of nylon rope, forming four concentric squares. "It's a dryer, silly," I told them, not realizing that I seemed the silly one. No matter, we could use it as base in a game of tag, or as a maypole as we held on and marched round and round. But that was only as long as it wasn't laundry day. On laundry days my mother emerged up the short set of grey concrete steps, with a heavy plastic laundry basket filled with wet clothes, past the tomato and hydrangea plants so lovingly planted. She deftly shook out the pieces of clothing and linens and hung each one carefully over the lines, securing them with clothespins. Socks and underwear got the inner ropes, while white sheets, quilt covers and damask tablecloths got the outer ones. As the sun shone, the pieces dried, only to be piled back into the basket and brought inside to be ironed. My mother ironed everything, including pajamas, daddy's boxers, and our cotton white panties. The kitchen counter did double duty as an ironing board, with a towel spread upon it, each piece of clothing quickly pressed and folded, then put in piles awaiting the trip to our drawers. The steam iron mixed with starch released a smell reminiscent of baking bread as it passed over the wrinkled collars and seams transforming them into stiff, perfect expanses. On rainy days, clothing was snatched off the outside dryer to be laid out on indoor dryers, folding contraptions made up of fifteen or so dowels, which often collapsed under the weight of our clothing. Little did I know that there was actually an electrical appliance called a dryer. I was introduced to one, standing like a fraternal twin next to the washing machine in my friend's house and was amazed at the ease with which the her mom did laundry. As Lisa played with her Suzy Homemaker oven, I was more intrigued to watch her mom Bernice pull out a pile of wet clothes from the washing machine, throw them in a dryer, push a button and walk away. It was even more wondrous to see the clothes emerge forty minutes later, dry, warm and toasty, ready to be folded. "Why don't we get a dryer, Mommy?" I asked. "We have a dryer, mamaleh. You think we need another one?" "Not another one, Mommy, an electric one that dries the clothes." "But why would I want that? The clothes smell so good from outside, and anyway where would we put it?" It was a question I didn't understand. "Next to the washing machine, of course. All we need to do is get rid of that old black sewing machine, and plug it in." I didn't yet understand about venting, and electrical lines, and why it would be so difficult in our small row house with the rental basement. I wanted to drag my parents out of their European greenhorn ways into the avocado green and harvest gold yellow of the American 1970's. I wanted my house to smell and look and sound like the others, and a dryer was a step in the right direction. I had an almost primal love of all things connected to laundry. I loved the aroma of the cleaning fluids, probably toxic, at the dry cleaners, and the scent of starch from the Chinese laundry. My father's dress shirts and our real linen tablecloths were sent out to the Chinaman, and when you picked them up they were wrapped in brown paper and tied with a string. Some of the more delicate linens were not trusted to anyone else. My mother would spray them with starch, roll them up and place them in the refrigerator. Hours later, she would heat up the iron and both gently and firmly press all the folds and creases, sprinkling them with lavender scented water as she worked. Although this was a labor of love, as was all the painstaking work done by my mother so we appeared presentable to the world, for me it was the tell tale puffs of steam arising from the coiled hose of our neighbor's dryer, that were a sure sign of a warm and cozy family. This fascination with laundry followed me. When my summer camp asked for volunteers to do our division's laundry at the Laundromat, my hand shot up. Sure, I was happy to spend the day in town, in civilization, but I was also excited to be in that warm soapy environment with the cavernous machines. In college, I started my own version of "Pay-it-forward". If I had to move someone's clothing out of a washer, I would put it in a dryer and start the machine. If I had to dump someone's stuff out of a dryer, I folded it. Sure it was a nice thing to do, but I also loved folding the almost too hot to touch denim skirts and pairing the socks.
My mastery over the laundry became my badge of honor and competence. My children's neat and pressed appearance was all thanks to me. The fact that clothes could be handed down from one child to the next was testament to my great abilities. As the household got busier with more carpools and activities, I often found myself procrastinating before starting a task, overwhelmed by the huge lists I accrued. There was the list on the refrigerator, the one on my palm pilot, the one by my night table, the post-its of emergency tasks tacked to the bathroom mirror and the list in my head never committed to paper. Did I really want to reorganize the linen closet so I could see what had to be bought for camp? Did I have to clean out the garage in order to figure out what sports equipment we needed this spring? Would it really free up space in the den drawers if I reorganized the photo albums? Every time I found myself with a few hours of empty time, perfect for starting one of these projects, I first checked the status of the laundry. In spite of the fact clean clothes never stay that way for long, I continued to find great comfort and solace in the various steps of doing the laundry. First separating the four or five hampers worth of clothes into whites, lights and darks, towels, linens and permanent press, and then watching the piles of disarray diminish as I washed each load. The crowning achievement was creating neat and orderly piles of each person's clothing. See I could make order out of chaos! Other projects may not have been completed satisfactorily, but I was always competent in the laundry room. My children were never the ones yelling "Ima, do I have any clean underwear?" They knew they could always depend on the drawer full of warm socks. There were other benefits to doing laundry. Between the whoosh of the water and the clanging of the dryer, it was hard to hear the other noises in the house. Down in the basement, my cave as it was dubbed, I could be very busy and excused for ignoring whatever was going on beyond. Since the laundry didn't require much concentration, laundry time became my private time to think, my thoughts meandering as I handled my children's shirts and pants, our sheets and tablecloths. The clothing often told me information that the children did not. Paint on a shirt cuff let me know that my 10 year old did a special mother's day project in school, an unfamiliar t-shirt let me know my daughter started the teenage phase of swapping clothes, and an extra button down shirt might clue me in that my son dressed nicely before that camp meeting, could it be because of one of the girl counselors? A stretched sweater cuff or a few blood spots may belie a playground tussle. Sometimes laundry time became my time for religious introspection. During the High Holy days, as I worked on an ink stain on a white t-shirt, I thought about how my misdeeds are like that stain. I might be a pretty good person most of the time, but that little blue blotch does ruin the perfection of the shirt. As I attempted to scrub and scratch and applied different concoctions to remove it, I thought of how hard it is to undo bad habits and bad deeds. And no matter how it emerged, with the stain completely gone, or with a bare trace of it slightly noticeable, it was food for thought about the repentance process. As they headed into their teenage years, my children and I had an unspoken agreement that secrets revealed through laundry would never be mentioned, but unmentioned did not mean unnoticed. Rather than have them launder their clothes on their own, I continued to do their laundry with some nod to going green and saving energy, but really because as they separated further and further from me, their laundry remained my tactile very sensual connection to them. They would lug back a bagful on their weekends home from college, and my mood soared. Not only were they home, back in the nest, but they still needed me. My daughter pointed out little spots and stains on her favorite outfits, so I could be sure to get them out, testament to my role as the wise and sage parent. Her friend dubbed me the laundry goddess, and her boyfriend began to ask me laundry advice. At the end of each trip home, their clothing was always ready, in neat piles, mommy as caretaker all wrapped up in a laundry bag. The last few years our family has shifted into a new phase, as two of my children have gotten married. In the weeks before the weddings, I made sure my children had a constant stream of clean clothes, as they readied themselves for each pre-celebration event. My son and I picked through his t-shirts and boxers throwing out the ratty ones, mending buttons on shirts, making sure to replace socks with holes. My daughter watched over my shoulder as I taught her how to wash delicates and sweaters, laying them flat, ready for the suitcases as she moved into her apartment. Again, without discussion, we all agreed that once married, it would be inappropriate for me to do their laundry. And then came that final load of laundry, in the few days after the most recent wedding, my son's, as his last pair of pajamas cycled through the hampers and I realized this was it. Although I had a lump in my throat at times during the wedding, the tears flowed down in the privacy of my cave as I folded and organized the end bits of clothing he would ever put in the family hampers. Sure, they may ask me to shift their clothes from washer to dryer on a visit home, and there might even be a few stretchys and booties to lovingly wash at some point in the future, but the day to day caring and nurturing of my babies where I could be enveloped by their touch, their smell, their mess had to end. There is more room than there used to be on the long, green folding table in the laundry room, with about half as many loads to do as there were just a year ago. Between my youngest son's pile of chinos and my pile of colorful t-shirts there is a gap that stands out like a child's missing front tooth. But now, on visits home to that little row house of my childhood, I notice the stains on my mother's pillowcases and tablecloths that her eyes no longer see. After I fill pillboxes of medications for the coming weeks, I sneak a load of laundry down to the basement to the ancient washing machine under the stairs. As I gingerly hang the few pieces of clothing on the wooden dryer, I am transported, knowing that I am still needed.
Mom Takes the Slow Roadby Tanya Ward Goodman There are two ways to get into Albuquerque from the Sandia Mountains in New Mexico where I grew up. There is the big four-lane interstate known as "I-40" and the meandering two-lane road that is "Old 66." My mom always chooses the old road. "I have to look at things," she says. On numerous drives throughout my life, she would suddenly pull over to examine a weed flowering by the side of the road or rescue a beetle from certain tragedy on the blacktop while I, in my late teens and early twenties, sat impatiently in the car. I just wanted to get to where I was going. One such box, known as "the girdle box" bore a pink and grey line drawing of a woman in her foundation garments and was exchanged by our extended family at the holidays for over fifteen years. The box traveled from Mom's home town of Rapid City, South Dakota north to relatives in Burney, California one year before being sent on to Albuquerque the next. After a time, the box was so celebrated that receiving it almost trumped the value of what was inside. Mom never set out to save the planet, but the way she cultivates her own environment is a lesson to those recent converts to the "green" life. Mom's daily summer ritual of breakfast (yogurt, granola and fruit) taken at the little metal table outside her back door affords her the chance to check up on her yard. Because she is mindful, she identifies the little green seedling poking through the stones in her patio as a "volunteer" from last summer's Cosmos. She attends the opening of a flower or the arrival of the hummingbirds with the same awe others might reserve for an opera or the first baseball game of the season. "I put a little dish of water out for the butterflies," she said to me one day, her voice vibrating with delight, "and yesterday there were three swallowtails." She goes on to regale me with tales of the snake who swallowed three of her fish and the coyote that stood outside her bedroom window and just stared in at her. "They're tricksters," she says, "I think he wanted me to laugh." Mom creates a kind of give and take relationship with wildlife in her yard. She knows to pick the apples on her trees a little early to fend off the bears and that if she leaves the bird feeders out at night, it's likely they'll be knocked down by a family of raccoons. Spiders that make their way into the house are captured in a juice glass and set loose in the garden. "My juncos are back," she says. "They're fighting the squirrels for the seed in the feeder. Those little buggers seem to give everyone a run for their money." I try to teach my children that looking out for the environment starts with being aware of the environment. On busy streets, we look for spent dandelions to parachute, we say hello to neighborhood cats and pick up the plastic cups and paper bags cluttering the gutters. This teaching comes easily, I realize, because I was taught so well by example. Mom didn't need to lecture, she didn't need to beat a drum to change the world. She simply slowed down enough to enjoy living in it and with that joy came compassion and an instinct for preservation. "I got eight-tenths of an inch of rain last night," Mom tells me. "And this morning it was only 30 degrees. Tonight, I bet we'll get snow." At sixty-three, her voice holds the same amount of glee as my five year old son's when he contemplates a winter wonderland. "Snow," she says. "I love the smell of snow." I am slowing down and it isn't the weight of my nearly forty years on the planet, it is the planet itself. I've begun to save glass jars and re-use packing envelopes. I pause in my daily tasks to watch the squirrels race each other through the palm leaves above my porch. Last summer, in the company of my son and daughter, I planted tomatoes in my yard. With the heat of August around me like a mantle, I ate the first while sitting on my low wall with dirt on my hands. Warm from the sun, it burst on my tongue with a sweetness I immediately wanted to share with my Mom.
Teenagers in SpringBy Alexe van Beuren
A teenage girl walks down the street, past my garden. She passes my house twice a day during the week, on her way to the school bus that stops at the bottom of the hill. She has a nice smile, even through all the awkwardness of early adolescence. The only time we spoke, she told me she'd seen turtles in our garden. Today, she is walking down the hill, as she does every school day. But today is Saturday: that's the first difference. The others are easy to spot: the tight jeans, the black top with a square neck, the silver flashing at her earlobes—-- a world apart from the rumpled denim and sweatshirts of the weekdays. For once, her hair is down, gleaming in the spring sunshine. When she nods to me, quick and shy like a deer determined to cross a road in front of traffic, I notice her eyes, outlined with a black that is too precise. Did I mention it's spring? I nod back at my neighbor and smile to myself. She turns left at the bottom of the hill, walking toward a bungalow where cars are always parked helter-skelter in the front yard, where teenage boys lounge and listen to loud music. I pull out a clump of crabgrass. Of course. Once, I was a gawky girl with shiny brown hair. So I know what lies behind my shy neighbor's Saturday descent. She has plucked and painted and polished. She is walking alone, without even the nervous giggling of a girlfriend. Walking towards a yard of back-slapping boys. Last night my husband and I watched a show about exotic fowl on the Discovery Channel. Humans have got it all wrong, I think today; the boys should be the ones puffing and preening, devising a baroque mating dance with two steps forward, one step back. Let them be the ones to flash blue feathers, puff up their necks, fan out their wings. Let them walk up the hill and loiter in front of my shy neighbor's house, naked in their desire. Instead, the shy girl with shiny hair promenades alone to boys who lean against cars, to boys with shaggy hair who sniff and scratch like quasi-brutes, whose pants barely cling to their behinds, whose threadbare t-shirts are of dubious cleanliness. She deserves something finer. A male peacock, iridescent in the sun, his tail spread; a long-legged heron, bowing and offering his lady love a token. Of course, she's just a young girl. Although she is walking down the hill now, shining in her new-minted glory, it's still practice. She's in the earliest flush of spring. She needs time to flesh out her own act: the downcast eyes, the shining hair, the smooth and faintly scented skin. She needs to learn to smudge her eyeliner. So much left to perfect; these boys in the yard are more witnesses than participants in this girl's first spring. I am not very old, but it has already been my time. Spring has had its way with me. The whole season was delicious: the circling dance of the maybe, do you want to, yes. The hand on the knee; the arm around the shoulder; the perfect and brand-new scent of the nape, the collarbone, the back of the knee. The late nights. The surprise of dawn. The long, slow slip of mornings into afternoons. Spring has had its way with me, and now I am well into summer, fighting the weeds, trying to keep what grew so abundantly just a little while ago alive and thriving under the summer sun. I am watering, harvesting, plucking the fruit before it splits open and falls to the ground to rot; I am working my hardest to keep one step ahead of the drought, the bugs, the dank rank air of plants too close together, so my husband and I can make it to harvest. Most of spring's charm is the promise of summer. But in retrospect, spring is more fun and less work. My neighbor has reached the car-cluttered yard. She stands, the sole girl, surrounded by boys who are doing their best not to look at her, and she flips her hair. I kneel to pull out more weeds. Spring. I look at my three-month-old daughter, and I sigh.
The Forward Motion of an Accidental Deathby Nancy Hanley Charles, the guinea pig, died in May. He was barely with us long enough to think of as our guinea pig, and not just 'a' guinea pig. He was a furry little patch I had tried to use to cover a gaping hole in our family. He fell into our hole that spring. His demise began with the fairly regular occurrence of my eleven-year-old daughter, Mia, telling me her stomach hurt too much to go to school. She had spent late fall of this school year desperately refusing to go to school, but there was more than hypochondria involved. Her father had moved out the first week of November. As her sisters, Anna and Tess, tried to act as if nothing happened, Mia, the long-suffering middle child, acted out for both of them. It took me a while to catch on, but finally enough was enough. I told her if she wasn't going to school she was going to the doctor. As a matter of fact I said, "After the doctor, straight to school with you, missy." That will show her, I thought, no more lounging in bed having Mommy bring her drinks. This plan was rejected, as Scout would be sure to dig Charles up and bring him back to us. We decided to bury Charles by our old house, which we hadn't sold yet. Tess was the only one who wanted anything to do with it, so she went upstairs and got a shoebox for me. "I'm not going to get him," she said as she handed it to me.
Kindergarten Seasonby Natalie Cousins-Robledo How did you hear about our school?
Please describe your child's talents/hobbies.
What are your educational goals for your child?
Is there anything else you'd like us to know about your child or family?
It's Kindergarten season, that special time in a family's life when visions of the perfect school, and the perfect future, dance in our dreams like straight-A students in a school pageant. And that wonderful place of bliss—happy child, happy Mama, happy bank account—is all just an application or two away. It's a daunting task, but the good news is that I'm not alone. I know this because all substantial conversations I've had with my network of Mommy Colleagues over the past three months have orbited exclusively around the topics of school tours, applications, deadlines and the interminable debate of public versus private education. This quest for the perfect Kindergarten is a phenomenon that, with uncanny precision, can change the most rock-solid of mothers in bizarre and eccentric ways. People have been known to sell their homes, buy new ones, and even break the law by giving false addresses—all to get their child into the "right" school. I myself have been shopping for fruit baskets, which I've heard is a favorite among the principals. Although this process of wooing schools and being wooed by schools is not entirely unique to my generation of neurotic mothers, statements from our own parents indicate that it hasn't always been so. "I don't know why you're getting so worked up. I just sent you to the school down the street," came from my mom just last week. Maybe some of you are right now in the midst of Kindergarten Season yourselves. If not, perhaps it's preschool that you're working on. And if you have a newborn, I imagine you to be standing on the sidelines, clutching your overly swaddled infant, and observing your contemporaries scuffle it out in the fray, wondering in amazement—or thinly masked horror—what is ahead for you. So, let me lay it all out there. There are the traditionally academic schools that will send your 2nd grader home with 4 hours of homework. Then there are the no-letter-grades developmental schools that believe in no homework at all. Some are religious and base their whole educational model on faith. Some are religious but don't teach religion at all. Then, of course, there's the plain old secular where you can be assured that no child within earshot of the campus will get so much as a "bless you" when they sneeze, because that would violate school policy. There will be the school with the principal you like but the Kindergarten teacher who looks like a toad. There's a public school that seems pretty good except that budget cuts have forced them to cut key staff. So, when one kid poops in the sand box on the same day that another pukes on the only computer in the office, they'll most certainly have to shut the whole place down and quarantine it. And we can't forget the beautiful private school in the hills that's perfect for your little darling, but will require you to go back to work, perhaps as the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, in order to pay for it. This is insanity at its Mommy-lovin' best, I tell you. To deal with it all, I've been experimenting in the practice of mindfulness—noticing my thoughts as they rise up, acknowledging their existence, but then allowing them to fall away without awarding them power with useless worrying. In the last few hazy moments before sleep comes, and in those transient seconds that I stand over the sink waiting for cold water to become hot, I wonder absently how exactly to transfer all of the information I'm receiving over into logical formulas that will result in one, correct answer. But as I devour ever -increasing amounts of data about these places, the level of urgency about the impending decision rapidly escalates. I want what's right for my kid. We all do. Dare I say we will stand for nothing less than the best. That's not news. But what that lofty idea really translates to is the paralyzing fear that I'm going to screw this up. And once I embark on that little road to nowhere all those lofty Zen aspirations get demoted in favor of the more traditional decision -making techniques. I don't know about you, but I've fallen back on an old habit that's gotten me through every other quandary that I've butted heads with since my son was born. No, I don't mean drinking a six- pack and passing out on the couch. Instead, I talk myself blue in the face to any living being who might have an opinion to share—friends, teachers, neighbors, the checkout clerk at the local grocery store—all in search of the ultimate truth: What is the best choice for my child? Where should I send him to school? But, of course, somewhere in that thick head of mine I know that the hard biting reality is, and some plain old fashioned logic would tell me, that what's best for my kid isn't necessarily best for yours and vice versa. So, come to think of it, that six- pack would have probably been more helpful after all. Still, it doesn't stop me from practically begging for the answer from anyone who'll give me the time of day. Somebody, please tell me!! But really, if someone did say, "OK, Natalie I'll tell you. You should send your son to Schmerfffinbuffa School." You know what my response would be, right? "Sure, Schmerfffinbuffa School sounds like a great school, but I don't think so." Because, you know what? I'll tell you a little secret. I actually already know the answer. And I'd almost bet that you—mother of a preschooler, mother of a future preschooler, or quandary-laden mother of any child at a crossroads—know the same for your kid too. Maybe you don't realize it yet. But somewhere deep inside your mind, or your heart, or wherever you keep such things, the answer awaits. Like your keys that have fallen into the floor vents, sitting out of view in the trap just below the grate, your answer is sitting there just out of sight. And at some point, when you tilt your head to just the right angle, and the sun shines through the bay window, bounces off of the stainless steel fridge and shines just so on to the chrome, it will allow itself to be revealed. They didn't suddenly materialize there as you might want to believe, but once the conditions become just right, only then are you able to see that which was there all along. A few months ago Karen Maezen Miller, a Zen Buddhist priest and the author of Momma Zen, spoke at a meeting I attended. She exuded such a quiet strength that the words she spoke—the simple, obvious answers to questions that hadn't been asked—awakened in me a sense of understanding that I didn't even know had been dormant. She said that we would make the right choice. We'd make the right choice because we cannot make the wrong one. My knee-jerk reaction was to demand incredulously, How could that be possible? I make "wrong" choices all the time. Yet somehow in the dark recesses of my mind—bound and gagged—was a mini me with the answer, waving her hands frantically, hoping I would take notice and pick her. I wanted to ignore her. She always comes up with crazy ideas, that little hippie alternative version of myself. Reluctantly, I peeled the tape off of her mouth and all she said was, "Choices are just choices". Well, what the hell is that supposed to mean? That's just great—an epiphany in the form of cryptic, circular babble. Having gotten this far, however, I figured it would be in my best interest to take the thought through to completion anyway. It brought me back to the original dilemma. I want the "best" for my son and that means sending him to the right school, not the wrong school. But if what she said is true, then it's this right/wrong label of my decisions that is flawed—maybe even, irrelevant—and the cause for all this brouhaha in the first place. These decisions are independent entities that generate new information and circumstances to use in the future. That's all. Ooh. Maybe that crazy little me is on to something. I chose the preschool that my son attends now. He's learned a lot, he's happy, and he's made friends. So from that perspective I made the right choice. On the other hand, their handling of his allergies, and the demanding level of participation and extra money required could lead me to perceive it as the wrong choice. What does that leave me with? That's right, more choices. If it's not working out, then I have to decide if we stay or go. Because, as it turns out, choosing your child's school isn't like a game of Jeopardy—one wrong answer and Bzzzzz! You lose. It's more like a scavenger hunt, where you gather everything you can find and see where it puts you among the group. At the end of the game you've probably made a bunch of new friends, maybe some new enemies, and you can finally relax, enjoy the party, and hang out with that until it gets awkward. Then you have to decide if you should stay or move on. This dizzying process of choosing a school has been circus-like, with its sideshows and distractions. But, after much deliberation, I've decided that the choice really is just the choice. And, quite surprisingly, I'm feeling pretty good about that. Once I stopped judging—myself, my son, and the schools—for just a jiffy, it lifted the burden of guilt for my inevitable mistakes that has been driving me in this near manic search. So now, I can sit back, pour myself some nog and enjoy the spirit of The Season while I finish up the last of my son's Kindergarten applications. Hey! Is there, something over there shining under the floor vent? In what additional capacity (i.e. volunteering, fundraising or other means) can your family add to the enrichment of your child's education at our school?
Natalie Cousins-Robledo comes at writing via a most circuitous route. She has a degree in Peace Studies from Chapman University, a minor in Music and a Certificate in Landscape Design. She has spent the better part of her career seeking a new career - criminal mediation, social work, music education, landscape architecture, writing, and Mommy to one 5 year old son. While she has written training manuals, book reviews, and lots of good listener charts, this is her first publication in a literary magazine. Bodies of WaterBy Maria Hummel When we meet on Venice Beach, Jen wears the off-white capris that she lent me when I was pregnant. Her belly peeks out above them, a little pop of flesh, the size of a small jug. She sees me notice it and bites her lip, so I keep my eyes on the blinding tarmac, as if we're actually headed somewhere, instead following her vague request to walk by the ocean. It would be good for me, she told me on the phone, and I hastened to agree. Anything you need. It would be good, she repeated with less conviction. Since we're both from landlocked New England towns, it shouldn't surprise me that even today, on the western edge of California, we can't find the waves. We have our two toddlers with us, and their strollers have forced us to take the smooth, flat bike path. The surf crashes far away from it, beyond yards and yards of beach. We reach a little playground. Her son Liam erupts from his seat and trots toward the ladder to the slide. My son doesn't move, so after a moment I lift him out and set him in a swing. He looks like a limp blond doll, his pale arms flopping over the harness. I push. His smile is nervous. I ask Jen how she is going to do it. She presses her fingers to her eyes and tells me that she will dilate with a chemical stimulus and go through labor. The pain medication is up to her. "But I don't want to have to wait for an epidural to wear off," she says. "I can't imagine sitting in the maternity ward afterward, wanting to go." My son whines. I pluck him out of the swing, but the black rubber won't come loose from his hips. I lift him higher, the chains grating under my elbows. Finally the seat falls free and we are left, clinging to each other. "How will he …" I pause, not wanting to say it. "He'll die coming down the birth canal," Jen replies curtly. "He has no lungs." She looks away toward Liam. He has her brown hair, her high cheekbones. She must see herself every time she glances at him. Right now he crouches on the last rungs of the jungle gym ladder with the sturdy grace of a two-year-old, his red shoes lodged and hands clenched, going neither forward nor back. "I bet he's stuck," she says, heading his way. Her walk is slow, her body conscious of the changes at its center. I carry my son back to the thin stripe of shade from a palm tree. His medication makes him sensitive to the sun, and besides he isn't playing. He just wants me to hold him. It's what he always wants since he first contracted a mysterious gastrointestinal illness four months ago, just before his first birthday. Bleeding ulcers line his digestive tract, making him weak, anemic, unable to chew and swallow. We may not be able to walk or talk together, but we are champions of embracing, my son and I. We've perfected it through the hospital stays, the blood transfusions, and the new liquid diet that means my husband and I can't eat around him because it makes him cry. As we two stand waiting, he runs his soft hands up the back of my neck. I curve mine down around his hips. Our bellies and ribs touch, and beneath them our thumping hearts. After months of this airborne hug, I feel like I have a notch at my waist that only he fits into, and when I walk around without him I am strangely light. Liam makes the last step to the slide and whooshes down the yellow plastic. He cheers. He's clearly fine playing independently, so Jen walks back to us. She's always had the whitest, purest skin, but today there is a rough layer over it, like the grit on drying cement. Her green eyes won't focus. "I could be put under, but I decided I needed to be awake for it," she says. "Have you ever had anesthesia? You wake up feeling like no time has passed." It's been a week since her ultrasound, since she first saw the hole in his diaphragm, the heart beating on the wrong side of the body. It's been days since the surgeon told her the likelihood of survival was no higher than ten percent. She had a choice and she had to make it fast: Keep the baby and risk his probable suffering and death, or end the pregnancy now, at five and a half months. We decide to keep walking. My son slumps in his stroller while Liam leaps from concrete curb to concrete curb, smiling and whipping a deflated balloon on a ribbon. Jen tells me it's his latest favorite toy. Bikers flash past us, heading toward the great white Ferris wheel of the Santa Monica pier. "We probably won't get there," she says, "but it's worth a try." As we stutter along, I gaze at the wheel's giant curves, the spokes, the dangling cars. It has one purpose: to lift us above the ocean and the hazy city. Without our awe, it's just a circle going nowhere, spinning and spinning against the sky. I don't want to be a sorry person. I don't want us to be sorry people, two hardy New England women, two good mothers, two faithful wives. But while Jen talks about having a plan for afterward, for when she is no longer making choices about this baby, and must start again to make choices for herself, all I can hear is the whir and whine of my own life since the disease has taken over. I hear my traitorous voice to her on the phone the other day, take it from the mother of a sick child—I said, and then I couldn't finish. My son makes a small needy noise. I grab his "milk" and lift it to his mouth. I know it is not what he wants, but I can offer nothing else. He drinks a tiny sip and then shoves the cup away, his blue eyes leaden. "No milk?" I hate my bruised and tentative tone. "No milk?" I hold the spout to his lips again. He whips his head away, raising the wand of his arm and whacking the lid. There are scars on his hands from the last blood-draw. I watch myself catch the cup before it spills. "He never drinks enough," I say to Jen, but she is calling after Liam, who has run in the path of the cyclists. He stops and stares back. He is the height of a fire hydrant and just as solid. I envy that she can provide him what mothers are supposed to provide—food, drink, sleep, love—and that is enough for him to grow and flourish. It is difficult to describe how deeply I envy this. I envy it with my arms and my breasts and the hole in my body where I grew my son. "It'd be nice to actually be by the water," Jen says. I nod. Isn't that what we wanted? A walk by the sea? I heft my son and she herds hers and we push the empty strollers into the sand. Their wheels sink into the soft white finery, sludging and grinding. I remember how my father taught me to put a board beneath a snow-stuck tire to stop it from digging itself deeper. He taught me and I must have forgot, because I know I've seen a hole grow, the tire whining, the air around it widening through the snow, then the earth, chucking up hunks of grass and black mud. The sand burns where it grazes the tops of my feet. I shove. Jen shoves. My son's small torso curls into me, rib to rib, his confiding hand on the back of my neck. Take it from the mother of a sick child, I said the other night and then I trailed off because the next words were ones I could not utter: You could save him from suffering. I believe she's making the right choice. I don't believe we can save anything from suffering. I want to tell her this, but instead I watch her body balk at making another step, and I can't go any further, either. Suddenly we're retreating in tandem, each of us dragging our stroller, clog and lurch, then finally rolling free. Back on the path, we stop again, hoisting our sons, setting them down. The shadows on her face have deepened their hold, and in each of them something impossibly small is moving. There is an ugly term for what my friend is about to do. In courts and legislative bodies, people are fighting over her right to make this decision. They are debating in the abstract about life and death, and the deepest questions of motherhood. I will never be able to think of the latter as abstractions again. Here is Jen, standing with her little keg of a belly, with her breasts that ache and mind that can't sleep, gripping the hand of her son so he won't run in the path of the cyclists. The waves crash behind her, out of sight. I hear them all the way back to the street, all the way to my child's crib that night, smashing to pieces under the soft treble of his breath. For days after, I hear the sea washing my ears. First I rub them to try to get it out, and then I just listen to its dark and immense power.
I'd Rather Die by Ice Than by Fireby Denise Emanuel Clemen Sarah fostered another unwed mother before me, and that girl left a box of things in the closet. There are letters, a diary, and a few pictures, and at night I sit on the foot of the bed underneath the ceiling light, and look through them. I sit and read, in my mint green nylon nightgown, while the sweat trickles down my back and drips from the round of my belly. The heat is intolerable at Sarah's house. It's humid here, with fields of corn and soybeans drinking up the rain and sweating it back into the long July days. The only air conditioning is in the living room. My room is upstairs, and it's sweltering. There's one window and a fan, but the fan doesn't do much because the ceiling is low and slanted. It holds the heat over my bed like a tent. I like Sarah and Bud and their kids, but it's lonesome here. Not like it might have been at a home for unwed mothers where I could have lain in the dark talking to the girls in the beds next to mine. Here all I have for company at night are the things in that box. I feel guilty looking through someone's private belongings, but I want to get to know this girl. She was older. It sounds as if before she got pregnant, she'd been to a couple of years of college at one of the big universities, like Iowa City or maybe Ames. In my book, she would have been old enough to keep her baby, but her boyfriend was black, and a mixed-race marriage wasn't much of a possibility in Iowa in 1970. Her boyfriend went off to Vietnam while she was expecting, which makes me think her situation was worse than mine. It was bad enough for her to have to give up her baby, but I wonder if her boyfriend came home safe. I can't help thinking of that anti-war song where the guy comes back in a box. The world is a terrible place. Boyfriends going off to war, babies and mothers split apart, couples unable to have their own babies, and me hustled off to the countryside to keep the shame of my predicament from ruining my family, while I worry that I'll go to hell anyway even if my secret stays kept. Lots of people I know have died in car accidents. They were burned in flaming wrecks, or broke their necks by rolling their cars over into ditches on an icy curve. If I had to choose, I know I'd rather die by ice than by fire and leave this world, as people in my town had said about Tom, without a mark on me. A girl's looks are an important thing—along with her reputation. A girl can become a secretary, or a nurse, or a teacher, but some fathers tell their daughters that college is a waste of time and money. "You'll just get married," they say, eyeing her prettiness, satisfied. But my father wants me to go to college. My father is gruff on the outside, but marshmallow sweet on the inside. He's been lending my boyfriend a car so he can come visit me, and now we're sitting in Sarah and Bud's driveway talking. It's past my due date, and I feel like the baby is pressing on my lungs from the inside, and that the air on the outside is just too thick to take in. There's lightning in the distance, and electricity under my skin, too. I feel mean and anxious, but still, I surprise myself when I punch him. It's a miscommunication. One tiny word is what sets me off. I think he says he can't believe he's the father. He claims he said he couldn't believe he was a father. There's a world of difference between those two little words, "a" and "the", and before I even think of asking any questions, my hand just closes up into a fist and aims itself at his face. I guess all those 'Friday Night at the Fights' boxing matches I watched on TV with my dad, while sitting on the big curved arm of his easy chair, filed themselves away somewhere in the back of my brain. I have no trouble at all figuring out what to do. I'm no Cassius Clay, and he dodges a little, but I hit him hard enough smack in the jaw to make my knuckles ache. He doesn't talk for a minute, so I have a chance to yell at him, "What do you mean you can't believe you're the father?" He tries to explain then, but I know what a smooth talker he is. All that smoothness, and the way his eyes glimmer when he smiles is what made me fall for him in the first place. I'm only seventeen, but I know when someone's lying to me. I'm sure he said what I thought he said. He's just like that, I tell myself. He's said a lot of things, and I doubt he's about to stop just because I'm pregnant with his baby. I'm wearing a hand-me-down maternity shirt that Sarah gave me. It's brown with white pin stripes, and it makes me look like a businessman with a paunch. I'm tired of feeling fat and swollen all the way to my ankles. I'm tired of wearing someone else's clothes. I'm tired of my boyfriend, but I tell him I think I might be having a contraction as I feel all the irritation in my being gather around my middle. We talk for a while about how this might be it, the baby might be coming, and I can feel myself forgiving him. But still we know he can't stay. It's ten or eleven at night, and he has to drive home whether the baby is coming or not. He'll call my mom tomorrow to find out what's going on, he says, and then we kiss. I get out of the car, and go in the back door. I pass through the kitchen and waddle into the living room where I can watch the taillights of his car glow down the long narrow driveway until he turns onto the gravel road. I'm alone at the window when Sarah comes into the living room to say goodnight, and I tell her that maybe I've had some contractions, but she doesn't seem worried. "Wake me if you need me," she says, "or if they get real regular." I know I won't be able to sleep, so I watch Johnny Carson, but nothing is funny or interesting. I just want to know if the pains I'm having are the real thing, and if my baby is a boy or a girl. I want to know how much giving birth will hurt, and if giving up the baby will hurt even more. I watch TV until it goes off the air, and then I just stay in Bud's big Naugahyde recliner listening to the TV play "The Star Spangled Banner" while I watch the lightning through the picture window. Just my damn luck to have this baby while the world is blowing down. I'm scared, but I time my contractions just like Sarah taught me. The next morning is so hot it shimmers and Sarah and I have given her kids breakfast and gotten the neighbor lady from down the road over to watch them. Now Sarah is driving me to the hospital. In town, large well-tended lawns surround big, old two-story houses or newer, tidy split-levels on shady streets. It's already humid and my clothes have been sticking to me since I dried off from my morning shower. By midday, everyone's scalp will have lost the perfume of Breck or Prell, and radiate pure sweat. For some reason, I want to look good when I get to the delivery room, or at least respectable, but I know I can give up on having my hair look decent until maybe sometime in September. At least the frosty pink polish on my fingernails is perfect. There are so many branches and big tree limbs in the streets on the way to the hospital that we have to keep taking detours. I think I'm going to be in real trouble if we get lost and can't get to the hospital in time. I imagine it all on the TV news. "A young mother gave birth today on a busy city street littered with tree limbs from last night's big storm!" Great, I think. I keep my pregnancy a secret from everyone and then I have the baby on television. Sarah looks over at me while she drives, and I worry that she can see me worrying. At least it wasn't a tornado, I think. Tornadoes have it in for my family. My dad lost one of his younger brothers during an awful one when he was a boy on his parents' farm down in southern Illinois. And another time when a tornado went through there, it blew down the county courthouse, and most of the records were destroyed including my dad's birth certificate, which is how he was able to shave a few years off his age. Disappearing birth certificates might be good in my case. My baby's birth certificate will say Baby Boy or Baby Girl MacDonald, which is my last name, not the name of the baby's father. My mother is worried that the birth will be published in the Stork Sightings column of the local newspaper in the city near where I'm hiding out. I am sixty miles from home, but still it's possible that someone from my hometown might read this paper since it's a big daily one, and the newspaper in my town only comes out once a week, and its staff actually calls people up looking for news. The hospital swears they don't release information about illegitimate births, but there aren't many MacDonalds around, thanks to my dad who, unlike any of his brothers, decided to use the Scottish spelling instead of the more common McDonald. If the hospital goofs up, and someone from my town sees our name in the paper, they just might put two and two together, my mother says. My abdomen is contracting under my seatbelt. My body's getting ready to reveal the baby I've been hiding, and I'm already fantasizing about finding my child someday. There'll be a trail of clues like in Nancy Drew mystery, I tell myself. I'll find this baby, and let him or her know there just wasn't any way to make things come out different. "Things get lost," he says, and I'm pretty sure I know what he means. My brain comes back to the present when Sarah parks the car. I can see the double glass doors of the hospital, and know that in a minute I'll be walking through them. Sarah takes my suitcase and we walk together across the parking lot. Admitting, the sign in the lobby says, which makes me think of how the truth is about to be unveiled. I follow Sarah in the direction of the arrow. We stand together at the desk, and after telling the person checking people in who I am and why I'm there, she leaves me. I'm not sure how long I've been at the hospital, but I've been lying alone in a little room with only a TV for company since morning. Though Sarah has called my mother, it's too risky to have her here. She could run into someone who knows her—a nurse, a patient, some distant relative. After a couple of hours, Sarah comes back to see how I'm doing, and has brought me a little white vase with artificial violets. "I can't do this," I tell her, and then I get out of bed, nauseated from the pain and vomit in the toilet while she stands in the doorway behind me. "We all feel that way," she says, and gives me a roll of Lifesavers from her purse. "They can't give you anything to eat or drink, but these will help you," she says. Sarah has to get back home then, and I glue my eyes to the TV, making myself watch it. Nurses come in every once in a while all day long, put their hands inside of me, hurting me. It's the only time I cry, and they offer no comfort, but speak to me in numbers that have no meaning. The minutes go by, and seem like days or hours depending on what my body is doing. I entertain a romantic notion that my boyfriend will appear in the doorway. I imagine he will tell me he loves me, and bring me real flowers the way my father did for my mother when I was born. I've seen my baby book with its padded pink cover in a dresser drawer in our attic, and a single red rose pressed between its pages. There are hands again, and one nurse says to the other, "Doctor O. has a dinner party to go to at 7:30." They ignore me for second, and then one nurse gives me a shot while the other takes something long and plastic out of a cellophane wrapper. It looks like an extra-large crochet hook. I feel a rush of wetness between my legs then, warm and urgent like floodwaters spilling over a riverbank. There's not much lying around or TV watching after that. The nurses shift me to a gurney, and time seems like it's got somewhere important to go, too. I'm surprised in the delivery room when I see the clock says 4:00. Sarah knew what she was talking about when she said that first babies just don't pop out that easily. She told me that a lot of babies are born after a storm. She said that a big storm like that just shakes things loose. This is what I'm thinking when I know the birth is almost over. I am terrified and miserable from all the pushing, and nurses and doctors telling me what to do. "Almost there," a nurse says and then suddenly the baby is out, and the doctor tells me that it's a healthy boy. For a moment, I'm relieved. Just a few nights ago, I dreamed I had twins. My mother is a twin, and I have a great aunt and uncle who are twins, and a set of twin cousins. I worried it would be even harder to give up a set of twins. Maybe I would keep the babies after all if there were two of them, I'd told myself after the dream. But this baby has come into the world alone, and now the relief disappears because I know what is expected of me. The delivery room is cold and bright, and I'm shaking. The baby is in the hands of one of the doctors. The doctor is young and cute, and I'm embarrassed to be so exposed. I watch as he hands the baby to the nurse. "Is this your first?" asks the young doctor, smiling. I don't know how to answer. He doesn't know what's going on, I think, as I hear the old doctor say to him in a low voice, "She's an unwed mother." The eyes of the doctors and the nurse flash at one another over their green surgical masks. Everyone is dressed in green, and the baby is covered in green blanket. I'm surprised by how much I want to hold him. He screams in tiny staccato bursts as they take him from the room. Now my body is burning, and I'm being stitched up. No one explained exactly how I would be cut, and I'm worried my body is maimed, disfigured, that something went terribly wrong with the delivery. I feel like I might be about to faint, though I'm not really in any pain. I wonder if they've given me some kind of shot like Novocain at the dentist. The room is emptying, someone is sliding me onto a gurney and I'm being wheeled out the door. The hallway has a shiny floor, and my eyes are closing. I wake up in a hospital bed and it takes my brain a few seconds to catch up with my body. There is a raw ache between my legs, and my breasts are tingling. My cotton underwear stuffed with a sanitary pad chafes against the fresh stubble of my shaved pubic hair. There's a lot I didn't know about having a baby. "You can't have any milk," she says, her voice full of reproach, as she plucks the red and white carton from my tray. "No milk for anyone in this ward." I have a vague understanding this has to do with not breastfeeding, but refusing to give someone milk is a serious affront in Iowa. To Iowans, a day without three glasses of milk means tooth decay and bones that can snap at the slightest provocation. The nurse's eyes settle on my chest and there's a prickly feeling in my breasts though I remember being given a shot to dry up my milk when I was barely awake this morning. But I know nothing about breastfeeding. For all I know, the mere sight of milk will cause my breasts to flow like faucets. The only other patient, a woman across the room, begins to sob after the nurse's words. I've heard her crying on and off throughout the night. The curtains are drawn around her bed, and I know from the whispers I heard while drifting off to sleep last evening that she's had a miscarriage. The crying woman and I both have lost our babies; only mine is alive, a couple of floors below in the nursery. "No sounds," he had said to me roughly. "I don't want to hear any sounds from you." The nurse had fastened my arms then, to straps at the sides of the delivery table. My breakfast still sits on its tray. The sun blazes through the window. Maybe it will ignite the blue and white miniature cardboard box of Rice Krispies nestled in the cafeteria bowl waiting for milk. I'm not hungry. My social worker, with his heavy black briefcase, is scheduled to arrive in an hour. He called to tell me he'll be bringing some preliminary papers for me to sign, so the baby can be released from the hospital into the custody of the state. The baby will then go home to a foster family, and within a few days, be placed with his permanent adoptive parents. The signing of the papers finalizing the adoption will occur in two weeks, but I know now that I will tell the social worker I won't be signing any papers until I have held my son. The days in the hospital move as slowly as the things that must be happening outside in the heat of these midsummer days. My bed is next to the window in my enormous room. There's one, or there might be two, other beds in the same row as mine, but there's no one in them. Across the room, there are still more empty beds, and on the second or third morning when I awake, the woman who had the miscarriage is gone. The curtain she'd kept closed is open, and now I'm alone in the ward for disappointed mothers. The nurses don't come by very often, and it seems the doctor has forgotten about me altogether. I get up occasionally and hobble to the bathroom in the corner at the end of my row beds. Sarah comes once to bring me a filmy powder-blue bed jacket that she wore in the hospital after her babies. I put it on over my hospital gown, especially glad to have it the day my boyfriend comes to visit. Mostly, I lie in my bed dozing and listening to the radio I can hear playing below my window. There's construction work going on outside and the music is always on loud, easy to hear over the steady growl of some piece of equipment. I've never in my life lain in bed without a book, but I read nothing during these days. I fill my time by picturing the nursery, and thinking how I'll take my dress from the wooden wardrobe against the far wall, put it on and go down there to look at my baby. The dress is one of my favorites, and will look great on me now that my stomach is almost flat again. I imagine how I'll brush out the tangled mess my long hair has become, and how none of the nurses will recognize me. I see myself standing in front of the nursery window. There are two or three rows of babies propped up at an angle. My baby is at the back, and while I stand at the glass, his eyes blink open and his gaze latches onto mine. I stand there for several minutes, then give him a wave, and walk back to the elevator. I think of doing this so many times that when I finally leave the hospital, wheeled to the curb in a wheelchair according to hospital rules, I'm unsure if I finally worked up the nerve to do it, or if it only happened in my mind. For the rest of July and on into August, until it's time to pack my belongings into my father's car for the drive to my new life at college, heat lightning flashes night after night in the restless sky. Love seems to me to be like the Iowa weather—stickiness and heat, and then thunderstorms washing it all away. But it's hail I crave this summer. A backyard piled high with ice so I can gather it up and hold it against my heart.
A Tale of Two BrothersBy Laura Shumaker It was an icy cold morning in our northern California town. I tapped lightly on my son, Andy's, door to wake him for an early morning flight back to the east coast, where he is a freshman in college. During his three week winter break, my husband and I were struck by how little time he needed to spend with us. Though he was perfectly pleasant, he was always in a hurry to be anywhere but home. "No," he sighed, "but he's thrown me a few lines." Paranoid that we had gone wrong somewhere along the way, we polled our friends in similar circumstances, and they assured us that his behavior was normal. When I drove Andy to the airport after winter break, he asked me if I had heard Matthew speak Spanish. Laura Shumaker(www.laurashumaker.com) is the mother of three boys, and the author of A Regular Guy: Growing Up With Autism. She lives in Lafayette, California. Arkansas TimeBy Kelsi Thomas My grandmother died this morning. My grandmother was a quilter and a florist, an ex-Sunday school teacher and member of the lady's guild, a bearer of three sons and a husband's temper, a gentle-voiced teller of stories and singer of hymns. My grandmother was also a racist, Jim Crow bred into her alongside a sweet drawl and a way with pie crust. She believed black people didn't have souls, like the beasts of the field. Still, she sang "Jesus loves the little children, red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight…" once when my sister and I were children, afraid during a late-night thunderstorm. I remember Grama's backyard lighting up in the humid Arkansas night, like a film negative through her lace curtains. She swayed at the edge of our bed, her sweet, drawling voice curving around those words like she meant them. But some people just love a tune and don't care a whit about the message. If she was one of those people, there was a time I didn't want to know. A time I didn't want to see any further into that hollow place than I had already, tunneled down through my father. Didn't want to see the ugly thing that emerged there from time to time. The thing that nearly spat through Grama's lips at the notion of my cousin having "yellow babies" when she married a Chinese man; the thing that twisted her nose like something stank when my sister announced an upcoming trip to Africa. And so I stopped going near her. I didn't go when I spent a week in the Ozarks. I didn't go when my uncle died. I didn't go when her emphysema got bad. I didn't go when she got pneumonia or when her bad heart put her in the hospital. I didn't go to a family reunion last July, organized with the concern she wouldn't make it through another year, because I knew if I heard the ugly thing speak through her lips I wouldn't be able to ignore it as the others do. I'd have stormed out, not without saying something first. Something like: I was ready for my Grama to die. Ready to see a long chapter end. A chapter where separate water fountains once stood, where signs differentiated between "black" lines and "white" ones. A chapter that held a long phone pole at the end of Grama's street, a siren on top of it that used to call anyone without white skin over to their side of the tracks at dusk. It had signaled generations back to rows of clapboard shanties I'd seen on the way to the rabbit hunting woods when I was ten. And I'd known, when I'd seen those dwellings, that I was looking at what the old timers called "Niggertown." I was ready to see my cousins, the two who married interracially, soap that foul word and its derivatives from yet-born children's mouths. I was ready for my Dad to be released from allegiance to the God of Oakville First Baptist Church. I had a feeling even Grama's deity, weary of His misrepresentation, might appear before her remaining sons with a message, "Let the old ways lay with thy mother!" Allowing the decorum of a proper mourning period, I envisioned my mom promptly making things right as the new family matriarch. With a little urging, maybe she'd start right away and help me round up the younger members of the family after the funeral. We could tear that old phone pole down, burn it and dance on its embers. We could ship pieces of it to the Smithsonian where they could sit alongside chunks of the Berlin Wall. We'd create a think tank for tolerance in Grama's name. There would be a PBS program, "How One Family Singularly Redeemed Jim Crow's Legacy", brought to you by the Nellie Watson Foundation. And Grama's life, never mind her death, would fit neatly into my agenda, tailored for the comprehension of her great grandchildren: The one she'd hardly known and the one she never would. I was barely out of bed this morning, my only raised girl set off to school, when the phone rang. "Nellie passed away," my mother said as quietly as a firefly's light dims. And there was something about the time, the fact that it wasn't mine but Grama's, that started to ruin the family remodeling I'd planned in the wake of her death. I started remembering things in her time not mine. First I recalled her laugh, understanding it had been around for eighty-six years. It was a boat of a laugh, Grama's, high up on either end and sunk down in the middle, usually ending with the name of whoever got it started. "Oh, Kelsi!" she would trail off with the "i" all breathy like a short "e," her left hand slapping her leg, her eyes watering, her chest rumbling with emphysema. Her laugh confounded me this morning and started smoothing over the tooth of my resentment, the same way her sugar used to take the bite out of iced tea. And I remembered more. I recalled how we taught her to say "butthead" in the early 80s, my dad, my sister, and me; how funny it sounded coming out of her lips all drawled out, "buuddhaaiiid." I remembered the feel of her hands, smooth like wrinkled pear skin, as they moved from my arm to the biscuits she made or the afghan she crocheted. I recollected the wedding quilt she'd spent months making for me; the unfailing chicken-scratched Christmas cards, sent even last year as macular degeneration was blinding her. I remembered the time Dad flew her out to California the week after a heart attack killed her youngest son. I sat beside her on the guest bed, holding her hand while she'd cried. And I recalled her reaction when I told her I'd had my first child. A baby I'd wanted and loved from the moment I'd felt her first kick. A beloved daughter whom, those who claimed to speak for God assured me, I could only love by letting go. My oldest girl. As the clock ticked on our hospital stay and the vow of open adoption was made, I finally believed she was too good for me—her too alone, too vulnerable, too unmarried mother. I was a young woman who desperately needed the support of my own mother, a mother who had long since been unavailable. I was a young woman who feared her own father, a man who kept a loaded pistol under the nightstand. A father who'd make sure no black man would get away with touching his daughter. It was Autumn when I told Grama. She was visiting California and I'd driven her to a church service, back when her God and mine could still squeeze into the same building. I told her despite my mother warning me against burdening Grama, insisting the news would affect her bad heart. I stood on a sidewalk outside of my church, twenty-five years old by then, feeling twelve, scanning her and wondering if the news would cause her to keel over clutching her chest. My absent child would have been approaching sixteen months old and still came to me, nightly, in my dreams. I still felt a tingling in my breasts when babies would cry in grocery stores. Still felt her, physically, the way an amputee feels a missing limb and reaches for it, surprised again to find it gone. I didn't know I was going to tell my Grama that morning, but as we walked to the parking lot after the service, it was as if my child began pressing out from inside of me demanding to be recognized. "I had a baby girl Grama!" I blurted as a gust of wind swirled red leaves around us. I searched her face for shock and saw none as we continued walking. Instead, something shifted behind her eyes. She looked the way she did when she was knitting; concentrating, her lips moving, counting to herself. I stopped and leaned against a concrete railing, patting it, encouraging her to come beside me as I continued speaking, figuring I'd just get it all out before she could tell me to stop. "It was over a year ago. Born on the first day of Spring. I had her with me for two days." I was facing my Grama now. She remained silent, but her head started to nod slowly. "Her father left when I told him, but Dad would've had a problem with him anyway," I paused. "There were … ethnic differences." I looked for something to register in my Grama, but she appeared only half there in front of me. It was as if she'd stationed a piece of herself at her eyes to hold the fort, so the rest of her could back away from what she was hearing. "It's okay," I tried to smile the way I'd learned to. The way I had to in order to keep myself convinced. "I found her a new father, a daddy who swore he'd always be there for her."
I thought I saw a softening in her eyes then, more moisture than her allergies put there, but maybe it was just because I'd referred to the Bible. Still, I figured I'd slip a little more in. "She had the most beautiful caramel colored skin," I told her, still able to feel the softness of it. "Her black hair had amber running through it, and there were the prettiest little ringlets I twisted my fingers through." I raised my head to look her straight in the eye, wanting her to finish drawing the conclusions I'd sketched out for her. But I don't think she did because I didn't use words she'd have been familiar with. "Mulatto." "Half-breed." Still when I finished Grama noted, without so much as a palpitation of her bad heart, what my family had collectively dusted under a rug. After working her bottom lip back and forth under her top one, the part of her that had been gone came back behind her eyes for an instant and looked at me before casting down at her dress. "Oh, hon," she said, straightening her hem and slowly shaking her head, "it must have killed you to let your baby go like that." I've barely seen Grama in sixteen years. I felt like it would be selling out to even once visit the place where that awful pole still stood. Like it would be a betrayal of my gone girl to stand in that dismantled siren's radius. But now I wonder what time will have to say on the matter. Would it have been possible to stand with a foot on each side of the Mason Dixon? To have bound together the split root that runs through this family's soul? Is it possible still? Sometimes I swear time would turn in on itself or shatter completely in attempting to answer. Why would it fare better than I have? Look at all of these years. Years! I figured this day's sorrow would at least be redeemed by the lapse of old Jim fucking Crow's grip, but there's nothing to say that he's shaken down from this family's tree. Death can breathe new life into the worst of things left behind, not just the best. It can cause us to scoop up old ways and spit shine them, run them up flagpoles, drag them into the next generation. I wonder who will do that now? Maybe one of my cousins. But all of this thinking is worldly tiresome, and my Grama was no longer of the world as of 10:05 Arkansas time. The divisions of this place, the ones that mark time or people, surely haven't followed her to where she has gone. And her death is so not about this singular thing she didn't know was between us. She may have lit near me some time today, maybe while I wrote that last paragraph, sorrowful upon realization of the holy cord she unwittingly helped cut. But then she surely moved on beyond me, beyond her still-living sons, on toward her husband and her youngest boy. Just now, my stoic sister called crying about Grama's passing. When she gave me the news this morning, my practical mother wept. My iron-forged father got sick to his stomach in Grama's hospital room yesterday because she was so emaciated. Her teeth out. Her memory trailing off to a factory from her youth where people made shoes. And I, the woman who could be a professional wailer, have not yet shed a tear. Not even when my mom told me this morning, her voice cracking, the very last thing Grama said to her. Emerging from her phantom shoe factory for a few lucid moments, Grama remembered this in the hours before her death: Her daughter-in-law, my mother, had been abandoned. When Mom was two years old, her father left without a trace. When she was five, Mom's young mother left her to be raised by maternal grandparents. "A breakdown," Mom had heard people whisper later, though we've never been certain. Being left that way had drawn a veil between my mother and anyone whom she later loved or might love, given the chance. And she always seemed like a bird that might fly away if I got too close. But, before dying this morning, Grama wriggled herself up under that old veil, touching the soft place in my mother. The place neither me nor my sister dared go for fear of scaring the bird in her off for good. "I love you like a daughter," Grama whispered to my mom, "and I'll just never understand how a mama could leave behind her own flesh and blood." I've been thinking too much since I got off the phone this morning. Linking events together that have nothing to do with each other, looking for patterns in what is probably randomness; looking for resolution where there is likely none. No longer sure where the sin began or ended, or even if it was sin. Looking for redemption when I'm no longer sure who needs it.
Unassistedby Sasha Hom I am sitting in a cafe in Davis, California. One of my babies sleeps beside me, the other is kicking soccer balls on a field on the other side of town. My husband is across the Pacific Ocean, following our dream of learning another land. We are a family with a blueprint for wandering inscribed on the soles of our feet. Languages are embedded there, waiting to be spoken. Sometimes the blueprint has created safe passage. Other times we have been tossed about, scraped raw by the sand. Twenty-nine years old, jobless, pregnant, sprawled across pillows on the floor of my midwife's houseboat, I felt it was important to tell my midwife about my dreams of flight, of soaring. I always landed, I told her. Sometimes with a thud, my limbs jerking as I awoke, or gracefully on two feet. Then I'd rise up, dragging my wings, and walk slowly into wakefulness. My soon to be husband and I looked around the room at six other pregnant couples sitting on a circle of cushions, taking turns asking questions and voicing fears, like rolling dice onto the middle of the floor. We were six, five, nine and a half months pregnant and counting. One woman on the verge of labor moaned softly. Someone's husband dreamt of the death of the family cat. A couple argued over the wife's sugar consumption, struggling to control the uncontrollable. She gave us a list of signs that would indicate I'd progressed and should give her a call. I didn't want her to leave. I was afraid. I didn't know what to do with my contractions and she told me how to let them take my body off the ground, then run with my breath and out my toes like water draining. I call it a possession akin to pain, but not quite pain. I didn't feel pain, I was pain, a sensation that kept me hungry for eyes. My husband's eyes were like birds; they were the only things offering air. I wasn't flying and I wasn't falling. I was expanding past the walls—a vast space filled with stars and the sound of water constantly running. This expansion was simultaneously constricting and my eyes would roll into the back of my head from the splitting while I gasped for air and roared like a bull. Dylan said I looked as if I were seeing spirits. Then my eyes would close and I'd fall into a deep sleep. These contractions came in sets, like waves, no longer than thirty seconds. A couple of short ones, then a lull that I'd sleep through while Dylan ran around trying to expedite the process of filling the birth tub. We were working so hard. It took so much effort for me not to explode, to find what I needed in his face, to allow my body to do what it needed to do, that there was no room for fear. In this stage of active labor, the concept of "pain" couldn't enter my consciousness because there was no room for consciousness. It was all being. On my knees in the water, I watched a gray object shoot out of me. It soared through the air with its arms spread out like a superhero and its back towards the star-less sky. My very first thought was, "flying squirrel." Like Rocky in Rocky and Bullwinkle she soared, then twisted underwater to face me. Without thinking, I scooped her up, water spilling out around her in drops and I put her purple body on my chest. My husband hung up on the assistant and climbed into the tub just as our daughter let out a cry like a call to arms. The midwife's assistant later told us that she ran with the phone in her hand to the midwife yelling "The baby's been born. The baby's been born." And they got into her car and sped through every red light, rolled through every stop sign, while calmly leaving messages on our answering machine instructing us to keep the baby warm, check the cord, and clear her passageways of mucous. We held each other in the tub, rose with her still attached to me, and climbed onto the bed, covering ourselves with blankets. The midwife arrived ten minutes later. Seven months pregnant herself, she ran down the driveway, leapt over our front neighbor's giant Mastiff, and entered our home incredulously, laughing and asking us why we hadn't called her directly. Our daughter Sora's birth was similar to Naima's—unassisted, beneath the water, at home. Except this time, I knew what to do with the pain. This time, it was an invitation rather than a possession. By the light of a single candle while my husband wept at the sight and every part of my body undulated, I felt God. I understood that to go with God, one must die many times. God is in the contractions, and I welcomed the pain of opening. I explained this to Dylan as I danced. The words were a bridge between my body and his. The pain was God, my mind was movement. I moved until God was the sun behind the clouds, and I felt the baby's presence. "It's okay," he said. "Your body knows what to do." I pushed the head to crowning, then peeled off my socks and climbed into the birth tub. I had to push some more, and that scared me too, so different than with Naima. I changed my position so that my back was to Dylan, and the baby swam out in his direction. Dylan passed her back to me and I scooped up her limp body, placid with faith in her mother, lids closed, without an independent life of her own. I was staring down at darkness. I bounced, coaxing life, rubbing the chest of death. We were not used to seeing a being so relaxed, and in that moment, where time does a funny thing, the cry of her voice was a miracle. The next morning, Naima woke up to find us collapsed in a heap on the floor. "Oh, my sister's here," she said sleepily, as if finding a new life in her living room were the most natural thing in the world.
"Unassisted" is an excerpt from an essay that appears in One Big Happy Family: 18 writers talk about polyamory, open adoption, mixed marriage, house husbandry, single motherhood, and other realities of truly modern love, Edited by Rebecca Walker (Riverhead Books, 2009).
The Loss of Meaningful Thingsby Allison Shores I find it when I am cleaning out my closet—the Noah's Ark mirror from Charlotte. I remember now. I hid it here a year-and-a-half ago. Away from Lia, so she couldn't throw it at the wall. Or at me. It was my favorite gift from the adoption shower. A baby-blue frame makes up the sky. The mirror, a circle centered in the rich blue, is the sun. Two giraffes, two elephants, two lions, in soft yellows and grays, stare out over the edge of the boat. The puffy cloud above says the storm has passed, the catastrophe averted. At the water's edge, a dove turns to play the music box: You Are My Sunshine. And I feel like yelling to Noah, presumably hanging out in the cabin behind the animals, "Heads up, Noah! What about us? We are up to our necks in muddy water!" When my daughter came into my life, she showed all my friends her new belongings. "Mi cama!" she pointed with glee to her bed. She pushed her toothbrush at people until they came up with a compliment, "Oh, what a pretty red it is!" Lia blushed with pride. Her toys, her clothes, even her soap, were all sources of unfamiliar ownership. This mirror was a favorite for her too. I showed her how to turn the dove, how to make the music play. She watched her own smile in the mirror as she listened. In those very early days, I'd hear the click-click-click of the dove winding up, then the gentle song ringing out from her room several times a day. I'd peek in to see her lying on her back in her bed, arms straight up, holding the mirror above her face. It was magic. I doubt she had ever seen a music box, or owned anything at all in Guatemala. Her reactions make me wonder what her life was like in her first three years, the years before me. You can conclude certain things from her behavior, the therapist says. When Lia steps out of the tub she cries desperately, "I'm cold, I'm cold! Mama! I'm cold!" This, despite the toasty warm temperature of the bathroom, the three towels, and my arms that surround her every time, without exception. When she is agitated, moving at full speed, crashing into walls, she cries, "I'm hungry! Mama, I'm hungry!" Even after a favorite meal of beans, rice, and avocados. I hold her hands and look into her eyes. "When you were really little, you must have been hungry a lot. It must have felt really scary," I explain, trying to create logic for this disordered, beautiful child. In the first few weeks after Lia came, she made pretend fires on the family room floor. Squatting, she stirred the contents of an invisible pot, and served me. She moved her clenched fist from a plastic bowl to her mouth and nodded. Eat, she gestured. Whenever she saw a police officer, she shouted "Policia!" She locked her arms in machine gun position and shook them while she clenched her teeth, "Chee, chee, chee, chee!" More than once, she tied up the baby doll with string, then sauntered across the room to apply pretend eye shadow with her finger tips and primp her hair. She ordered me to be the baby and to cry. Sometimes the police would come, sirens screeching from her mouth, taking away the mommy while she directed me, the baby, to scream. Now if I say "no," or "I can't," or "not now" her rage is so all-encompassing that she explodes into violence. "You're bad! I hate you! I hate you," Lia yells while she hits, kicks, and throws things. As her mother, I'm told, I am a trauma trigger. When Lia feels the combination of my love and my limits, the wiring in her brain spills directly into panic and then rage. The word "no" embodies the rejection of her entire being. I am told to stay calm and non-punitive, as Lia is trying to recreate the anger and abandonment she is familiar with. So I stand there, backed into a wall, intercepting her hands as they thrash at me, moving my feet as she stomps. "I can't let you hurt me," I say. I remind myself she is only six; she is dissociated; this is not personal. But with every swing I stop, every kick I avert, I feel I'm being maimed. One day, she was in her room for biting my knee, creating a purple circle in my flesh with her teeth. Why did she bite me? I don't remember now. Possibly, I told her she needed to wash her hands for dinner, or to put her toys away, or maybe that it was time to go to bed. I heard familiar thuds against the door—socks, shoes, markers being hurled in anger. It was when I heard a bigger crash that I came in. The mirror, glass and ceramic, was lying face down by the door, amazingly unbroken. Lia's eyes were wild with rage. So I took the mirror while she slept. She never asked me where it went. But something more happened, something I don't want to imagine. The images come anyway. I imagine the mami, and the one-room shack in which she lived with Lia. Lia, alert to every detail, lay swaddled in the corner, out of the way. I imagine men, rough, brutal men whom Lia's mami sold her body to. She was beaten, bloodied, screaming—a scene so terrible that the misogynistic Guatemalan police intervened. They took everyone involved. The mami, the men. But they left the baby, restrained in a wrap, screaming. Lia. I look into the mirror, the sun surrounded by warm blue sky, and water fills my eyes as I remember receiving this gift. And I remember giving it to Lia, watching her eyes glitter with pride and astonishment. When will I give it back to her? Maybe someday when the rages that bring her to violence stop. What if that day doesn't come? It is more than I can bring myself to imagine. I turn the dove three times and let go. It dives into the waves, then circles up to face the sun, then dives again. And I think, this song, tinkling like a lullaby, is a lie. The irony clobbers me like the fists of my daughter. There is no sunshine here. Then I swallow the self-pity in my throat because I love her, and maybe someday she'll know the words to this song. And, in my fantasy, she'll think of me. You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. You make me happy when skies are grey. You'll never know how much I love you. Please don't take my sunshine away.
Nannyby Andrea Askowitz When I was approaching 35, I decided to have a child on my own. I was single and also a lesbian. I thought that if I didn't act, I might lose the chance. I got myself inseminated and then one day I woke up fat and alone. Next I was alone with a newborn. My mom, who lived 3,000 miles away, came to help. She hired a cleaning lady. Deniz, a Turkish Muslim who barely spoke English, came over with a bucket and a mop. My mom hired her again. On her way out Deniz showed me a picture of a boy and a girl, which she carried on her keychain, and said, "I do babysit." I noticed she was young, somewhere in her thirties. She had long dark brown hair pulled back into a ponytail and a strong nose. She had deep-set, dark eyes. And she cleaned the house better than I'd ever seen it. I said, "Okay." She started the next Monday when my daughter Tashi was two weeks old. A few months later, when my mom left and I started working again, Deniz stayed all day. When Tashi was off the breast, Deniz rocked her to sleep better than I did. Deniz was calm around Tashi. I probably wasn't. I watched my married new-mom friends struggle and I learned in those first several months that in some ways a nanny is more important than a partner. I didn't have to trade favors to get time to myself, or to get groceries, or to get the house cleaned. And apart from me, Deniz was Tashi's constant. It didn't take long for both Tashi and me to love her and need her. When Deniz had been our nanny for about six months, I started dating someone and so I thought I should explain how Tashi came to be and why there was another woman waking up in bed with me. I wanted to tell Deniz that I was a lesbian from the beginning, but she didn't speak English, so we didn't really talk much. We mostly smiled at each other and if we talked at all, it was about poo poo or what Tashi was eating. And even with that I was never sure she understood me. Deniz loved to pretend she understood. Or maybe she hated to admit she didn't. So I learned to have her repeat my instructions. I'd say: "Please give her a bath and feed her 1/2 a banana. Now what did I say?" "Bath, 1/2 banana." She didn't seem to feel condescended to, but to make sure, I asked if she felt condescended to and then I explained: "Condescension is looking down on, not treating someone equally. It's not nice. I don't mean to do that. I'm just nervous about Tashi getting enough to eat. I'm just a neurotic mom. Neurotic, that's a condition that is typical of Jews and new moms." Deniz nodded. I sat down with Deniz on the couch and said, "I want you to know I'm a lesbian." I told her that I got pregnant with Tashi using an anonymous sperm donor. Deniz nodded. I got nervous and I think I overcompensated. I ran to my filing cabinet and pulled the folder of Tashi's donor. While Deniz held Tashi, I showed her our donor's medical history, questions answered in his handwriting, and a picture of him as a baby. I asked: "Do they have lesbians in Turkey?" As soon as I said that, I felt stupid. "Yes," she said. She laughed and looked at the file. She seemed totally cool with all of this. I felt like a freak. She said, "I already think before that you are a lesbian." "Can you wait until Monday?" "I want today. But I wait," she said. Deniz was on time Monday morning and punctuality was not one of her strengths. Her hair was down. I'd never seen her hair down. She had long, silky brown hair. Pretty. She had makeup on. I'd never seen her with makeup on: Black eyeliner heading toward her temples, and blue eye shadow above dark brown eyes. Not pretty. She wore a black tank top and black slacks, which were just a little too tight. She looked like a high school foreign exchange student who was trying to be popular. We sat down on the end of my bed. I asked, "Is everything okay?" "Yes." "What is it?" "I think I want love with woman." "Oh wow. That's cool. What about your husband?" "Love is cold. I want different. I want more." "Well wow, how will you meet anyone? There are lesbian bars and the Internet, but they're kind of intimidating. What will you do?" "I already meet someone." "Really? Who?" "You." There was a long, ungraceful moment. I looked into Deniz's eyes and then we both looked away. I looked down at her pants and thought about how uncomfortable they must feel in the crotch. She was holding Tashi, who started to grab at her nose, which made us both laugh a little. She said, "I think so." The rest of the day was awkward. I know Turks have a different sense of personal space, but I kept feeling Deniz standing too close. This gave me a whole new take on workplace harassment. But, slowly the awkwardness faded. Very slowly. A few months later she hugged me and laughed and said she was sorry. I hugged her and said it was okay and backed up as fast as I could. Deniz was with us for two years, until Tashi and I moved to a different city. She cried every day the last few weeks before we left. The crying was hard. I was also sad. Deniz took care of me, just as much as she took care of Tashi. I would hug her and laugh and then she would laugh too. On our last Saturday, she threw a goodbye party at her house and invited some of my friends and some of hers. She made way too much food: grape leaves and baklava and everything she'd taught me. She gave Tashi a giant stuffed dog to sleep with. She gave me a Turkish evil eye amulet to ward off bad energy at our new house. After dinner Deniz put Turkish music on and for the first time since I'd known her, she belly danced. We all stopped talking and watched from the dining room. She was wearing stretchy pants that hugged her ass and a tight button-down silky blouse that lifted when she lifted her arms. She wasn't wearing shoes. Deniz's hips moved hard and deliberately back and forth and her belly, soft from having two children, shook gently. It was late, but suddenly I was wide-awake. I felt something stir inside and my mouth watered. Then her whole body undulated, including her breasts, which pressed up and out of her low-cut shirt. I had never noticed her breasts before, but now I wanted to touch them. I got this scary sensation, like I couldn't breathe and then I started to feel my ears and face burn and I knew I was blushing like I always do when I think I've been caught. I said, "Wow, it's really hot in here."
Born of the Dragonby Sandra A. Miller I wanted to touch it the way mothers with grown children often ache to hold babies. A purple peace sign inked like a badge of hope on that tender spot between pelvis and belly, a place where passion easily ignites. The woman, who I hardly knew, lifted her tee-shirt higher, offering me a better view. My hand reached out, then pulled back. “Sure, touch it,” she invited. And as I drew my forefinger across the compelling flatness, I knew that I would have one. “But why?” my best friend asked. “Can’t you just frame a picture of a dragon and put it on your wall? Does it have to be etched on your body with needles?” When I grilled my doctor about the health implications of permanently injecting ink into the skin, he said, “Have you ever seen a tattoo on an old person? That might cure you of wanting one.” I imagined the cadavers of the future now that tattoos have gone mainstream. I pictured pre-med students decoding vertical rows of Chinese symbols inked on dead butts. Growing up, Joey, my hairdresser at the Golden Scissors Salon, was the one person I knew with a tattoo--a murky green anchor outlined in black on his forearm. With his shirtsleeves rolled up, I was riveted to the place that anchor lay buried in dark curling wisps of hair. It looked ugly and brave. “Did it hurt?” I remember asking. At Joey’s I got to drink Fanta from the bottle while my mother chain-smoked Tareytons in the parking garage. “No more than a hair cut,” he said, snipping the detested straight-across bangs that my mother had resolutely prescribed. When I was twelve, I came home from the Golden Scissors once and drew a Scorpio on my arm in black pen. I copied a picture from the World Book Encyclopedia, but after much tugging of resistant flesh, it looked more like a lopsided cup with arms. Still, I took to the park with the twin toddlers I babysat every Saturday afternoon. As I crossed the grass, I tried walking in that tired, casual way I noticed mothers walk. I hoped people would think I was a mother, too, that at twelve I’d gotten knocked up with twins. A tall order for a Catholic girl with straight-across bangs and a drawn-on Scorpio tattoo. For years, the Scorpio was my symbol, a power strangely bigger than me, but one that encompassed me, as well. It was my secret conviction, my anti-Christ. My answer to church, where every Sunday I sat stiff-backed on a wooden pew doing my best to look beatific with a dash of compunction. How politely I resented those imposed weekly visits to a house of worship where beliefs, like the cardboard-tasting host, were force-fed. In the fellowship of Scorpio there was no one to pray to and nothing to swallow. A birthdate between October 23 and November 21st was the only membership requirement. Still, it felt earned, important. And while it wasn’t quite enough to spiritually sustain me, it was all I had. For Mother’s Day this year I received a hand-painted mug that my kids made at Clay Dreams and a hundred dollar gift certificate for Ink Jam Tattoo. “That should get you a good-sized dragon,” my husband said. He knew I’d been considering one. “Will it hurt, Mommy?” my seven-year-old son asked, wide-eyed. He panicked at words like “splinter” and “bee sting.” Vaccines did him in “A little,” I answered. “Not much.” “So why are you doing it?” he asked. “I just like tattoos,” I lied. “And I really like dragons.” Later, I asked my husband if he honestly wanted me to get one. “Do you want to get one?” he responded. When I was turning 16, my mother asked how I wanted to celebrate my birthday. I wanted a party, but this was unimaginable at my staid house. My parents would never abide the hormonally-charged chaos that was the hallmark of such teenage events. Almost as much as I wanted my parents to stop hitting me, I wanted a basement room with a pool table and a lock on the door. Oh yes, and a boy to kiss on the other side. Instead, I asked to go out for Chinese food. My friend Karen’s parents were divorced, and every other Friday night she and her sister went to Peking Garden with their Dad and ordered the Pu Pu platter. I had never eaten Chinese food. My family had only gone out to dinner once together. It was the Saturday after my mother’s hysterectomy, and we got burgers at the East Side. So, instead of turning sixteen with rounds of spin-the-bottle, awkward kisses laced with blackberry brandy smuggled into the house in madras purses, I spent the evening with my parents in the Peking Garden. Dim lights. Red velvet curtains. The sweet scent of cooking grease thick in the air. The three of us shared the Pu Pu platter as an appetizer. My mother said it was too much for just me. It was like being given a bike for my birthday that would also belong to everyone else in the family. But what I really remember about that night was the white paper placemat with scalloped edges. In the center was a circle of twelve Chinese Astrology symbols with the relevant birth years and a few lines of description below each one. Across the top danced a red dragon with crazy black eyes. A single curl of fire blazed from his mouth. I skimmed a finger down the columns until it landed on 1964. When I stopped to read, it was like finding treasure I didn’t know I was looking for. Born of the Dragon, the most powerful and lucky of the twelve signs, you know exactly what you want and are determined to get it. Your natural charm and charisma will make you the center of attention. Just like that, I converted. Being a Scorpio may have spiritually buoyed me, but discovering I was a dragon, well, that was finding God. I carried the placemat home and tacked it to the corkboard in my room. Two years later, I took it down, smoothed out the curled edges, and brought it with me to college, my certificate of survival. I floated the idea of getting tattooed to a group of mothers on my suburban playground. Almost immediately a pant waist dropped, a clog was shaken off. Like a spring flower show, out came a rose in comic book red and a yellow daisy floating across a stretch-marked hip. There was a heart on a back and a dove in shades of gray soaring over the slope of a weary breast. “It killed,” the forty-ish mother of three admitted, prompting the exchange of tattoo war stories and why stories from the casual gathering of well-inked moms. Everyone had a reason for doing it. When the mother of three asked why I wanted a tattoo, I couldn’t tell her the story behind my decision. It’s a story I couldn’t tell my best friend when she asked why, either. I certainly couldn’t tell it to my children. I was nineteen when my father caught me with a boy in our vacation rental in New Jersey. He had woken at 2 am to take pain medication, and there I was on the orange shag carpet. Underwear was kicked down to my ankles. Strange hands groped my hips. Hollering at the boy to get the hell out would be the last words my father used around me for almost three weeks. When he did speak again, the two of us were suffering through breakfast. In that silence made louder by the crunch of chewing cereal, my father leaned across the table and said, “Your body is sacred. Don’t you ever let anyone touch it again.” “Does that mean you’ll stop hitting me?” I asked. Six months later, with hardly another hundred words between us, my father died. At his funeral on a December morning, this steely-eyed dragon wore her scales like armor. It would be years before I felt anything but relief at his death. Years before I understood that sacred meant my body was mine to love, despise, share, cherish, touch, pierce, abuse, esteem or even ink. Since I can’t draw, I designed my tattoo in my head. It would be an amalgam of the dragons I’ve collected since my 16th birthday. He is Futs Lung, a benign creature who guards the treasures of the underworld. He has four legs with five claws on each foot. In one of his hands he holds a single white pearl. He is lucky and invincible. Jim, the tattoo artist, told me to bring in pictures that he could customize, and I feigned relaxation when, the day before my appointment, the kids and I shuffled into his studio wedged between a health food store and a Chinese restaurant in a strip mall near my town center. I hadn’t seen the place before and was relieved by the cool sterility of the counters, oddly incongruous with the smattering of pre-fab tattoos known as flash papering every free inch of wall. It was like a biker bar run under the jurisdiction of Mass General Hospital. While my son oohed at the flash, my girl begged for a butterfly. I neatly placed my collection of dragon paraphernalia on the counter, as if setting out my kid’s lunch boxes the night before school. But halfway through my lengthy characterization of what exactly he should draw, Jim nodded coolly as if he got it. Tattoo parlors, I quickly learned, are not places for the fussy or the loquacious. The next day as I was waiting at home for my noon appointment, I suddenly felt the permanence of what I was about to do. It would be like the difference between wanting a kid and actually ditching the condom. I called my best friend and admitted to being scared, but not of the pain. (Funny how a couple of rounds of drug-free childbirth reframes the concept of what hurts.) “So why are you doing it?” she asked again. I still couldn’t tell her. Some things you can’t make clear, even to your best friend. How was she supposed to believe in the protective powers of dragons if she’d never had one? How was I to explain that when a parent steals your body and then comes hunting your self-worth, you take whatever safety you can find, even if it is mythical? And that you never forget what that protection meant, whether it was real or imagined. “Thanks,” I told her, “for asking the right question.” I went alone. Jim showed me the design he’d sketched. It was just right, but instead of saying so, I merely nodded. Then he nodded. After a pause he said, “No other colors?” “Just black.” Jim traced the picture in red onto wax paper and applied it as template to the chosen spot: just below the fleshy back curve of my hip. There it would be sacred, mine to hide or share. And I realized that if in years to come, I ever explained to my daughter what my tattoo meant, it would be enough to tell her that it’s a reminder—a reminder that my body is my own. Next, face down on a vinyl table, I thrilled to the buzz of the needle passing over my skin. When it grew sharp and irritating, I journeyed to the place my mind goes to escape pain. I became a dragon. I was red and green and the textured blue of the sea. I was the cold gray darkness of the underworld and the hot orange of fire. I was as completely untouchable as the black that seamlessly met the inky night sky, until I was the muted shades of dawn, the color of morning and blessed relief. Then for the briefest moment, one as easy to ignore as a needle’s faint buzz, I was again a sixteen-year-old girl who feared she’d been locked into her life. A girl whose fist had always been clenched in rage or terror. Now that fist was opening; and inside it, instead of a palm slapped empty, left wanting, lay a single white pearl of luck and invincibility.
Lice SeasonBy Andrea Jarrell The lice bring us together, my daughter and me. When I see the translucent eggs, I know I am a bad mother. "Lice season," says the school nurse. My daughter's hair, dark brown, shows them well. Holding each strand in the sunlight to examine, I take some enjoyment from touching her head, touching her again. Lately, she does not want me in the old "mother" way. Or perhaps that should be the young mother way when smooth-stone satisfaction came from feeding her, my breasts so full they ached, and the sweet relief as they were emptied. And when the rise and fall of a sleeping chest was checked every few moments as she lay beached between two pillows, a curving question mark. Traces remain. When my children have had meat and carrots and milk, I have that same satisfaction. And, who am I kidding, a sleeping eight year-old's breathing needs to be checked. But it must be done in secret. These days, as I pass her room, I enter among the book piles and drawings tentatively and ask the questions of a dullard. Behind her green, brown-flecked eyes, she is a deer, ears pricked at the edge of the woods. All I have is a human's freeze-tag stillness. She spots me from a mile away and bolts. For two years I have volunteered in her classroom, helping the kids write stories. Inevitably, one of my friends will say, "I bet she's proud of you." But my daughter does not praise me. I really have no idea what she thinks of me. Sometimes, as I'm about to leave for an appointment or a party, I ask her what she thinks of what I'm wearing. Let's call this fishing expedition what it is. I don't want her opinion. I want her to say what I used to say to my own mother—that she was beautiful and perfect. (Of course, later I found out my mother wasn't perfect, so maybe it's just as well my daughter seems to know this already.) Rather than a gushing compliment about my appearance, she gives me advice. She stands back for a better look, her arms across her chest, one hand holding her chin. After careful scrutiny she suggests different shoes (almost always the strappy sandals she loves) or perhaps my leopard belt or a scarf. Advice I never take. The lice die but the nits go on for weeks. The school nurse clears her, but I am more thorough. After school we sit by the sunniest window, I bend over her head picking, picking. "Sanchari says you're pretty," she offers. I have always been fond of this classmate, whose stories about a secret tree in her front yard and her mother's cooking whistle and tap with sound, but now I love her. That evening, my five year-old son has had his shower. He skitters from tub to hallway, a darting waterbug skimming the surface of the pond. My daughter seems to find herself between that freewheeling pond and expulsion from Eden. She skins off her clothes–jeans wadded and grungy, shirt tossed to the side–yet she covers herself carefully as she sidles to the shower. Afterward, she is clean and new, a towel turban on her head and a robe with ribbon at the neck. I trim her fingernails and toenails and tell her that her length once fit neatly into my lap. "It was easier when I could look down as if they were my own fingers and toes," I say. Now she sits on the toilet with me on the bathtub edge, and props her foot on my knee. I can't tell where her shell-thin nail ends and the toe begins. She shifts her legs to improve my hold, and I am stunned to see the beginnings of dark hair growing between her legs. "Sorry," she says covering herself not from embarrassment but to shield me as if I am the child. "I was surprised. That's all." "I saw it on your face," she says. "It's been like that for awhile." How long has it been since I've seen her body? I feel an urgency to tell my husband. Later, my daughter and I are standing at the bathroom mirror, as I dry her hair. The hairdryer blows loud and warm around us. I look down at the wide-open plains of her clean face, past her smooth chest and rounded belly. The hair below is no longer visible and I realize that I have seen her body all these days, yet from above. My vantage has been a blind curve. The lice live close to the scalp and lay their eggs near the root – hatching, growing, laying. I think of them as so many tiny mothers trying to keep their kin, their kind alive. I have my own system to root them out. Some use poison. Others drown them in hair conditioner. I cut the egg away completely. Strand by strand I sift through my daughter's hair. Using a tiny pair of scissors, I snip the strand and drop it into a Zip-lock bag. I hold the bag up to the light and we cannot help but be fascinated. We lean in together to peer at the sesame-seed-shaped egg, gray or pearl white. Sometimes the eggs are as empty as a lasso. Just the trace of the body that scampered away, crawled deep into my daughter's thick hair to make its way in its lice world, its hair and scalp world. But I will find it. I will root it out for my kin, my kind, my love, my daughter. Her hair is silky beneath my fingers as I work, but in several weeks when the lice are gone, the single hairs I snip now will sprout up rough and coarse. As one does a scab or scar, she will run her small–not so small anymore–hand over and over these slender shoots, absent-mindedly worrying them with her fingertips. I will look across the room and we will exchange a glance, remembering the time so recent but now long gone when we sat together each day, close again, touching again.
Searching for the Sweetby Sarah Werthan Buttenwieser Nestled in a valley, not far from the Connecticut River, not wholly removed from the sounds of traffic or airplanes, dark green leaves canopy bunches of tiny, crimson gems in the fields at our community-supported farm. The leaves and fuzzy brambly stalks are scratchy against my skin. My hands pore over and under the leaves now, no longer tentative. At first, the strawberry plants, with their prickly armor, intimidated me and I was cautious pulling berries from their tendrils. Comfort isn't instant. But after a few hours in the field, I've gotten used to the plants' intricacies. I'm no longer shy of their roughness, no longer afraid to get my hands dirty or scratched. I know I won't damage the plant when I pull at the berries. In the field, the air hovers closely: sometimes steamy and thick, so heavy it's almost opaque; sometimes both entirely palpable and like nothing on my skin. What makes the field magic is simply this: nothing separates me from the air. Plants, dirt, air. Me. The last time I worked in a big, food-producing garden was during my adolescence, in Vermont: tucked between hills, woods, ribbon of dirt road and reservoir. From that garden I could feel the air more precisely than ever before in my life. Carefully I noted the fanning of the squash leaves, the dry husks of flowers at snow peas' tips, the majestic bean circle and stately sunflowers, the soft carrot tops and the carrots' pale orange hue. Contemplating the garden made me appreciate the very act of growth, the very fact of life. The garden taught me the beauty of letting things unfurl. I was letting myself unfold at that point, preparing leave for college in a year's time, to grow up. I was scared and eager, thrilled and sad. The garden showed me seedling to harvest to turning back to earth, the lesson of seasons and cycles. Last week, a couple of hours before berry picking, we heard about a baby born in Florida the day before, a biracial girl whose birth mother did not want to raise her. The birth mother, living with the father of her five year-old-son, had kept this pregnancy hidden because this girl's birth father was a different, unnamed man. Unwilling to see or hold the baby, she did not even want to know the baby's gender. At first, the situation sounded simple: come get the baby tomorrow. Take her home. No visitations, no entanglements: the birth mother wanted no contact. On the other hand, our daughter would find very infertile soil if she wanted to dig into her biological roots. The birth mother's family had generations of bipolar disease, so there were gnarled roots beneath the surface. Now, all families have knotted roots when you start looking. Mine include depression, addiction, and generations of anorexia. Adoption transplants a child. While the choice to couple up with another person and eventually bear children is almost equally random, there's an illusion of more control in that we've chosen one another, family history be damned. Unlike nurturing a berry plant, rearing a child lasts longer than a single growing season. Hurried before heading to the farm with our youngest child on a steamy afternoon, my husband and I decided there was too much risk—the bipolar disease, the secrecy, the birth mother's understandably angry face floating on our computer screen, despite the fact that her smiling son, the baby's brother, looked adorable—with this newborn baby. Our family garden has three children growing in it already. At the farm, my son and his friends cavorted between the rows and knelt to eat berries. His cheeks turned rosy with berry juice and his hands were stained red. Exhausted, I sank down without regard to the plants' roughness—embracing the harshness accompanying these bright globes—and found comfort in the simplicity of place. Getting Thereby Cheryl Dumesnil Paso Doble Leaning against the tiled kitchen counter, surrounded by the thick jazz of Christmas party conversation punctuated with laughter, the reflection of a hundred tiny lights twinkling in the darkened window, I talk with a man I've just met, about my wife Tracie and my plans to get pregnant soon. He says, "I can see you're ready," as if the magnitude of longing inside me has telegraphed itself out. Maybe it has. "Okay, I know this sounds strange," I confess, "but I feel like I'm already pregnant, and we haven't even tried yet. Almost like I could get pregnant just thinking about it." The minute I release the words into the room, I want them back. Those are fate-tempting words. Those are the kind of words that return to haunt later. Say, eight months later, when I'm still not pregnant. And then this man's voice, all smoke and bass, confers: "Yes, because your soul is pregnant." I look closely at this oracle, this prophet: deep lines carved in the clay of his brown face, gray fuzz populating his temples, exhausted haze in his eyes. Under all that, I see a polished saxophone glinting in a midnight bar room. Though it feels transgressive, vaguely dangerous, I speak the truth again, fate be damned. My voice hushes, "That's it," I say. "Like a spirit is fluttering around me, everywhere I go, waiting to enter." "Then it will happen quickly," he nods, "You'll get pregnant right away." I want to believe him. Faith, fear. Faith, fear. They will rehearse their Paso Doble across my dance floor a million times in the coming months: believing that I will receive the gift of a child, then fearing that I won't; accepting that life happens exactly as it is supposed to, then trying desperately to control every outcome. Yes, my lifelong habit of attempting to control the future is about to do battle with my more recent practice of accepting whatever comes my way. The habit of control is more ingrained and therefore stronger, but surrendering into acceptance is the only thing that brings me peace. Signs Salmon swimming upstream through a river of procrastinating holiday shoppers, Tracie and I thread our way through the local mall's gadget shop. My imagination is pregnant with wondering about our baby-someday-to-be. In the mode of body purification, I choose not to try out the electric massaging chair—what would the current do to my insides? Instead I select a miniature stocking embroidered with a vibrant pine tree and place it in our shopping basket. This year, decorating the Christmas tree becomes an intentional ritual. Each ornament casts a spell, calling the baby toward us. We hang the tiny stocking for welcoming, then drop a quarter in it, for prosperity. An angel for protection. Wheat woven into a Celtic knot: fertility, abundance. Two gold doves for peace. A carved wood heart for love. We plug in the lights and curl up on the couch, breathing the sacred wish the tree has become. The air swells with all we want for ourselves, for this future child. Falling asleep, I try to see our child through the murky vision of my mind's eye. I see a silver fish circling an alpine lake's algae covered rocks, darting away when my touch ripples the surface. Red Blood Memory flirts with me: "You okay?" the nurse asked. Eyes squeezed shut, head turned away from the needle sucking blood out of a vein in my right arm, I muttered through pursed lips, "I'm just trying to remember to breathe." "Well don't stop breathing," she chuckled, "that'll slow your heart down, then your blood will pump even slower." In a sudden gasp, the balloons of my lungs expanded. Seconds later, air released with equal pressure. "Easy now," she whispered to me. "Sorry," I said, face clenched tight as a fist, "I hate needles." "That's okay," she said, pressing a cotton ball to the crook of my arm, "you're done now." Twenty-two years old, I had just survived the second blood test of my life. Now I remember neither how the needle pinched going in, nor how sweat pasted the exam table paper to my legs. I remember what I saw after the nurse left the room: two vials of blood resting on a metal tray. Two thoughts flooded in: "Oh, that's my blood." Then, "Oh, it's red." As if the blood pulled from my veins would be what? Swamp brown? Eight weeks ago, a distant cousin of those thoughts arrived when my period did, signaling the end of my first meticulously charted menstrual cycle. After filling in the final point on my fertility graph, I held it at arm's length. For each morning, a plot point indicating my basal body temperature. The line connecting the dots across the graph was shaped like a square root symbol, which means my body did exactly what it should. I stared at the chart in disbelief: "My body actually works the way it is supposed to? Really?" My blood is red? Really? In the contest between faith and fear, trusting in my fertility scored a point. Still, fear nags: Will I get pregnant? How long will it take? Can I carry a baby to term? Will I ever be a mom? Progesterone "Sperm's expensive," Dr. Grain says when I talk to her on the phone, "so I want to run some tests before you come in for your consultation with me, to make sure everything's working right." Though it took a while to find her—two days working the phone maze our HMO has constructed seemingly to protect doctors from their patients—I like this woman: practical, proactive, matter-of-fact. This time, motivation overrides my needle phobia. The next day, perched on the medical center lab's version of a bar stool, I lay my elbow on the white Formica counter and gladly roll up my sleeve for the phlebotomist's glinting needle tip. I even smile as the point breaks skin. Two weeks later, sitting in her cluttered corner office, Dr. Grain leans across her desk, opens a manila folder in front of Tracie and me, and reads us the blood test results. "Glucose, normal. TSH, normal. Rubella, immune. Hemaglobin, normal. Hemacrit, normal. Progesterone, 9.7." Here she pauses, tip of her ball point pen tapping the number. "Now this," she says, "this I'd like to see a little higher. Usually 10 or higher is normal for this point in your menstrual cycle, but 9.7 is close enough, so I'm not worried." I'm worried. I say, "Really? It's okay? Should I take supplements or something?" "No, it's fine," she says, unmoved by the concern staining my voice. So I make another go of it: "The first time my sister got pregnant, she had a miscarriage. Her doctor diagnosed her with low progesterone and gave her supplements. The next time she got pregnant, the baby was fine."
I nod my head. I worry. "If you have trouble after you get pregnant, we can talk about supplements," she concedes, as if that's supposed to soothe me. As if a first pregnancy is like a first batch of cookies—burn them and it's no big deal, you've got plenty more dough in the bowl. "May I get a lab order from you, so I can test my progesterone once I get pregnant?" Dr. Grain holds eye contact with me for a long second, her facial expression offering nothing. She's not impressed by my persistence, but I'm proud of myself. I'm getting the hang of this HMO thing—find the back door and sneak through it, demand what you want until you get it. "Okay," she says, pulling a lab requisition off a tray on her desk, ticking the box next to progesterone, and sliding my golden ticket toward me. Back at home, I search my fertility books for information on progesterone. From a local midwifery group, I order a small brown glass bottle of progesterone drops, then I wonder which is worse, dispensing four drops of the alcohol-preserved solution under my tongue twice a day, or trusting my 9.7? Fear or faith? Faith or fear? Outside the living room window, a squirrel dashes across the street with a peanut in its mouth. Rain overruns the leaf-full gutters of the neighbor's house. Weeks past Halloween, a whole pumpkin glows orange on her gray porch. I notice none of this. I've fallen headlong into my research. Sitting on our green canvas couch, I have three books and two pamphlets folded open on the cushions beside me: Taking Charge of your Fertility, The Essential Guide to Pregnancy for Lesbians, The Ultimate Guide to Pregnancy for Lesbians, "Your Ovulation Cycle," and the instruction manual from the ovulation predictor monitor I borrowed from my sister. This could be a scene from my college days, synthesizing information from several sources to support my hypothesis. Back then the topic would have been feminist subtext in Emily Dickinson's poetry. Now it's all about baby. The texts conflict, each staking out different routes to a town called pregnancy. In the spiral notebook I'm balancing on my bent knee, I jot notes. On the coffee table, I spread out my three fertility graphs marked with lines, dots, initials, and cryptic notes scratched in pencil charting the ups and downs of my basal body temperature, the changes in my bodily fluids, the rise and then fall of my hormone levels. I stare at the graphs the way I used to stare at the globe in my preschool classroom, as if by looking closely enough at the pinpoint marked San Francisco, I could actually see my street, my house, a microscopic version of my family moving through their daily routines. Encoded somewhere in these charts is the key to the door marked parenthood. I can see her in there, that baby. Now how to get her out. The puzzle teases my brain even in sleep, where I dream of receiving a science kit in the mail. The box is labeled Baby. Inside: a rolled up pair of socks, a tube of toothpaste, three automotive looking parts I cannot identify. There are no instructions. Awake, the problem becomes mathematical: If sperm leaves the syringe at seven a.m., traveling an inch an hour, and an egg leaves the ovary at twelve p.m., traveling an inch a day, will they meet before they die? Math. I remember a poster that hung on the bulletin board in my Algebra 2 class junior year in high school. It answered the question "When will I ever use this?" with a list of everyday scenarios that require algebra. Somehow "determining optimum schedule for insemination" didn't make the list. Along with that image from the past arrives the voice of Mrs. August, my Algebra 2 teacher, whispering, "Identify the variables." Mrs. August, who announced her accidental but welcome pregnancy in class one day, as she tore open a sleeve of Saltines and proceeded to litter the classroom floor with their crumbs for the next two months. "Okay," I say out loud, "the variables." I isolate them: the release of egg from ovary, the travel time of sperm, the shelf-life of a post-ovulation egg, frozen sperm's post-thaw life expectancy. Apparently, getting one half of our future kid's genetics to meet up with the other half is not as easy as it seems. On the one hand, each vial we use contains up to 64,000 live sperm. We need only one. On the other hand, the odds of getting pregnant using our chosen method—inseminating at home, using frozen sperm injected via a needleless syringe—are five to fifteen percent, depending on who I ask. I study harder.
LalaBy Gabrielle Selz The last time my son Theo saw his Lala he was nine years old. Lala was the name my mother had chosen for Theo, her only grandchild, to call her because she felt that Grandma sounded too old. She was 72 when he was born. Back then she still dyed her hair a brownish red and liked to borrow my clothes. She favored my wild prints, flowered skirts, and long sweaters. My narrow-legged jeans though, were impossible for her to pull over her wide hips. Before Theo was born, we discussed the name. She said she liked the musical sound of Lala; we all did. Even my ex-husband, who was not an ex at the time, but who was still a little surprised that I was so accommodating to anyone who did not want to be called Grandma, liked Lala’s name. To me the name had a nursery room sweetness. A name that called to my mind baby talk itself, or what is referred to as Babyease—like Chinese or Japanese—a language all its own. Lala had been her nickname, the term of endearment that I remember my father calling her, back when they were both young, swirling around in party clothes, part of the glamorous New York City art scene. Right from the start my mother and my son were close. In retrospect, I realize that the very early stages of her Alzheimer’s dementia allowed her to meet him on some young, sweet, carefree plain. When he was a toddler they ran through the house pretending to be rocket ships. With him, she was unaware that she’d forgotten things. They liked to sit on the couch and watch Rug Rats together. She told him stories and in an imaginary world, it didn’t matter what was right or wrong. Watching the two of them I don’t remember feeling like one of the sandwich generation, squeezed between the old and the young. I felt like the stitching, a thread binding two pieces of cloth together to form something whole. Startled, I turned and spotted her seated at a table. "Lala." Theo ran towards her. "What are you doing here, Mom?" I asked. "There you are." My mother wrapped her arms around my son. "I thought I’d lost you." She’d come all this way looking for him. She awoke that morning, sure he should be in her house, but then unable to find him, she’d driven down the two hours from Hartford, Connecticut, following the route that led to my door and searching at rest stops and gas stations along routes 91 and 95 for Theo. My phone call to remind her that morning must have slipped right through her mind like thread through open fingers. "What’s wrong with my Lala," Theo had asked. Though flattered that she’d come all this way searching for him, he knew enough to be alarmed. I didn’t know what was wrong with Lala and so I couldn’t answer. Slowly, his discomfort with her grew. Back at her house she tried to serve him coffee and feed him her Detrol—the medicine she took for her overactive bladder. He was patient. He loved her after all. He explained that little boys didn’t drink coffee or need those kinds of pills. She looked at him with a mixture of bafflement and pride. "How smart you are," she said. Which was so clever, wasn’t it? It made us almost forget she didn’t really know what she was doing. A year passed, and just as rapidly as Theo grew, my mother’s disease progressed. The midway point between senility and childhood, where they had once met and played, vanished. During that time she lived in an Alzheimer’s assisted living facility until a bout with pneumonia landed her in the hospital and then into a nursing home. Before long, I knew I would have to move her closer to me, into a home better suited to care for her escalating needs. Theo and I drove up to Connecticut, first to collect her belongings at the old facility, then to visit her in the new one. "Are you done yet? Are you done yet?" Theo asked, not looking up, but hammering away at his game. He wanted to go the hotel. To sit up on the big king size bed I’d promised him as a reward for his patience. Mostly he wanted online access for his computer and to order movies and bad pizza from room service. "She loves musicals." The aide who was serving juice told us. "Don’t you sweetheart?" As she handed my mother a Dixie cup of apple juice. Which was funny because my mother always hated musicals. She used to send my sister and me off to see the latest shows on Broadway alone. I suspect we were the only ten and eleven year-olds allowed to see "Hair" by ourselves in 1968. Imagine a time, so close behind us, when two children were admitted into the theater to see naked people on stage. We sat in the balcony, far above the stage, and had to look hard through my Grandmother’s opera glasses to see anything. From her armchair, my mother beamed up at us. She gazed at Theo, such light coming out of her eyes it looked like a lamp was glowing deep within her, a look I can only call adoration. "Who am I in love with? Guess who?" She said in a gravelly voice. "Hi Lala," he said, ducking is head towards her and she held his brow between her long hands and said, "Who? Who?" Only this time it sounded like an owl, like a call in the night. Theo and I sat down beside her on little stools, one on either side of her big chair, and held hands across her lap. With his other hand Theo kept punching at the keys of his Gameboy. My mother’s hair was cut short and she kept pushing the ends behind her ears in the awkward, embarrassed way that schoolgirls do. He shook his head and said, "Mom, how long do we have to stay here?" "Clang, clang, clang went the trolley . . . " Judy Garland sang out in her brassy voice and my mother clapped her hands. "The movie’s not over yet." "Mom." We walked my mother back to her room when it was over. A woman, surprisingly agile, came trotting over to us cooing, reaching out her hands towards my son as if he were a pet she wanted to stroke. He ducked behind me. Then, my mother, sensing his distress, threw her arms open wide as if to protect him. Theo tugged at my hand, "I want to go now." As we left the locked ward, I had to punch in a code—it is not surprising to me that I never once forgot a code because I too wanted to escape—this facilities code was the month followed by the year like the expiration date on a credit card. Theo looked back over his shoulder. Up and down the corridor, lining the hallway, patients were leaning in their doorframes, slumped against the walls or propped-up in wheel chairs with pillows supporting them, but all staring after us. "Mom," my son said quietly, "They all think I belong to them." Which isn’t such a bad thing unless you’re nine years old. I wanted to say something meaningful like we all belong to each other, but the fact was, those faces full of longing gazing after us made me feel uneasy too. It’s been two years since Theo saw his grandmother, my mother, his Lala. After that last visit, he told me, "I want to remember Lala the way she was." Who can blame him? I realized then that I had been so intent on keeping the fabric of our family from ripping, I had ignored my son’s need, the very real need of a boy, not to look too deeply into the cave of her illness. Still, whenever I come back from my visits to my mother, Theo never fails to ask the same questions. "Is she still sick? Will she get better? Does she remember me?" "Yes, No and Yes." I say. Last week Theo turned eleven. We had gone to dinner with his father, and were sitting downstairs together on the couch waiting for the latest segment of American Idol to begin. I could tell Theo was a little annoyed. He’d been explaining to me why he wanted green eyes like his father’s and not brown like mine. Earlier that day someone had told him that he looked like me, which he took to mean he looked like a girl. At the time, I took it to mean that too, but it was about that other inheritance. "Remember when Lala went loco?" he asked. I rolled my eyes. He said, "Are you going to get it.?" "I don’t know?" "Am I?" "Probably not, boys don’t get it as much." Which is true, though nobody is sure just why. Then Theo asked quietly. "If you had only five minutes left to live what would you do?" I was surprised at how easily the answer came to me. "I’d look at you. Your face would be the last thing I would want to see." Those two freckles, on his otherwise cream white face, marking the sides of his mouth like dimples. Gabrielle Selz is a freelance writer who lives on Long Island with her brilliant and incorrigible son, Theo, and their feisty little dog, Rufi. Her essays have appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, Newsday and MORE Magazine and online at ducts.org, among others. She is presently completing a memoir that chronicles her journey as she slowly lost her mother to Alzheimer’s dementia.
Seeing in the Darkby Kathy Briccetti I. Urgency When the time came, and she had left boyfriends and a fiancé behind, she found herself in love with another woman. The two filled their dogs' Christmas stockings with biscuits and chew toys every year. For the woman who had always wanted children, this wasn't enough. She negotiated with the woman she loved. "I'll give up the wedding for you," she had dreamed about silver boxes the size soup tureens come in, "but I won't give up the babies." II. Heat V. Moonrise Maroonedby Erika Trafton The sunny day lured us to the park. I'd just picked my son Julian up from preschool. Parents sat on benches circling the play structure. They looked bored. I cried silently behind black sunglasses, my brain under siege, again. Meanwhile, an aging Asian nanny read a dog-eared paperback. A dad in his office clothes draped his lanky body proprietarily across an entire bench and furiously sent text messages. Two women, noteworthy for their footwear (one in knee-high black leather boots, the other in designer flip-flops that showed off a recent pedicure) chatted loudly enough for all of us to hear over the voices of shrieking children. They leaned against the play structure a few feet from me, as if to appear engaged with their kids. "That team of housekeepers you recommended is faaabulous–their attention to detail is amaaaazing." "Aren't they lifesavers?" "Yeah, except our nanny said they’re not very nice. They don't say 'please' and 'thank you.'" The friend shrugged. Apparently her nanny didn't have such stringent etiquette requirements. "I'm just glad we have Fridays to spend with our little ones." "Absolutely–without the nannies' day off we’d never get this quality time." The women seemed unaware that one of their little girls had just stolen another child's sand pail and flung it down the slide. My phone rang. My phone never rings. I only use it for emergencies. "So what's going on?" "I’m really depressed and anxious and I want to kill myself." I began to sob. "Where are you?" "The park." Her voice had an enforced calm about it. I was glad. "Should you be driving? Your voice sounds a little slurred." "It does? I took some Klonopin. I don't know, I don't know, I don't know if I should be driving. But I'm only a few blocks from home." "OK, you are going to drive home and then you are going to call Steve and tell him to come home immediately to take care of Julian, and then you are going to do whatever you need to do to stay safe." Silence. Crying. "Erika, do you need to go to the hospital?" I might need to go to the hospital. "I don't want to go to the hospital!" I was pacing now, circling the children, keeping an eye on my own, noticing nothing but his tow-headed form, working busily in the sandbox. I could feel a panic attack coming on. I no longer saw the man who was texting or the nanny who was reading or the overprivileged women with their legions of help. I was thinking about how I went to the hospital once, before my son was born, and how it felt like prison. "I know you don’t want to go to the hospital. But I’m asking: do you need to go?" More crying. "I don't know." "OK. Can you do what I asked you to do?" "Yes." "If you feel worse tonight, call a crisis worker." "But they won't know me, they won’t know I'm a responsible person, and they'll throw me in the hospital against my will!" My therapist's voice remained calm. "I'll put a note in the computer and explain the situation…OK?" I couldn't talk. All I knew was that I didn't want her to hang up on me. I needed the sound of her voice. But she had other patients. She couldn't stay on the line while I paced for another hour. Suddenly I became aware that I was audibly crying. It hadn't occurred to me that anyone might be observing this meltdown. "OK. Thanks." I collapsed on my bench and looked around. Kids played, adults chatted or messed with their phones. Dappled sunlight played across the sandbox where Julian narrated his tractor action. A pair of grandparents pushed their granddaughter in a swing. And the two women with the shoes recoiled from me in horror as I dried my face with my shirt. Clearly they had overheard my conversation. Only a fragile membrane separates life and death and I had my hands and mouth pressed up against it. I need a seeing eye dog. To guide me through the mood swings. To offer a handle I can grip, guidance I can yield to. A reassuring nuzzle, a friend I need not find words for. Most of all, eyes to see the future when I cannot. I am bipolar. It runs in my family. After years of research and the support of two therapists, one psychiatrist, and my OB/GYN, I went off almost all my meds and had a child. During that time, some professionals and family members treated me in ways they never would have treated a deaf, blind, or diabetic woman who had conceived. They believed I had no right to be a mother, despite the fact that I was responsibly managing my illness and always reached out for help when I needed it. Fighting the stigma was draining. No wonder I had learned to "pass," or pretend everything was all right. By age eighteen I was class valedictorian and state tennis champion. By age twenty I was living alone in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where I attended two colleges and worked two jobs. By age twenty-six I'd taught countless college prep classes, scoring well with students for my "cheerfulness." By age twenty-eight I'd spent two years circling the globe and married a computer programmer. By age thirty I'd written a book about my travels and published several excerpts. Then there's the other story: By age eight I'd had my first psychotic experiences (I told no one; no one ever noticed). By fourteen I had my first major depression. By fifteen I had an eating disorder. By sixteen I was manic. By twenty-five I was diagnosed bipolar. By thirty-two I'd been hospitalized. By thirty-three I'd endured an extremely difficult pregnancy, a horrific birth, and postpartum psychosis. All the while, I’d tried countless medications—mostly ineffective, nearly all causing serious side effects like dementia, suicidality, and–this one’s great—a potentially fatal rash on my face. For years before Julian's birth, I’d wondered how I would explain my illness to him. Luckily, I had a role model in an aunt with lupus who’d handled her illness with grace. She and her son had had an enviable bond. She showed me we all have limitations, and our children will not punish us for them, but rather learn from them. That morning simple tasks felt impossible. Like getting my son’s lunch together. Making sure he had extra clothes. Putting sunblock on his face. Feeding him breakfast. I tried to keep it together. "You have sad eyes again, Mommy?" asked Julian. "Yes, I'm afraid so." "I want to give you a hug and a kiss, Mommy." His voice was insistent. He was two years old and he was going to fix this problem. He is not an affectionate child—I have to take it when I can get it. So I pulled the car over and crawled into the backseat. We hugged and kissed through my tears and he said, "You are so happy now?!", a question as much as an exclamation. I could feel my heart cracking. I loved him so much and I wanted to protect him from everything. But I couldn't. As the traffic rushed past us, I said, "You know Mommy is sick and that sickness makes her sad sometimes?" "Like when Daddy was sick in bed?" His dad had recently gone through a bout of hepatitis. "Yes, kind of like Daddy." I stroked his hair. "And you know I love you so so much!" This same little person who threw tantrums in parking lots and screamed, "Don't look at me!" on nearly a daily basis, this same little person was trying to understand the incomprehensible and to help in the best way he knew how. Obviously, Julian could not cure me. After I dropped him off at preschool, I spent the rest of the morning pacing the house, debating whether or not to overdose on my meds. I was agitated, I was suicidal, I was desperate. I have to kill myself, I can't kill myself played in a rapid, endless loop in my head. Yet I continued to play the proper mother, taking him to the park after preschool and packing a snack. I survived that dark patch. Even without a seeing eye dog. I did as my therapist instructed: I called my husband to come home to watch Julian, I called supportive people, I distracted myself with TV and DVD’s. I also debated whether to give Steve control of my meds, but decided not to, opting instead to increase my antipsychotic dose in order to slow the self-destructive thoughts and agitation (I was a pro at tinkering with my meds after so many years). When I could, I slept–my sole relief. I struggled to survive each second. In short, I hung on by my fingernails for a few days until the suicidal urges began to recede. Unfortunately, it was not the last time I'd find myself marooned on my own bipolar island. I'll admit the repetition wears me down. But Julian keeps me from giving up. He did not choose a mentally ill mommy; I owe it to him to stay alive. I can only hope that someday he'll be proud of how hard I always fight to swim back to him.
Surfacingby Karen Barnett My second child arrived amid disaster. Not my own disaster in any personal sense; I am not among the hundreds of thousands whose lives are ruined. But two catastrophes usher him into my life, their presence a dark backdrop to his arrival. The day I find out I am pregnant, a Tsunami devours entire islands in Indonesia and Thailand, drowning an unimaginable number of people and rendering inconsequential the shock I feel at my own unexpected circumstances. Almost nine months later, just as I feel the first rhythmic cramps that will bring his birth, a hurricane strikes. The extent of its aftermath slowly becomes evident during our first evening together. As I hold my puffy-faced baby in a clean, bright room, I imagine a woman in New Orleans giving birth in a flooded hospital, or on a crowded stadium floor. Perhaps the pairing of these two cataclysmic events with such pivotal moments in my life causes the sense of foreboding I carry home from the hospital, along with my second child. Or maybe the foreboding comes from exhaustion. My newborn is not one of those mythical creatures that sleep five-hour stretches from day one. Still, theoretically I could get snatches of rest between wakings, or nurse mostly in my sleep. It's just that sleep no longer comes. I stumble through the grey weeks, play with my daughter, feed the baby, buy groceries. At the end of a day I cannot remember how I accomplished any of these things. When I finally close my eyes at night, all I see are waves. During these endless first few months, my husband, Andy, and I develop a nightly ritual. After my daughter is finally in bed for the night, we collapse on the couch to watch part of a movie, while I nurse baby Solomon to sleep and carry him up to our bed. One evening, in the midst of the never-ending rain, I wrap little arms tight to their sides, while Andy picks An Inconvenient Truth from the top of our pile. Our customary 20-minute installment stretches until the credits end and we continue to stare at the screen. That night, Solomon is restless and unsettled, placated only by my breast. I lie motionless, my body cramped uncomfortably around his, visions of smashing polar ice caps and submerging cities flowing through my mind. Despite the tenuous link between global warming and my own strange post-Katrina/tsunami anxiety, I feel oddly justified. My fears now have a name, a basis in reality. The next day, aching with exhaustion, I resolve to do something. I will not sit idly by during a moment of planetary emergency. I will not sink into inaction with the future of the human race, the future of my children, at stake. I drop my daughter at preschool and try desperately to get Solomon to sleep so I can concentrate. He refuses to be settled, so I hold him in one aching arm and scour the Internet while bouncing on an exercise ball. I buy carbon credits for our cars, the miles we flew last year, the output of my electrical appliances. Only when I realize I have driven my checking account into overdraft do I stop. I feel good, buoyed up, I am taking action. Over the next weeks and months I replace our light bulbs, turn the thermostat down, and make everyone wear slippers. I leave the car in the garage and walk everywhere I can, one baby in the sling, the other in the stroller, cloth bags hanging precariously from the handles. I sign petitions, send letters to Congress, forward email campaigns. I wash plastic snack bags and hang them from cabinet doors to dry. I cancel our diaper service, and soak them myself, replacing disposable wipes with squares of cotton. I soon reach a point where I can think of nothing else to do. The momentary elation of these tiny actions quickly grows thin. I berate myself for not being strong enough, good enough, brilliant enough to come up with some way to be more proactive. Should I stand on a street corner holding a sign, or volunteer to go door to door? I search for jobs in environmental organizations, even though I cannot yet imagine returning to work, but find none looking for a lawyer with no environmental experience, (other than Internet carbon off-setting). My preoccupation grows hand in hand with my mounting sleep debt. I squander the little time I have sitting at the computer reading of multiplying disasters: receding glaciers, dwindling forests, rising sea levels, peak oil, ecosystem collapse. By some accounts the disaster will strike in 20 years, some say in as few as 10. My entire life trajectory suddenly makes little sense. Sometimes the weight of it presses physically onto my chest. I feel as though I am suffocating. My eerily green-glowing light bulbs and carbon credits are meaningless, empty gestures, tiny exhalations in a mounting windstorm. At night I finally sink into sleep, then wake suddenly, gasping to get my head above water. It seems I am not the only one struck with worry. All around me, other parents swap the latest calamitous news over the din of playground noise. My inbox is inundated with snippets from articles, lectures and magazines, ranging in tone from the cheerily optimistic (let's all buy organic cashmere and save the planet) to the morbidly pessimistic (we have eight years left until the end of oil and collapse of suburbia). Dinner conversation with friends veers frequently to the post-apocalyptic. Survival plans for various disaster scenarios are hashed out over glasses of wine, sometimes with fatalistic jest, sometimes followed by sharp silence. Like other couples we know, Andy and I hammer out our own short-term emergency strategies. We discuss meeting places, contact points, routes of escape. Having mocked survivalists for years, I feel slightly silly as I fill our garage with five-gallon jugs of water, cans of food, medical supplies and duct tape. Andy, a vegetarian who leaves me to usher spiders from the house and set bait in mousetraps, suddenly talks of buying a shotgun. He wants to learn to shoot, to hunt food if necessary and defend our family if law and order break down. At first I laugh him off, then argue vehemently. Slowly, over the course of months of these conversations, the Katrina footage never fading from my mind, I begin to wish he'd just go and buy one and lock it up in the house without my knowledge. As lost as I am in my new baby fog, it seems this is the year that climate change becomes a household issue. Disaster preparedness pamphlets pop up in preschools, grocery stores, the local YMCA. (Apparently my bins in the basement aren't weird, they're responsible.) Al Gore wins the Nobel Peace Prize. Even our reluctant President makes a few statements of broad acknowledgment. For a short time, I am hopeful. Maybe it's not too late. However, despite the increasing public awareness and rapidly rising gas prices, things continue as normal. I stare incredulously from my detached, exhausted place, but nothing seems to change. The facts are overwhelming, impossible to ignore, but ignoring them seems to be the predominate response. I wonder often throughout this long, sleep-deprived year whether I would be as preoccupied with the future of the planet, or lack thereof, if I did not have children. At this moment, life in North America is still affluent and comfortable. Leaving aside the worst predictions, it is entirely possible that for most of my own lifetime, energy prices may rise dramatically and weather patterns may shift and intensify, but life in my privileged little corner of the globe will otherwise continue as I currently consider normal. If I did not have children, I could live my life in comfort and relative unconcern. How deeply can one really feel the pain of unknown generations to come? But, I do have children. And some day they may have children too. I have read no predictions that leave their lives unaltered. The future that I've always imagined for them may be nothing like the world they will inhabit. As the baby slowly morphs from appendage to person, this becomes my predominate concern: what world do I prepare my children for? The business-as-usual version where a decent education, some extra-curricular enrichment and a bit of good luck will ensure them middle class security and some measure of happiness? The world where college funds and 401(k)s and investments in private schools make sense? Or should I try to somehow prepare them for a post-apocalyptic future: one where they will have to eke out their own livings amid constant natural disaster? Will they really end up in the technology-driven, class-divided, American-dominated, ever-more-globalized trajectory they were born into? This becomes the background to my thinking on numerous issues, from what to buy to how to invest to where to live. We are unsettled in career and geographic location anyway, torn between two countries, families on two coasts, and competing desires for career/family balance. To these deliberations we add our fears of climate change, rising sea levels, urban unrest, oil shortages. The waters become so murky that I cannot picture myself and my family anywhere. Do we pursue my legal career and a second residency for my husband in New York City or San Francisco? Both are cities we have lived in before and considered returning to. However, both are also overpopulated, oil-dependent and destined to be under sea level in the not too distant future according to many predictions. Do we instead opt for a more rural, simple existence and buy a parcel of land somewhere where we can grow food and maybe raise a few chickens? The specter of environmental disaster is not the only consideration guiding our thoughts, but it is an unshakable factor–a trump card often played by my more rurally-inclined husband, that I can no longer completely discount. My quest for concrete action continues. Along with it, the web of interconnected issues expands. Search as I might, I cannot seem to find any obvious avenue for my own dramatic contribution, no ingenious idea for carbon reduction, no chutzpah to start a political movement. Instead, I find small actions and imperfect ones at that; more tiny steps beyond light bulbs and cloth bags. The most fundamental and obvious contribution is to consume less, and this I attempt to do. However, it is not easy. As any new parent will attest, babies seem to require an enormous number of things. Many of them are large and plastic and many seem to be indispensable. There is a continuous stream of products for beautifying and simplifying parenting and for purifying and edifying one's children. I am drawn by their endless promise. I try to resist, to question my purchasing motives, to think about how long an item will last and where it will end up. I consider packaging, buy from "green" labels, shop in bulk, opting frequently against convenience. I turn to second-hand stores, get things off Craigslist, borrow from friends. I understand that my overall consumption matters far more than the cosmetic or minor greening of the products I buy. Nonetheless, these small measures salve my conscience, making me feel better as I continue to consume far more than my planetary share. It seems that for every message against consumption, there are at least three counter messages, many of them "moral" ones, urging me to buy. I must keep my children safe, myself young and vibrant, my house Zen-like and peaceful, my technology at least somewhat up-to-date. How can I be good or happy, a competent mother or strong woman without the necessary things? These purchases make me feel good. New jeans and a great pair of boots remind me I'm something more than an un-showered, stained and saggy mother. Hand-made German wooden toys with non-toxic, vegetable-based paint, not only amuse and educate my children, they look nice scattered around my living room. Many of these things I consider my birthright–I need an attractive home, fashionable clothing, decent cosmetics, well-dressed children. But slowly, I begin to understand them as extravagant luxuries that come at a cost far greater than the amounts of money I spend on them. However, even knowing this, I continue to buy. For I discover that I am no different than my neighbors or friends, or the imagined uncaring masses whom I rail against in my most passionately self-righteous moments. I too cannot feel the urgency at every moment. I too act as if nothing were wrong. One recurrent theme that emerges from my search for action beyond the three Rs is localism. I read about the efforts of so-called "locavores" who attempt to eat nothing from outside a certain geographic range. My husband and I try to emulate them wherever possible, buying as much food as we can from local sources. In the summer this is relatively easy; we shop at farmer's markets, choosing from a wide range of fruits and vegetables grown in the Pacific Northwest. I enjoy the process of hunting out local food, meeting some of the farmers who grow it, hearing about the particular conditions and challenges of a given growing season. In the winter localism becomes more difficult: my toddler and baby have apparently inherited the palate of a globalized, modern, American, rather than a native Northwesterner. They shun applesauce, greens, and potatoes, begging instead for tropical fare like mangoes, bananas, and kiwi. I feel furtive and guilty loading grapes from Chile into my shopping cart in February, but the motherly fear of vitamin deficiency and the battle of picky eating trump my convictions. True localism doesn't work with young children, I rationalize. Of course for most of human history it had to, and in the future, it may again. Even more satisfying than buying locally, we soon discover, is not-buying locally. Growing and foraging our own food slowly become central family activities. We build raised garden beds in the yard, fill them with organic soil, plant seeds, water and weed. My daughter, the vegetable-phobe, stands outside picking peas and lettuce and eating them by the handful. I steam and mash home-grown carrots to spoon-feed the baby, feeling powerful and pure. We forage for shellfish, digging clams and oysters all over the Puget Sound. Soon we are gathering berries, then wild greens, then mushrooms, first with mycological societies and experienced friends. We spend many weekend days tromping through the woods, children strapped to our backs or toddling along the path at our sides. After a few months of learning, we fill baskets with wild kitchen mushrooms: porcini, chanterelle, morel. I am nervous about all of it at first. But my confidence soon increases, and I am quickly surprised by how safe and easy it actually is to gather hundreds of dollars worth of delicious food on a morning walk with my children. Gardening, foraging, buying locally, consuming and driving less: these things make me feel somewhat proactive and, as a result, more optimistic. They, along with the supplies in my basement, also give me at least the illusion that my family could weather short-, or even long-term disaster. I know my actions are far from perfect. I probably contribute to the problems in more ways than I help, although my search for new ways to lessen our footprint continues. Clearly, nothing I do will change the planetary outcome. I have yet to find a dramatic angle for a massive social movement. Of course, it may not be necessary for me to do anything at all. The world may very well continue on its current course, ushering billions in India and China into the industrial age with nothing more than a few hiccups. Human ingenuity and modern technology are powerful forces. Marshaled in time, they may stave off disaster, reverse carbon levels and perfect new, clean, renewable energy sources that allow us to keep consuming and living our comfortable, suburban lives. Although hopeful, I am unable to believe that things will remain entirely unchanged. I feel certain that my children will live their adult lives in a world unlike the one in which I came of age. But hasn't that always been the case? Things have changed dramatically in the past few generations, and we have done just fine. Despite the dark speculations and my wildest disaster planning, I am too programmed, too comfortably middle class to abandon it all and move out to some property in the wilderness and learn to survive off the land. I have invested too much in this way of life to give it up completely just yet. So where does that leave me? Right here, on my current trajectory, saving for college, planning for an unaltered future. Yet I am also trying to raise my children to be prepared for whatever awaits them, with an awareness of the issues and a moral obligation to consider the impact of their actions. I will try to provide them with an understanding of where their necessities come from and empower them to obtain some of them in the same way their great-grandparents did, without a lengthy web of fossil-fueled assistance. I want them to understand that their comfortable, suburban lifestyle is neither inevitable nor universal. Most of all, I want to foster in them a flexibility and toughness that will allow them to flourish no matter their circumstances. I will try not to rush to solve their every problem, alleviate their every discomfort or provide a material solution to their every need. Only time will tell if this will be enough. Camping with my family on the slopes of Mt. Rainier one summer night just before my son's second birthday, I lie awake in my sleeping bag, unable to drift off amid the tangled limbs that surround me. Lying there, slowly watching the hours pass, I realize suddenly that my suffocating nightmares have ended. It has been months since the last time I woke to water crashing over my head. It now seems slightly quaint, my preoccupation with the tsunami and Katrina. I think about the mythical woman I imagined so often, the one who gave birth on the stadium floor. Her child is also nearing two. I wonder how her life has moved on. I sneak quietly out of the tent, stepping around the sleeping bodies of my children. Outside I breathe the sharp night air, the smell of damp soil and leaves. Enormous Douglas firs surround me, silhouetted against the blue-black sky, the moon low behind them. A breeze washes through the branches then disappears, leaving only the faintest trembling of needles. Crouching beneath trees that have stood in this spot for hundreds of years, I feel small, safely insignificant, an inconsequential part of something unbroken and enduring. It is hard to imagine anything that could alter a world so vast, so endless. More than anything, I want my children to feel this, this sense of peace in their own insignificance, breathing in the night air in some unspoiled forest. If nothing else, I can raise them to know that this existed, that this is the world they belong to; this is their beautiful home. I crawl back in the tent beside my sleeping family and listen to them breathing in the night.
Girl Feelingsby Alle C. Hall We were in Manhattan when I started spotting. Everything about our pregnancy had been we. "We're pregnant," we told Aunt Lucy at lunch, breaking the three-month rule because we weren't in Manhattan that often. We told Cliff's parents, his cousins. Yet here it was, indisputably me who was spotting. I called my OB's office to ask if it was safe to fly back to Seattle. "How many weeks are you?" "Eleven." "What does the spotting look like?" Purplish. Kind of thick, but not a lot of blood. Not a lot, I stressed. It took nine months to get pregnant—nine months of temperature-taking, "Now, Cliff!" sex; of waiting, waiting, waiting; of fourteen other couples, all good friends, making their big announcements. When we finally got pregnant, we didn't tell my family—not parents or siblings, not seconds, however removed. Ten years prior, I'd tried to talk to them about the abuse that happened during my childhood. They shut me down. I was alone, still five years from knowing that Cliff Meyer walked the planet, but I accepted that my family couldn't be the one I deserved. I would create a family that could. And now I was spotting. My OB said nothing could stop a miscarriage once it started, so the flight wouldn't determine the situation one way or another. We flew home, and went bleeding—I was bleeding—to our scheduled appointment with the genetic counselor. She flips open our thin file. "Alle Hall and Cliff Meyer?" Cliff squeezes my hand with a regular, comforting rhythm, radioing over: "Best Sweetheart." "What kind of blood?" "Bright red, now," I say. "Lots." They send us to ultrasound. The med tech—compassionate eyes above the severe neutrality of her white mask—says, "I am not seeing a fetus" and leaves to fetch the doctor. In the false twilight of the exam room I reach for Cliff's hand, to tell him what I had previously told two best girlfriends but not him. "I thought she was a girl." Her name was Mira. In Hebrew, Mira is short for Miriam, one of the few women in the Torah who wasn't "So-and-so's mother," or "So-and-so's sister." Miriam was a prophet and a diviner. Her name means "bitterness," though I prefer the alternate translation: "rebellion." Cliff wanted a "normal" name. I wanted Mira. In those first weeks I didn't reveal that I was having girl feelings, but as Cliff and I played with names—"Nadav!" "Is that a boy or a girl?"—I did lay the groundwork. "Cliff, did you know that 'Meira' is Hebrew for 'light'? If we have a girl, we could make your last name into her first name." "Meira Meyer? Like, 'Duran Duran'?" "Not Meira Meyer. Meira Hall." Cliff answered, "How about Halle Meyer?" In theory, Cliff was okay with Mira, perhaps by comparison only. At least now, we wouldn't have to fight over her name. The exam room. The doctor wields a large, vibrator-looking thing that can only be the vaginal ultrasound. In it goes. Some pain. I worry, as I have for the last eleven weeks when anything went in, about miscarrying. The medical wand against my belly projects my innards onto the blue computer screen. No fetus. Click click. With a mouse, the doctor circles the lump of cells that was supposed to have been my child. In seconds, he determines that "development stopped" between five and seven weeks. I am eleven weeks pregnant. Was. Am. The egg sac and placenta are developing normally, so I (choose your verb) pregnant. There is weight gain, gas, nausea that elicits, "Good!" from every mom and medical person I talk to. They all say, "That means the baby is taking what it needs." Only she wasn't. She quit at five weeks. "Why?" I ask. The doctor has no answer. No one has that answer. Left-leaning friends remind me that in Buddhist philosophy, a woman doesn't lose a baby. The baby chooses different parents. I want to cave their hippy skulls in. Why didn't Mira think I'd be a good mom? I'd done all this work around my childhood abuse. I would background-check caregivers. I wouldn't give her Barbies. I would feed her organic everything but would let her eat junk when the other kids were eating it. OK, I'd even give her a Barbie if she wanted one, but I'd also sign her up for Aikido. Two days after confirming I am/was pregnant, it takes ten minutes for my OB to scrape the remnants of Mira's placenta and egg sac from my uterus. It is months before I can act on Cliff's suggestion that we plant something in her honor. The list of pregnant friends keeps growing: 22, 23. Even the receptionist where I go for physical therapy sports a bump. Finally, we fill the two terra cotta planters on the front porch with shrubs. They are evergreen. When Miriam the Prophet was a five-year-old slave girl, the Pharaoh of Egypt ordered all Hebrew boys murdered at birth. The slaves resolved to stop having babies. This might not need explaining, but in ancient times, the only way to ensure that there would be no more babies was to have no more sex. All of five years old, Miriam foresaw the man who would lead her people to freedom. All of five years old, she convinced her father to once again take her mother under the chuppa. They had a son. His name was Mosheh. Moses. Which makes Miriam someone's sister, after all. I imagine a lean girl with fierce eyes above a strong nose, quiet until she has something to say—at which point, you can't shut her up. I imagine a child with an uncanny ability to hope, even when the grown-ups give up. Rebellion. As an adult, Miriam used her divining skills to find water for the former slaves during the 40 years they wandered the dessert. Jewish women of the feminist variety adore Miriam. She was not a big part of Passover until we reconstructed it. We re-wrote the haggadah—the book that leads us through the ritual seder—to include her. We created songs and readings in her honor. We made up the Miriam's Cup, to balance the traditional Cup of Elijah, which stands filled with wine for the prophet Elijah to drink from, a harbinger of the Messiah. Miriam's Cup only ever holds mayim hayim, "living waters." We found her. She validates us. I have a Miriam's Cup, made by my friend Yael. Its thick, blue, ceramic base tapers to a narrow, beaded neck, on which sits a shallow scoop of hand-blown glass. Yael also made a companion Elijah's Cup, in red. Elijah waits in the cabinet for his once-a-year appearance on our seder table. Initially, in addition to seder, I used Miriam to honor the new moon each month. Recently, I've started using her weekly. Cliff and I welcome Shabbat with traditional candles, challah, wine, and Miriam's living waters. Miriam enables me to claim my heritage without claiming my parents. I like to imagine I have some of her insight. But I had hoped for a daughter who would have her power—the power that was taken from me as a child. Bitterness. After the D&C, my OB diagnoses my progesterone level as "lowish." The daily dose she prescribes must be shoved up my crotch, followed by fifteen horizontal minutes allotted to "absorbing"—a euphemism for "dripping all over the goddamn place." Even less charming, progesterone makes me feel as if I've eaten an excess of meat. I stop taking it and find an acupuncturist who specializes in fertility issues—underscoring that I have them. Meanwhile, all the literature instructs me to believe that I am perfectly normal: one in every twenty pregnancies miscarries. I am not supposed to worry until I kill three. We (we are back to "we") spend the summer in treatment (though I'm the one with all the appointments) and the fall "trying." When the number of friends making their happy announcements tops thirty, I stop counting. When Cliff calls me, "Best Sweetheart," I say, "A 'Best Sweetheart' wouldn't have lost the baby." I hate having fertility issues. I hate taking my temperature. I hate sex. January. Bingo. And the real waiting begins. I can't ignore that Mira chose another mom. My acupuncturist says I worry too much. For this she needs medical training? I thought she was a girl. Clear girl feelings. I didn't tell Cliff because Cliff didn't even want to let many friends know we were "trying." I had begrudgingly accommodated his caution, telling only my closest friends. Then, when it was the last thing I wanted to discuss, I had had to tell them the baby died. I am having boy feelings. When we make our happy announcement, friends who don't know about the miscarriage ask if we want a boy or girl. There's a question for the privileged. I want to bond without the terror of "What if I do?" I want to stop aching. Every time I stand for more than twenty minutes, a deep ache permeates my pelvis. Neither my OB nor acupuncturist can diagnose it. They both ask if it feels like pre-menstrual cramping. "I don't know. I don't cramp." "What happens before your period?" "I get this ache." They both say, "Oh." They both look worried. Around the end of my fourth month, I dream of a boy with dark curls and eyes that crinkle into new moons when he smiles. He looks like the photographs of Cliff's father as a child. In the dream, I press my son's face into my neck and say, "I love you," over and over. Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. He hugs my neck with the pulse-like rhythm his papa uses to comfort me. When the genetic counselor reveals, "It's a boy," I laugh and burst into tears. Cliff looks puzzled. "You really wanted a boy?" "No! I was right!" We favor the name Zachary. It means "in memory of." Zachary Fritz Hall Meyer. "Fritz" was Cliff's father's name. We are unclear if "Hall" is a second middle or first last name. I don't care. It just has to be there. Zachary also means "remembrance of God." I am terrified that I will kill him, too; so terrified, that when I turn an ankle waddling to the front door, I insist we go to the emergency room. The ER confirms that Zachary is fine but my ankle is sprained. They send me back to PT, where I find out that the receptionist's baby was stillborn. Routine delivery, no problem, then, dead. Oh, Julie. Eight months pregnant and wobbling around on crutches, I finally stop worrying about miscarriage. I've got my teeth into stillbirth. "What to do if stillborn" occupies an inordinate amount of space on our birth plan. Surely once I hold him, once he is safely delivered, these worries will end. Prior to pregnancy—prior to meeting Cliff, even—I spent a solid decade in therapy, addressing the repercussions of surviving the family I was born into. Pushing out Zac after six hours of active labor that began on my due date, I felt pretty on top of how I would parent; no Barbies, no abuse. When I finally held him, when he was finally safely here, my fears did not go away. They intensified. Parents often say their greatest fear is that what happened to them will happen to their kids. The luckier want to be more emotionally available/have more money,/spend more time than their parents did. My father was a pedophile and a rapist; my mother, always either outrageously happy or raging. Once—I was between four and six years old—I opened the door and found her standing there. I knew my mother. Why was she knocking like a visitor on her own front door? My therapist suspects my mother suffered from what was then called Multiple Personality Disorder—now, Dissociative Identity Disorder. This explains the furious swirl in an orchid-colored bathrobe coming after me with a steak knife. The bend of her back over my brother's bed. I have no doubt that she physically, sexually, and emotionally abused us, but this murky diptych is my clearest memory. I have crystalline images of my father's abuse. At a core level, I accept that men rape and batter. In a way, I expect them to. The same level of betrayal from my mother is more than I will allow myself to remember in detail. For years, I checked regularly with my therapist: are you sure I am not multiple? She said she was sure. She had been seeing me for 12 years. Alle always showed up. Work never complained about absenteeism. I wore a consistent style of clothing. I didn't suddenly find myself in Argentina. Most importantly, I remembered my life. There were no big holes. I showed no signs of DID. My question became, "Why not?" Doctors never have that answer. As the years passed, as I moved toward marriage, then motherhood, I lived with an uneasy acceptance of what I could only categorize as a blessing: Alle continued to show up. Then they handed me that tiny, amazing bundle named Zac. Initially, I was only aware of everything that someone else could do to him. I knew the odds: one in every three girls, slightly fewer boys. This was a time when the relevant parts still hurt—vagina from giving birth, nipples from breastfeeding—when the night feedings meant more than interrupted sleep. The terror of a dark house. Of the grocery store, the park. What if I turned my back for too long, or misjudged a sitter? A friend I had had for years? Cliff did his best, waking during night feedings to sit with me until he conked out flat on the carpet in Zac's room, but he could not get on board with what we agreed to call my hypervigilance. He—like most of our parenting peers—thought me a paranoid freak. Cliff, my question is not, "Don't all parents insist their nannies memorize what to do if a child goes missing in public?" (Call 911 ASAP, even before you call us. You have twenty minutes until that child is raped and dead. If you are in a store, have the staff close the doors immediately.Never leave the house without quickly reviewing your child's clothing. A clear description for the police could make the difference.) My question is, "Why don't they?" Oblivious, or swimming in denial. There are monsters out there. The panic attacks start when Zac turns fifteen months old. Every morning, between 3:15 and 3:45, I wake to a silver terror binding my esophagus, unable to get back to sleep. Around this time, I miscarry again—sorry, we, we we. My sleep dwindles to two hours a night. Another sprained ankle takes four stupid months to heal. I get fat (nine pounds), fail two different tests for sleep apnea-the first because, during the overnight stay, the guy in the next room wakes me by screaming and yelling and banging around. I am jerked from sleep into an unfamiliar room, wires and goo in my hair, thinking my insides have become my outsides and are coming to get me. This is where I start to wonder about my mother's DID. Did I say my mother's? The second apnea test I fail because I do not have apnea. I have depression. I am sleep deprived, in general, and re-traumatized from the first test. I get on antidepressants, claw my way back to five hours of solid sleep followed by three, intermittent. One night I wake with the usual silver-jumbles, convinced of my multiplicity. For several months prior, Zac had been obsessed with "walk in street by self." "Zac!" I say. "Do little boys walk in the street by themselves, or do they hold Mama or Daddy's hand?" "No vant, no vant!" Zac so vanted to walk in street by self that he began darting. My therapist—a recognized expert on the adult children of screwy families and by no means an advocate of physical abuse—said, It took me a full three weeks to hear that she was not saying, "Beat him senseless," but rather, "Hit him just hard enough to get his attention." Mother wolves snap at their cubs to teach critical lessons in survival, she told me. One whap with an open palm on a covered bottom is not child abuse, she said. Never hit when you are out of control of your anger or fear. Hit only in situations where your child is truly at risk. Immediately following, take him firmly by the shoulders and say in an unyielding voice, "Never ever go in the street again. Ever." And he won't. But, "hit." One afternoon, as Zac and I approached our car, I let go of his hand in order to find my keys. He darted for the street. He laughed. I did not hit him. But I knew then I was going to have to. Why would a man work at a children's clothing store? If your child disappears in a store, have the staff close the doors immediately. The door stood open. The night was black. Never leave the house without quickly reviewing your child's clothing. Rounds and rounds of children's clothing. You have twenty minutes. "Zac?" "Zachary?" I said, more loudly. "Zachary Fritz?" I could not move. "Has anyone seen my child?" Zac was gone for all of two minutes. He and the Japanese boy were playing under a clothing round in the back of the store. That night, the silver jumbles: I lost him. I am going to have to hit him. She hit me. Our insides are our outsides. He needs to be protected from me. I stayed on my meds. I slept better. I did what anyone who really wants to address any aspect of childhood has to do: admit where and who we come from. Accept the possibilities while striving to live in the probability: Sybil is not on childcare. I am. I am not convinced that had my first run at motherhood been with a girl-child, I would have been able to achieve what I did with Zac. I never once hit or shook him. I certainly never sexually abused him. I can state with confidence that I would not have sexually abused Mira, but I can easily envision how adding "she is a girl/I was a girl/I am my mother's illness" to the raw cocktail of panic, depression, and sleep deprivation would have tipped me into yelling. Perhaps Zac's being a boy enabled me to keep it together, however incrementally. I never once yelled—at him; Cliff got it a fair bit. When Zac inevitably darted again, I grabbed him by the shoulders and loudly said, "Don't ever do that again!" I felt angry, and almost—but definitely not—out of control. It was a year before he tried it again. I sat him down. "The next time I say, 'Stop,' and you don't, I will smack your tushie." "Don't do dat. Dat will hurt." "Yes. But I will do it." I was dead calm in my certainty. I was also pregnant again. Stop. Seeing the heartbeat at the eight-week ultrasound for the pregnancy that turned into Zac, my unbidden thought was, "Boy." Upon seeing this fourth pregnancy's heartbeat, I had the same experience. Only it was, "Girl." Rewind. It is late one night or early one morning, some time during the first month of Zac's life. Cliff is out flat on the carpet. Zac's little feet are like pieces of sushi. You could dunk them in soy sauce. I can't wait until he poops so I can change him—partially because once he has pooped, I know exactly what he needs, and partially because I am strangely in love with the milky smell. That's weird, I know. A poop! I struggle Zac out of the two-blanket burrito wrap, out of the footie-jammies and the onesie bodysuit, out of the poopy diaper and into the clean, then back into the onesie, the jammies, and the two-blanket burrito wrap; all to have him let out another massive, wet poop. Totally Cliff's sense of humor. Almost two years after Mira chose another mom, I understand. Zachary Fritz Hall Meyer is the baby we are supposed to have. I still don't understand why. It still hurts. The prophet Miriam was five years old when she foresaw the brother that would lead the slaves to freedom. She knew where the Pharaoh's daughter bathed, and sailed the newborn toward her in a reed basket. When Pharaoh's daughter drew the baby from the river and needed a wet nurse, Miriam presented their mother. Miriam's vision ensured that the otherwise doomed boy would survive, nursed by his own mama. I doubt my Mira was a prophet, but I wonder if she used the insight I ascribe to her to understand that a mom who wanted a daughter to be everything that was taken from her was not a mom who was ready for a daughter. Perhaps Mira accessed the power I ascribe to her to wisely choose a mother who was. The admission is no longer painful. Mira's choice goes beyond what was good for her or me. It's all of us: why, in Mira's position, my pre-born self chose to stay with my mother; why the uber-mensch I married so loves and willingly stays with someone from such an extreme set of circumstances; why Zac is the child we were supposed to have first. Observing Zac at this stage allows me to pretend I know the answer to a question that used to plague me: what would I have been like, had my parents been remotely normal? I would have been happy. But if you go back in time and step on even one butterfly, you will return to a radically altered reality. As it so happens, I was right, again. Girl. I am doing a good job of not spending much time on that; I'm otherwise occupied debating Cliff about her name. We might have her middle name. Ruth. Beloved. But every first-name consideration lacks that Sea World je ne sais quois. Zac is lobbying for Greta, which is darling and means pearls, but is a tad "Yodel-ay-hee-hoo." My choices all evoke light or ascendance. Had I my druthers, she'd be Jaden. God has heard. So have I.
More Than a Boyby Dedria H. Barker What a bad idea: a middle-aged woman in the praying position on the kitchen floor, a big young guy hovering over her. Still, the big guy, my fourteen-year-old son David, pressed down on my shoulder trying to get me to my knees. "No," I blurted out, jerking away. "Mom!" David yelped, throwing his big hands in the air. "I'm trying to show you something." Every day of his high-school freshman year, David came home to show me something. That winter, David was showing me wrestling. I wanted him to have a good time, but I sure didn't want him to wrestle. I only knew one black wrestler in my whole life. My college professor had wrestled in prep school until he got his neck snapped like it was a branch on my neighbor's spindly magnolia tree. After that he was a paraplegic in a wheelchair. If I got to my knees for David, he might think I wanted to be his wrestling partner. Prep wrestling involved serious training. It was more than tussling on the beat-down brown sofa in the family room, tumbling off it onto the floor, not that we ever did that. We had got to our knees together in church. He had protested that much less than I protested wrestling. Still, speaking as a mother of two black boys, this scenario was not altogether a bad thing. David's just a regular boy who needs to play and be a boy, just a boy. David showing me something he had learned that day was simply a part of our after-school routine. But, why would David want to show his mother something that might involve pain? Because boys will be boys. I have two sons. David has an older brother. His name is Diallo. He's the child of my youth, a 1970s child who has one of those 1970s names, like Sunshine. But we are African-American so his name is African, and it means warrior. One day, a long time ago, when Diallo was seven years old, I lay on the sofa nursing a hurt finger. We got into some kind of beef--as mothers and their oldest sons sometimes do. In his anger, Diallo grabbed my hurt finger in his little fingers and he bent my finger, my hurt finger. "Diallo!" I screamed at the flash of pain. "That's my hurt finger." Diallo slunk away, his little boy body defiant. I felt betrayed. My little boy had turned into some kind of brute. Since then, I have been as rough and tumble with my sons as I need to be. By the time David, my third child and younger son, came along, it was necessary. David was a real little boy who liked physical sensation. He didn't cry when doctors stitched his forehead back together. He took it. As a teenager, David wrestled. How could he? That's not what I wanted, but it was what the football coach wanted. Wrestling built strength. Wrestling terrified me, but because five of my brothers played high school football, I understood football. So it was because of football I got to my knees in the kitchen where dinner should have been cooking. My head came up to David's waist. At fourteen, David was just about the same height as I, a grown woman. We were both five foot six inches tall. David though seemed shorter. He was wide at the shoulders and dense muscled like a Staffordshire terrier. That was the original Buster Brown children's shoe mascot which is now feared as the dangerous pit bull. Just the opposite, I am so thin-limbed that when I was growing up my father called me "Sticks." So there we were: the pit bull and the twig. David closed in on me, circling with plodding flat-footed wrestler's steps. The purse strings of the kitchen space pulled tighter around me. My eyes darted far into their corners tracking him as far as they could. Oh, if only I truly had eyes in the back of my head. At the edge of my glasses, I lost sight of David. My spine stiffened. The move he was showing me was called "man-on-the-bottom." Was it too late for me to just get up? Could I just say, "Wait 'til your father gets home"? David crouched behind me. He encircled my body with his thick arms. I could feel his heat. Not since he was a wee boy creeping into my bed at night had we been this close. I caught my breath. The energy crackled between our bodies. We live in a society that considers being that close the turf of lovers, where electricity fuels sex. My ears strained toward David's words. I could hear him, but it was like he spoke in a foreign tongue. "A wrestler," David rasped, "must be careful not to touch his opponent until he is ready to wrestle ." Was this my baby, his blunt-tipped fingers writhing through the air in front of me like octopus tentacles? He acted like he couldn't wait to get his hands on me. However, there was no tenderness in David's voice. "When contact is made ," he said, "the round starts, and Bam!" His voice clapped. "It's on." I crashed over onto the floor, sprawling, all arms and legs. Though it might not have looked it, my collapse was choreographed and it came with sound effects. "Knave!" I shrieked at Dave, rhyming his nickname with the lowly class of folk we had read about in The Big Book of Castles. David reached out his square tan hand to help me up. I looked up to see his eyes, the ones that reminded me of the chocolate in s'mores, twinkling. His grin was almost like a friendly Jack-a-lantern. It showed a slanted front tooth chipped from an earlier rough boy activity. I couldn't fool David. "Mom," he chided. "You did that." I did. I did do that. David never touched me. I just fell over. That was easier than waiting to see if mom as 'man-on-the-bottom' was going to work out for me. Don't you know, I have enough stuff to wrestle with raising my boy without have to wrestle with? him. Dedria H. Barker, the mother of three and professor of writing in Michigan, is at work on a memoir about moms, sons, and sports. A Mother and a Daughter on the Subject of Menby Deborah Adelman She storms through the front door, a tempest blasting past me, face consumed by deep, dark anger. It would be foolish to smile pleasantly and ask, "How was your day?" so I just close the door behind her and sigh. "Hi, Maya," is all I dare. "I hate that place," she declares. "How can you send me there?" I shrug. It’s the high school we have, is one possible answer. Why are you so picky? There are plenty of other kids who like it, could be another. Because you are 14 years old and ready for ninth grade. But I have parented this child long enough to know what is wrong with each of those answers, so I remain silent. "I had a horrible day," she says. "Awful. You wouldn’t believe what happened in French class." By nine p.m., the after-school hurricane has turned into clinging affection, and Maya asks me to walk the dog with her. Our Chihuahua in tow, we go out into the November darkness, a magical evening, breezy but unseasonably warm, almost 60 degrees, falling leaves rustling and whirling in the air around us like rain. "That boy Chris? The one who told me I could be in his group after that mean girl Jessica wouldn’t let me in hers?" At the beginning of the semester, Chris, who is Black, told Maya to go take her white punk-ass attitude somewhere, but they have become friendly now. And Jessica, who is white, purportedly smokes, drinks, buys condoms from vending machines, and tells other kids she might be pregnant. "Yeah?" I say, guardedly. "He said to his friends, 'If I were thirty, I would totally fuck Ms. Barnes." Mrs. Barnes is the French teacher. Her voice chokes with rage. "And I was sitting right there. And his friends said, 'Ooh, yeah, man.'" She tells me this as I am bent over the lawn, wishing I had brought a flashlight to recover the waste of our five-pound dog, which is hard to spot in the grass in the dark. This buys me a little time. I hesitate, poking around in the grass with a plastic bag. I’d like to smack those idiot boys in the face is the first thing that comes to mind. But that obviously will not do as a response. Or would it? "Wow," I say, still stalling. "And?" Maya insists. I am walking a fine line here, no room for even one misstep. Boys like to brag like that, a lot of hot air, a lot of wishful thinking, crosses my mind. But a general denunciation of men and their tendency toward braggadocio doesn’t strike me as a really good direction to steer my fourteen-year-old, as she begins to wonder about what her future with males might hold. Even so, what comes to my mind is the unguarded way I have heard men talk about women. Once, when I was on a study abroad program, I snuck a peek at a letter, not intended for me, written by a male grad student to a male friend back home, about the female grad student he was involved with. They made quite the couple in our dorm on Lenin Hills in Moscow, but the letter said, "I am drilling one of the girls here, pretty regularly, only she is starting to get too attached." Or once, as I stood on Broadway in NYC with a group of Italian guys--one of whom was my boyfriend--and a woman in black stockings with mini-skirt passed, I heard one of my group blurt in Italian, "Look at those luscious legs! What a pussy! Che fica!" Or the time in Moscow, when I was walking with a tall German woman down a dorm hall, and a Cuban man behind us, thinking we did not understand Spanish, told a friend, "You take the short one. I like tall women." Or one summer, on a Black Sea beach, with a female friend from Moscow, when some men, mistaking us (dark-haired, Jewish and Armenian) as Mexicans, got excited. Thinking we did not understand Russian, one shouted up the hill, "Seryozha! They’re Mexican! And there’s ten more of them up the hill. Wow! I’ve never fucked a Mexican before!" A woman is for the taking, that is, just as Chris would take Ms. Barnes, if only she weren’t so god-awful old. Wow. But at least I was already a woman when I encountered those remarks, wasn’t fourteen, still so open, untested and vulnerable. My mother watched me head to those morning sailing excursions with a smile. She was kind and supportive, watching the scenario unfold but never teasing. She liked Ken -- everybody liked Ken, who was charming, with his shiny black hair, dark, laughing eyes, beautiful smile despite crooked teeth, and his tall, thin frame with just a hint of a potbelly. He was smart and had a sly, teasing sense of humor. I was crazy about him. One night, during a heavy rain, we met under the pine trees in the field near the Girls’ Village, laughing, dripping, and ended up in each other’s arms. But still no kiss. But Ken was about the best of what happened between the teenaged me and the boys at Camp. The agency served inner-city families, and every year the camp hired youths, mostly males, to work in the kitchen and maintenance department. Black, white, Latino, known at Camp as the "Kitchen Boys," they came from low-income urban families and needed summer employment. They were too old to be campers but too young, and untrained and probably way too irresponsible to work with the children. Those kitchen and maintenance boys at Camp could be rough, but there they were, all summer, urban boys on the loose, and there was I, all summer, all girl, albeit in jeans, oversized t-shirt, and red bandanna. There was Phil. One evening, riding in the crowded camp van, I found myself sitting on the vehicle floor in the darkness next to him. Phil moved the full length of his thigh against mine. I was uncertain of his intentions and too embarrassed to say anything. What if I denounced him, and he had intended nothing? I felt his hand touch my leg, warm and heavy against my upper thigh, but still I sat, paralyzed. The hand moved along my leg, until it rested on my inner thigh. I sat, trapped between him and the door. We arrived back at camp, and I fled to my family apartment, never telling my mother, or anyone else, what had happened. There was Lynneal, originally from the South, who had come to Milwaukee as a boy. He was rough and angry, but one night, after hours, the campers now asleep in their cabins, I sat at one of the tables in the main lodge, a well-lit and open public space, and Lynneal came over, sat next to me and spoke in a quiet, sweet voice, something I felt but didn’t quite identify as flirtation. Lynneal was older than I, frightening to me with his gruff manner. But that evening, his voice was sugar-coated. At some point an older program staff member, a social worker and long-time friend of my family, walked into the building and came toward us, interrupting our interaction. Later, to my deep embarrassment, I heard him tell my mother, in a hushed voice that contained anger, resignation, but also humor, that he had noticed Lynneal’s excitement, showing through his pants, as he talked to me. One of those kitchen boys was the first boy I did kiss, finally. I was fifteen. We were in the small library nestled into one corner of the main lodge. A staff party was underway in our small apartment, as there usually was toward the end of the season, and I snuck off with him. The kiss was awkward, both thrilling and disgusting, somebody else’s lips against mine, somebody else’s tongue searching my mouth, some boy’s hands touching my breasts through my clothing. Like Lynneal, that boy also came from the South, from Mississippi, where years earlier, he had seen his father, in a fit of rage, shoot and kill his mother. Some time after the summer of our kiss, I heard he had been arrested for robbing a bus driver. And then, some years later, which was the last time I ran into him, he had found religion and become a storefront preacher. That was the last time I ran into him. The daily lives of my three sisters and I were completely enmeshed with my parents’ work. We were from the white, liberal, intellectual east side of Milwaukee, daughters of middle-class educated professionals, but raised alongside the inner-city people that our parents worked with and helped to organize. We grew up marching, protesting, refusing to salute the flag or say the Pledge of Allegiance, instead saluting the resisters and demonstrators, and insisting on our right, as girls, to wear pants to school. Summers, we grew up at Camp, first as young children with a babysitter, spending the days running through fields and swimming, and as older girls, riding horses. And then, as teenagers, mixing with those kitchen boys, urban guys spending three months in the country, not sure how to pass their free time. My mother raised us only into our teens because she died suddenly, at 44. I can’t ask her now, but I wonder: Did she worry about her four girls, running with those rough boys all summer? Did she try to protect us? And from what, exactly? Maya and I continue our evening walk around the block, and she describes how things got even worse in French class that day. "They asked me if I have a boyfriend. Then they asked me if I have ever had a boyfriend. And then they wanted to know if I even want to have a boyfriend. And then they said, '‘Maya, what do you do after school'?" She shakes her head, embarrassed as she recounts her answers: no, not now, not in the past either, and after school I do my homework! "They told me I need to get a life! I felt so stupid, like some naïve geek." "Ok, but that’s how it is," I say. "You haven’t gotten interested in boys yet." "No, that’s not true," Maya answers. And I remember the boy in Mexico, in the village she visited on her eighth grade class trip. But her mind is still on French class. She lowers her head, to avoid eye contact, and reveals the final horror: one boy, probing to see just how innocent she is, said, "Maya, do you know what dirty fingers means?" "What did you say?" I ask. And then, "I have no idea either." And then we shake our heads, laughing at the absurdity. In her non-Honors section of French, she found herself sitting as a lone white girl in the middle of six or seven Black boys. She has struggled to find her place among these boys, who started out by tossing pencils at her, complaining about her "white punk-ass attitude." But over the past two months, Maya and these boys have started talking to each other, to accept each other. It’s been rough for Maya, but she has been determined, resisting any suggestion of changing seats. She tells me her observation--that Black students have support networks, solidarity, and she admires that. My daughter is out in the world now, almost a young woman. I would like her to find an easy path, and a man who will love her, who will feel passionately about this lovely, tempestuous girl with her dark eyes and wavy hair, her frenetic energy, her emotional highs and lows--a calm, even-keeled man who will respect her, treat her with kindness, gentleness, and devotion. But in the meantime, there is French class tomorrow, with Chris and his friends, with Jessica. Maya doesn’t really want to know what I wish for her future. She wants to know what to do tomorrow. We continue our walk up the street, and she watches me expectantly. I feel, as I often do as a parent, lost. Maya wants help. I’m her mother. But what can I offer as guidance? How do I help her make sense out of the muddle when so often I do not know how to do that myself? These are the moments when my own distant memories insist on surfacing. And so I do what I always seem to do in such situations, for better or worse: I tell her the stories. And at least for now, she listens. When she is not busy teaching, commuting and raising two children (Maya and Jonah), Deborah Adelman writes fiction, non-fiction and a bit of poetry. Her work includes The "Children of Perestroika": Moscow Teenagers Talk About Their Lives and the Future, The "Children of Perestroika" Come of Age: Young People of Moscow Talk About Life in the New Russia and an article on the community garden she co-founded and co-directs at College of DuPage, where she is an English faculty member. Deborah lives with her family in Oak Park, IL. The Color of Aloneby Reine Bouton It's night and the house is empty. As quiet as it's ever been. None of the usual dirt or clutter because there's been ample time to clean, too much time. At midnight, unable to sleep, I walk through the house alone, something I feel I've never done before. Like a child in a new school. My bare feet pad softly on the floor as I wander. Each room is perfect. Slowly, I've scrubbed, cleaned, purged, and redecorated each room--a fresh start. The bedroom, no longer our bedroom, but my bedroom, has been recently painted Terra Cotta Tuscan, with the feminine, puffy toile curtains I'd always wanted. I know I'll never move to Tuscany but at least my room will remind me of that place. Paintings hang on every wall, sometimes covering the entire space. Whatever I want. The largest canvas depicts a lone road in the countryside, tall green cypress trees lining the way. Beside it hangs a painting of an ochre-colored villa and its rolling vineyard. Several small Madonnas hover together to the right. This room has become a sanctuary, a place to read, to nap, to hide. No piles of dirty clothes litter the other side of the room--it is bare. The bathroom is now Canary Yellow, the closet organized with little white baskets for each cluster of stuff: nail polish, files, and remover in one, face creams, exfoliators, masks in the next one, another for my son's brush, bubble bath, powder, his little deodorant. I spent an hour fixing that bathroom closet. Now, everything goes back in its proper place because order has somehow become important. The room doesn't smell as much like pee now, because there is only one male using the toilet. I'm doing my best to make him aim right and to put down the seat. Don't forget to wash your hands, Jacob. Jacob's room is lime green, Chartreuse Champion--it's been that color since his birth. I wanted his room to be bright and happy, just like I thought our lives would be upon the birth of a much wanted child. No longer nursery-like, the room contains bins of Legos, Matchbox cars, books, Jedi lightsabers, Happy Meal toys. Tonight, though, the room is empty, quiet. I lie on his bed for a moment, turn my face into his SpongeBob pillow and breathe deeply. I get up quickly and walk out. Into the living room, mocha colored walls--Mocha Madness--with scarlet sofas that look like wounds, horizontal slashes of red in the otherwise brown room. Brown walls, floors, piano, furniture. The only light at this hour is the moonlight, shining in from a window; tonight it barely brightens the room. Flipping the switch, I walk into the kitchen. The whiteness of it makes me squint. Spackled corners, filled-in cracks all around--attempts to cover up time's damage. This room is next. It will be pink, I think. Cotton Candy Pink. Or Tickled Pink. I can have a pink kitchen if I want. A ladder stands in the middle of the room, left there after I stopped working today. I climb to the tip-top and sit, glad that no one can see me perched in the middle of my utterly still kitchen. Through the back window, I spy a hawk, sitting on a wire, waiting, waiting for something. A mouse? I've never seen a hawk in my neighborhood before--after all, this is a suburb, not the country. What is it doing here? A lone hawk. I watch it, it watches something else. We're both still. Then it takes off. I get down and continue roaming through the house, finally getting sleepy. There is no noise. I'm aware of the silence. The air conditioner has cut off, the ice maker has stopped churning out cubes, no cars speed or even glide down the street. The phone doesn't ring. No one speaks. All is frozen, like a snapshot. A black and white snapshot of me in my colorless kitchen, now divorced, my son's first sleepover at his dad's, and I'm alone and still in my empty, quiet house.
Holding Onby Rochelle L. Levy His hands are around my neck. Squeezing. Out of control. I'm used to his blind rages, used to being kicked and scratched and pummeled, but this is different, this is scarier. I'm afraid he might really hurt me this time. "Let go!" I struggle to breathe, struggle to pull his fingers off my neck. "Let go!" I beg him again, falling to my knees on the Oriental rug outside the kitchen, the maroons, greens and golds all blurring together. Another April southern California evening lost to anger and frustration. I finally break his grip, gasp for air, run down the hall, and fall on my bed exhausted. I'm more afraid for him than for myself. Just like seven years ago. He wasn't crying that night. His skin was blue. And the umbilical cord—his life force for the past nine months—was wrapped around his tiny neck. As one doctor gently held his alarmingly scrawny body upright, the other slowly unwound the cord, counting along with each revolution: "One, two, three, four." Twenty-six hours after being unsuccessfully induced, my biggest fear had come true—a middle-of-the-night emergency C-section. A tugging sensation, my husband's tightly clenched hand, and I watched in a mirror as our baby emerged from my belly. A boy! A blue-faced, silent boy. Why isn't he crying? Why isn't he crying? I couldn't catch my breath until he did. Finally, finally, he screamed. We named him Jonah. His six pounds felt just right in my arms. I stared in awe at my new best friend—at rose petal lips twitching as he exercised brand new muscles; at a tiny tongue darting in and out like a hungry kitten; at slightly clouded, not-yet-focused eyes taking in a world that had unexpectedly expanded as inevitably as mine had just shrunk. I'd never been so thrilled—and nervous—to meet someone. Even before his birth, he'd become my entire world. An extremely difficult pregnancy—coupled with the oppressive silences and contemptuous stares of a long-dying marriage—had me turning to my belly for companionship, those jabbing feet, knees and elbows assuring me that someone was listening, someone was on my side. In the sixth month, when the unrelenting nausea was finally manageable, my husband and I met up with my east coast sister and brother-in-law for a long-planned San Francisco vacation. "Say something nice about your wife," my sister said at dinner our first night, trying to lighten the mood, to diffuse the tension that seemed to envelop us like the early morning northern California fog. We all turned toward my husband, eyebrows raised, forks still. He stared back defiantly, eyes unblinking, lips unmoving. The father of my seven-year-old stepdaughter, of my unborn baby, the man with all the words now had none. "Mom?" Jonah's standing in my bedroom doorway, the hard scary anger replaced by a little boy's regret. He doesn't want to lose his TV shows. "Sorry I did that. You just made me so angry." I've heard it all before: You made me hit you. It's your fault I didn't do my homework. Blaming me comes so naturally to him. "Maybe it's best for you if you spend more time with your dad," I say, not believing it but feeling defeated, out of options. "No! I want to be with you! I know you better than I know my dad." My mouth struggles to remain neutral, but my eyes betray me. "It wouldn't be to punish you," I say. "I just want to do what's best for you right now." And for me, I think, but cannot say. "I came out of your body—you can't leave me!" He's right; I can't. He's been my one constant, the only person I know who will always be there, one day to the next. When, at six weeks, he graduated from the bedside bassinet to the nursery, I followed, sleeping in the lumpy twin bed just feet from his crib. My husband and I were barely speaking at that point anyway, so it was a relief not to lie next to him—hating his loud snoring, his teeth grinding, his very presence. When Jonah and I moved out for good just a year later, the adjustment was more physical than emotional. I talked to Jonah nonstop. Sitting in his highchair, trying out new teeth on soft bread, his eyes would fix on my mouth, as if trying to decipher how I formed words. So I'd place his chubby fingers gently on my throat, letting him feel my larynx as it rose and fell. By 15 months he was talking in complete sentences. "Purse?" I'd ask, as part of our leaving-the-house routine. "Check," he'd say. "Diaper bag?" "Check." "Cheese?" "You mean keys!" he'd laugh—we'd laugh—and it never got old. He depended on me, trusted me to keep him safe. Until one Saturday morning. His father—angry because Jonah wasn't quite ready when he arrived to pick him up—barged into our house. It was the day before Jonah's third birthday, and his father was furious that he hadn't been invited to the backyard party I was throwing the next day. "Please wait outside," I said softly, as I saw the insanity creeping into his eyes. But he stormed into the kitchen, reached for a butcher knife, dragged me across the floor—my boy clutched in my arms—and out the front door. I was still weak from a bout of food poisoning, so could barely fight back, was grabbing onto chairs and doorways, holding onto Jonah, trying to keep my bathrobe closed. My ex-husband wrenched Jonah from my arms, threw him in his car seat, sped down the street. The next afternoon, after the guests were gone and the gifts unwrapped, Jonah ran agitatedly around the dining room-turned-playroom, legs and arms lashing out at me with frenetic kicks and hits. I sat down in our special corner, knees up, back against the dark gray wall. "Jonah, do you want to talk about what happened yesterday between Mommy and Daddy?" He came to a sudden halt, crumpled next to me on the gray shag carpet. "I didn't like it when Daddy grabbed me from you and took me out of the house," he said. "And I didn't like it when you were screaming and crying and Daddy was dragging you across the floor. It scared me." He put his head in my lap. His skin was warm and flushed, bangs moist against his forehead, a thin film of sweat smearing the blue face paint that squiggled down his left cheek. We were still in summer clothes on this first Sunday in October. It was five o'clock and finally cooling off. A lawn mower puttered and died a few houses down; leftover sandwiches, fruit salad and birthday cake awaited refrigeration. I'd thrown a good party. Jonah sat upright. "I'm mad you let that happen." I'd filed a police report, was off to court the next day to obtain a restraining order, had brought two officers with me that morning to pick Jonah up from his father's. But none of that mattered to a frightened three-year-old who no longer trusted his mother. He stared at me, long lashes fluttering ever so slightly. "Dad came in our house and you couldn't stop him." Outside the window, the birthday balloons flapped gently in the breeze, well into the drooping stage, soon to face the inevitable shrivel. "So how are you going to stop other bad guys from breaking in?" "I will always keep you safe." I had to say—and hear—those words. "I will never let anyone hurt you." I'm sure he wanted to believe me but decided not to chance it. "Jonah was hitting kids all morning and was sent to the director's office a number of times," Maria, his preschool teacher, reported when I arrived for pickup one afternoon two months later. "Out on the playground, he hit one child with a shovel." His father had been right there watching, Maria said, yet he'd offered no words, no discipline. "Boys will be boys," he told me later. He was just slightly more concerned when, in kindergarten, Jonah held a plastic knife to a little girl's throat. Although his actions had directly provoked Jonah's aggression and anxiety, his father adamantly refused to discuss or even acknowledge his violent behavior in our house that day. "I try to ask him about it," Jonah would say as we snuggled in his blue teddy bear bed before lights out, "but he just says it never happened." By denying the episode, he was also denying its devastating effects: Jonah's very real, very raw anger, fear and confusion. And so Jonah learned to hide his feelings from his father, saving his bottled-up rage for me. And, eventually, our uncommon bond lost all boundaries. He responded to everything from, "It's time to turn off the TV," to "Let's go for a walk" with defiance and anger. After being scratched in the face too many times, I learned to grab him from behind, successfully restraining his thrashing limbs, but usually forgetting until too late about the backward head snap. As he grew stronger, I'd wrestle him down, sitting on his thighs with just enough pressure to control his legs, holding his arms flat to the ground. Yet, he had difficulty separating from me. One summer, during his two-week vacation with his father, he called me regularly. "I want to come home," he sobbed. "I miss you." "Jonah, why are you whispering?" "Because if Dad hears me saying I want to come there, he'll spank me." "Dad says if you know I miss you, then you'll go to court to take me away from him," Jonah said first thing when he returned home. "Is that true?" When I assured him it was not, he seemed momentarily relieved. "It makes me feel really bad when he says that," he admitted. "But I don't want Dad to know that he's hurting my feelings." At the same time, he refused to accept any male friends into our lives. The few times I introduced him to someone I was dating, he responded with a kick to the groin. It didn't even seem to matter if we knew the man—in an elevator one day, he turned and punched a complete stranger in the stomach. He stopped sleeping in his own bed, refused to walk alone from one room to another at night, cried in fear if I didn't keep the bathroom door open. He shadowed me to the kitchen while I washed dishes, to the laundry room while I folded clothes, finally falling asleep on the sofa while I read the paper. These days, his nighttime fears overpower both of us. Occasionally he'll sleep in his own bed, but only after waking me up nearly every hour, sneaking in to crawl under the covers next to me. "No," I tell him, "back to your own bed." He's a solid 70 pounds; I can't pick him up anymore. So I pull him by his legs, wrap my arms around his chest—leaving red marks on his pale skin, still so pure and unblemished—dance clumsily down the hall until he slips from my grasp. I wrestle him back to his room, throw him onto his bed, pin his arms above his head. He glares at me. "I hate you!" He looks just like his father. Now, watching him in the doorway, I want to tell him that I divorced his father to escape this kind of anger, that every time he blames me for his rages I lose hope that he'll grow out of it, that it breaks my heart to be abused by my own child. "I'd never leave you," I say. "You know that. We just can't go on like this." My voice cracks. "Go wait for me in the living room." "Mom, you're crying. I can't leave you when you're crying." His soft arms, fingernails always in need of a trim, are around me. "It's okay, Mom. You're just under a lot of stress." I hug him tight, my lips grazing his crew cut, remembering a smaller, softer scalp, the silkiness of brand new hair, that intoxicating baby smell. Since the moment he was born, irrational fear has been my constant companion too. That first morning home from the hospital, I awoke suddenly, peering down at the Moses basket beside our bed. His tiny face was covered by the blanket I'd so carefully swaddled him in the previous night. That's it, I thought, strangely calm, I've suffocated him. I'm still afraid of losing him, still afraid that if I can't see him breathing, can't feel his anger, can't hold onto his childhood, then he'll be gone. It's dark out now, nearly eight o'clock. Another bedtime battle is but an hour away. I run my index finger over his downy eyebrows, the bridge of his nose, kiss the freckles cascading onto his cheeks. They multiply every summer, no matter how much sun block I slather on. I want to cherish this time, these years soon to be just a memory. Rochelle L. Levy is the author of two chapbooks, Admit One and Living in Limbo, and has been published in The Washington Post, Salon, Glamour and The Los Angeles Times Magazine, as well as in the anthology Deliver Me: True Confessions of Motherhood. She lives with her son, Jonah, in Los Angeles.
Where the World Isby Karen Kasaba I discovered this smell within hours of my daughter's birth, after the morphine had begun to thin in my system, after I stopped shaking. Twenty-four hours of labor followed by caesarian had wracked my body and wrung my nerves, but the epiphany of my daughter's scent soothed me to tears. I had anticipated something cloying and powdery and pink. Instead, what emitted from her head was not an aroma but an atmosphere, the fertile climate of an enchanted forest. I relaxed into the world she evoked, grounded in the wonder of my love for her, and we napped. Last week I held a baby. A beautiful boy four months in the world--wise-eyed and willing to be held. My voice twittered and fluted in an attempt to enchant him, really to allow me more time to remain enchanted by him. I bounced him and hugged him and tested his grip. Then I sniffed his head.
Choosing Daddyby Greta Gaard "Butterfly!" Flora yells, dashing toward me in her best toddler version of Charlie Chaplin's rocking gait, carrying a clear tube with a cork at one end. She shows me the tube, which contains both a butterfly and what looks like a wasp. "Butterfly!" Her father is following close behind, explaining that they just found the butterfly in the final stages of death and have now added it to Flora's new insect collection. As a high school Biology teacher, Barry offers Flora a close-up look at cockroaches, lizards, aphids clinging to the undersides of leaves--things I don't normally point out. This summer I've found the two of them sitting on the back porch, staring at Flora's chubby little hand while an ant crawls across it. They stop on sidewalks after the rain, inspecting worms and ant hills. When Barry and I first met, one of the things that drew us together was our environmentalism, though our passion for nature manifests differently for each of us. I'm a theorist and an activist, more likely to write essays and deliver speeches defending the earth, while Barry investigates the natural world, collects book after book about Darwin, and defends evolution. We work at different ends of the same environment, occasionally meeting in the middle to discuss politics on a hike, or take Flora to the landscape arboretum. I've needed some time to appreciate the way our characters complement each other, since I never intended to stay with Barry much longer than the birth of our child. Four years ago on a snowy and bright Martin Luther King day, I walked in to a tiny coffee shop and recognized the man whose picture I had seen on Match.com. Barry's dark brown eyes, salt-and-pepper hair, and Guatemalan woven sweater spoke to me of an old friendship. When he rose to greet me and bought me coffee, I saw that he was lean, angular, and taller than me, almost six feet tall. For the next three hours, we chatted about our lives, our different paths leading us to Minneapolis and to our chosen profession, teaching. Both Barry and I had recently lost childless, long-term relationships and spent the past two years grieving. Neither of us had healed. Neither of us had unbroken hearts, ready to offer to a new mate. Yet each of us wanted a child. In fact, I had one waiting. An unplanned pregnancy in the abusive marriage of my twenties shocked me into terminating both the pregnancy and the marriage. As the suction tube pulled that eight-week embryo from my body, I whispered, "Wait for me," to the little soul who had chosen me to be its mother. "Wait for me, darling," I promised, "and I will find you a good father, a good home." Twenty years later, I felt that little soul's presence. It was time to bring her home. With a cool head, I had chosen Match.com over a sperm donor. My own father cherished me, tickled me, camped with me, and gave me self-confidence in the short sixteen years we had together; I wanted my child to have the same opportunity of knowing a father's love. If I could find a man with integrity, the partnership piece wouldn't matter. At 44, I didn't have much time to search for a real partner. A co-parent would have to do. We could have the child, separate, and share de facto joint custody, each of us free to choose other mates for love and companionship. Biologically disadvantaged as a potential father at age 46, Barry must have faced a more difficult challenge: find and woo a woman (preferably in her 30's) into marrying him and having a child. Over the next six months, Barry pursued me while I continued to break up with him. We were not a good fit, I insisted. He was Jewish; I was Buddhist. He liked comedies; I preferred documentaries. He was a liberal; I was a radical. Worst of all, our shortcomings annoyed each other: he was a mild-mannered procrastinator, with a diagnosable clutter problem; I was impatient, quick to action, to anger, and to passion. We weren't in love. It just wouldn't work. The last time I tried to break up with him, we were about to leave for a week's vacation exploring Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. True to our characters, Barry did endless research to choose the best independent hotels, while I was ready to book the trip after an hour's investigation. Two nights before our scheduled departure, I just knew I couldn't go with him. Barry was paying for more of the trip since I was in the middle of a career change, looking for work and finding none. I couldn't afford a vacation, and I couldn't be indebted to someone I didn't love. By 3:00 a.m. I was wide awake, tense with anxiety, certain I was walking into an impossible situation by agreeing to spend ten days with this impossible man in a foreign country. I picked up the telephone and called him. He picked up on the second ring. "Barry, I'm so worried about this trip," I launched in. "I can't even sleep." What was he going to say? Surely he had been sleeping. Surely this would be the last straw. Surely he would dump me at last. "I'm so glad you called," Barry replied. Kindness is Barry's leading suit. He assured me we could fly home any time if the trip weren't fun for both of us. After an hour's conversation, I agreed to go with him. In Mexico, we played. In a cabana outside Tulum we shared romantic afternoon sex amid thunderstorms, hitchhiked into town to see the ruins, separated for a day so we could each explore our own interests. In Merida we strolled the zocalo in the evenings, watching sidewalk artists and vendors, listening to music and sitting at tiny café tables having drinks. On our bicycle trip around Isla Mujeres and our half-day tour of Chichen Itza, we visited shrines to fertility, the Goddess Ixchel, and the ruin whose enclosed room ensured that every woman who entered there would become pregnant within the year. Was it flirtation, or were we serious? On our last morning in Mexico, Barry wrote me a note in the airport, when we were supposed to be writing postcards, and expressed his anxiety about our separation upon returning to the U.S. He asked me to live with him. I thought about it for a few days, and agreed. I could tell Barry had integrity: he wouldn't leave me with a child, he wouldn't betray me with another woman unless I betrayed him first, and he wouldn't tell me he was in love with me when he wasn't. Besides, he had Paul Wellstone's book on his nightstand at home. An unspoken agreement formed. We would have a child. After that, we would see. In September, I charted my waking temperature, picked the date, and we conceived. The little soul who had waited twenty years for me settled in to my body, and began to make herself at home. Meanwhile, Barry and I adjusted to living together, sleeping together, and sharing household duties. Still looking for work, and picking up part-time teaching jobs for income, I wasn't able to pay my fair share. Barry carried the bulk of the expenses, bought me a cell phone for protection, and kept a bedside copy of the book, How to Make a Pregnant Woman Happy. He did the housekeeping and the laundry, while I grocery shopped and cooked the meals. We had a shared project and a shared household. What I didn't anticipate was how our lives would change with the birth of our shared project, Flora. Up to the birth we had leaped certain hurdles, met each other's families, announced our expectant child and our absence of marriage, chosen a name in Jewish tradition by honoring Barry's mother, Florence, and even agreed to hyphenate our child's last name. In the hospital after the birth, Barry signed the affidavit of paternity that would record him as the father on Flora's birth certificate, and we were catapulted into the role of co-parents, exchanging our newborn between us every few hours while the other parent slept, ate, or rested. We used the hair-dryer and the vacuum cleaner for white noise to soothe our sobbing infant, left fine dinners with to-go cartons because our baby just couldn't wait. We shared the intensity of that first summer with Flora--and the absolute beauty of it, of her fragile tender alert presence--and we loved her fiercely, in ways no other two people would ever love her. When Flora wailed and Barry walked with her, back and forth, rubbing her back and whispering to her, something shifted for me. I watched my child's father nurturing her with patience and kindness. No other man or woman would have the relationship to Flora that Barry could offer her. He was even willing to take her at 3:00 a.m., when I was exhausted after hours of nursing and tears, frustrated and sleep-deprived. I decided to postpone leaving him. Since then, it's been two years. "Mommy! Mommy!" Flora calls out from the front door and dashes in to the kitchen where I am cooking dinner. It is always like this: she and Barry have been out on some amazing expedition, visiting the zoo, riding the train or the carousel, and she can't wait to tell me where she's been and what she's seen. Barry is slower to enter, muttering and stammering something about their adventures while Flora excitedly narrates in two-year-old English, "Train! Carousel!" They look at each other for affirmation and then back at me as they try to tell the story of their time together, each talking at the same time, Flora shouting and jumping, Barry setting down the travel bag and unpacking what's left of Flora's snacks, clothing, souvenirs. He often brings back something to put in her baby book: a postcard, a train ticket, something that will help her know how much she was loved. As parents nearing 50, we know our lives are rich with Flora. We know life is not without end. We take pictures; we write narratives; we save mementos. Our relationship is like an arranged marriage from the old days: we have chosen each other with little prelude, and have been thrown into family life while still getting acquainted. In the process we have become friends, sometime lovers, occasional companions. The intimacy is tenuous, partial, erratic. I sleep with Flora; Barry sleeps in the guest room. Occasionally, we rendezvous during nap-time, joke about our cabana in Tulum, fantasize about faculty exchanges to Italy or Greece. Meanwhile Barry's stacks of books, papers, and boxes fills the family room, the study, the basement. Meanwhile I am impatient and quick to act, quick to anger and criticism. We try to be patient with each other's quirks. We try to be patient with our toddler. Each morning when Flora wakes up, I take her to the window and show her the back yard: there is her swing, here is her sandbox, then it's her pool, the trees, the flowers, the birds. Flora knows no other home except this one, here, with us. Because Flora is here, I cook healthy meals, keep regular hours, cut flirtations in the bud. Barry repairs the house, keeps the temperature warmer in winter and cooler in summer than either one of us would do for ourselves. We both work less, and play more. With Flora, we become a family rather than two isolated academics, a family that recreates and continues our own childhoods. Originally thinking that I would "stick it out" for Flora, I find some unexpected benefits here for myself. With Barry and Flora to come home to, I feel grounded, content. The waiting is over. "Mommy, Daddy, Flora!" Often, Flora will recite the attendance list: who is here in our house? Who is part of our family? Sometimes the doggy makes it to the list, other times not, but the trinity of Mommy-Daddy-Flora remains consistent. This week, Barry was away at a conference, and I read library books to Flora each night before bedtime, trying to keep her mind away from her absent father. "Where is the mommy?" I asked, opening a book of animal stories that featured a duck family. Flora points to the larger duck. "That's right, Flora. And how many mommies are there?" I persist, trying to teach Flora her numbers. "Two," Flora replies. There is only one large duck, but two small ducklings. "Two?" I decide this is a teachable moment. "How many mommies does Flora have?" "Two," Flora replies. "Mommy," she rests her head on my shoulder, "and Daddy." Damn. If he's that good, I decide, I'll have to stay another year. Maybe longer.
A Tree House of Her Ownby Kelli Russell Agodon This morning my husband went on the Internet and printed out detailed plans for building a tree house. There was a quick discussion on cost--I heard "about four hundred dollars"--but what concerned me most was that the tree house would be finished, not left incomplete in our backyard as a visual sign to the world: "The Agodons Do Not Finish Projects." An in-progress kayak has remained hidden for seven years in our basement; the washing machine covers a half-finished floor in the laundry room; and in the bathroom a strategically-placed toothbrush holder conceals missing wall tiles. But the tree house will be one of the first things you see as you open the garden gate and walk to our front door. If it isn't completed, it will be the oversized and un-finished welcome wagon we'll be rationalizing to guests for years to come. My fear of incompleteness expands: I imagine my daughter at sixteen standing in our backyard; there behind her is the unfinished tree house, the one she was never able to climb. We will start her a therapy fund instead of a college account so she can talk about her childhood's unfulfilled hopes and dreams. And there's a part of me that would understand. After all of our googling for tree house plans and our talks about how to do this, when my husband walked into the garage to find his chainsaw to trim down a space for the tree house I thought, "No kidding, this is seriously going to happen." I always wanted a tree house, but my father was a sort of Ward Cleaver dad, magically appearing at night for dinner, then, just as quickly as he arrived, disappearing into the bedroom to go to sleep. When I awoke the next morning, he was already back at work, a phantom dad who smoked a pipe, had an office, and left a check for my allowance under my placemat every other Monday. I realized this year that my memories of times with my father were so clear because they were so infrequent. In second grade he took me to my first Mariner's game on a school night. They played the Kansas City Royals. I brought my mitt. I wore my Mariner's shirt and red baseball cap. We walked up the slope of Seattle's Kingdome to look out over the city--my dad and me at a ballgame. One night my dad brought me home a Styrofoam replica of Boeing's new 747. One night he came home with a guitar for me. Another time, it was a cockatiel. I had never asked for all these strange gifts, or even known I wanted them. But this was my father: a sort of eccentric Republican who arrived occasionally with surprising presents. To thank him, I would buy him soap on a rope at Christmas time from our Avon lady, and with this I considered us even. I remembered so many distinct interactions with my dad because in my life he played the part of the mysterious stranger who moved through the house like a shadow. As I considered all these memories from my dad, I wondered why I didn't have any particularly strong memories of my mother. Then it occurred to me: my mom was always there. She was the comfortable beige chair I never noticed, always available and open to have me sit with her. I don't remember my mom as much because we were always together. Just as surely as I can't remember when the common freckle on my hand appeared, I know I received the unusual scar on my leg when I accidentally impaled myself with a pair of scissors while cutting out a photo of Scott Baio and watching Lawrence Welk with my nana. It's easy to remember the exception or the freak occurrence, and my father was more of that uncommon element. He was the shiny white agate on the beach, not the common gray rocks that were my life. So as my husband revved up the chainsaw this morning to cut down any parts of the cherry tree that didn't say "tree house," I was returning to my own childhood. My daughter and I stood in the yard with our safety glasses on and when we heard the chainsaw roar, a sound I imagine could compare to a T-Rex ready to kill its prey, we raced into the house to watch from the bathroom window. We would return to the carnage of branches and splinters later. When the roar quieted, we went outside to see what my husband had done. I saw huge long limbs of the cherry tree laying across our lawn and I felt a little weepy. Not because I was the tree hugger who cried when our neighbors cut down four beautiful evergreens from their lot (and were forever nicknamed "The Tree-haters"), but because this was really happening. We would be the owners of a tree house, a mini-condo under a cherry universe. I realized that our daughter would experience what I never did, a place of her own above earth in the limbs of another world. But more than just a tree house of her own, she would experience a father who would be there for her in the details of life, not a mysterious stranger who appeared after work with gifts or tickets. As she looked up into the space where her tree house would be, I realized that she will know herself better because she knows him. Kelli Russell Agodon, the author of two books of poems, Small Knots and Geography, lives in the Northwest with her husband and daughter. She can be found reading in her daughter's tree house on warm summer days. Pendulumby Teryl Faulkner "Nothing can make me stop drinking," my father told my mother the day my brother was born. Twelve years later, a first and last family meeting is called. My mother and father stand in front of the couch, each at opposite ends of the coffee table. She appears agitated and reluctant, as though summoning the courage to leap into a freshly thawed lake; he, the slightest bit eager. "I'll only be gone for awhile," my father promises. "I'll be back." Car keys loose in his mechanic's hand, he leaves the house as a sigh does the lungs. Through the window, the three of us watch the night's big snowflakes settle about his hair. The Cadillac swallows his down-filled bomber and, in melodramatic slow motion, my father drifts away. My mother has been going to Al-Anon for some time. She tells us our father has a disease that prevents him from changing with life, that caps his growth. Because of it, he forgets to retrieve his six-year-old son from baseball games. He misses dinners and eats out more and spends time and money at the bar down the street with his friends. He loses track of things that might otherwise matter. I rarely see him during the years that follow, which seems mostly alright. I have my own friends, I love high school, and I bond with our family dog Martha. I can count on the gentle rhythm of Martha's rough pads on pavement, and the more accomplished sounds of their sinking and plucking in the mud. We walk in the rain and the snow and along creeks filled with sequins by the sun. Martha draws me off the trails and into the longer grasses, the deeper woods. Which is where I meet Bill and his dog, Rambo. I like that Bill dresses in camouflage, takes to the forests, and walks his dog. Later, when I think of him (and I'll occasionally pick him out of sylvan dreams), I see red sugar candied onto the corners of his laughing mouth. This is how he appears tonight in my best friend Paige's rec room. Paige has been dating Bill's best friend, Todd and the four of us play cards and watch movies and toboggan in the parks together. It's Friday night and Bill and Todd know Paige's parents are away. They knock at her door, Rambo nosing in the snow behind them. Their laughter is loud and fills the entranceway with familiar vapours. They remove their scarves and toques and amass a pile of damp outerwear on the steps. The four of us descend the short flight of steps to the TV and VCR. I ask Bill, how was the ravine, aren't you cold? He grins and asks for a kiss. I ask again about the ravine. He grins and puckers. He must be kidding, I think. Can he not hear me? And then, not the puckering but the glassy eyes, the rummy breath and the sleepy smile take me back to the kitchen where I used to find my father late at night. I would already have been in bed for hours, waiting for the familiar scuffling of my father's key in the door. Next, I would hear him shuffling the pots and pans in the drawer beneath the oven. I might wander downstairs to find him holding a can opener and staring at the cupboard of canned food – pork and beans, tuna, Klik, sweet corn. Then he would abandon that mission and instead root through leftovers in the fridge. He would talk and I would listen. I didn't mind his sweet rummy breath and the way his words seemed to have no edges, the way they rolled and blended back into his body. "Imagine living on a boat and drifting towards all the ends of the lake and never choosing one end or another." Most of the time I didn't know what he was talking about but I didn't need to know. As a child, I was happy to see my father happy. But Bill's happiness, and at this moment it seems plentiful, is annoying. Bill and I are both fifteen and I expect inclusion. I want any kissing to mean something; I want everything to mean something. I'm indignant, self-righteous and repulsed. Clearly, boys can't be trusted. Alcohol is evil and people, especially boys, who drink it are no pals of mine. Paige and I send Bill and Todd back into the cold ravine. Through the screen door we watch their breath freeze into hard white clouds. ~ At ten you can show a child a pair of lungs blackened by smoking and the child becomes a fierce non-smoking advocate. She runs home to tell her father to quit. The smoke in the restaurant makes her despair and write sensible letters to the local newspaper. But then adolescence creeps in and wipes that strong, body-centred morality from mind. Self-destructive forces prevail and she will stand in their midst: placid, strong, smoking. She will understand, her confused bodymind will understand, why her father does it. Similarly, Paige's parents' liquor cabinet soon begins to shimmer and sparkle, indeed to beckon and bewitch. One day I hate Bill for drinking, and the next I plunge with glee into the cabinet's enchanting depths: peach schnapps, cherry brandy, pink wines, Baby Duck. We soon move on to cans of Coors Light, bottles of Molson Dry, vodkas and rums and velvety red wines. Paige and I pride ourselves on the granite caves we have for stomachs. Now if Bill were to shed his big camouflage parka and descend the short flight of steps to the TV and VCR, I would merrily pour tequila into his red candy grin, drink and kiss and drink some more until we would travel my father's infinite sea together. But who needs Bill, really? What's important is that I have discovered a buoyant new way of being. My father and I can now relate. I drop by to visit him in his new apartment with his New Woman. She makes me Caesars with just the right seasoning, the perfect stalk of celery and just the right amount of vodka. ~ By twenty-one I've become a regular at my father's dinner parties. My brother is here and New Woman and a few other drinking buddies, some cousins, uncles. All are welcome for a toddy (or twelve). My brother stays the night since there's recently been a close call and a stop to the drinking and driving. I stay too and wake early with a hangover. I have a coffee with New Woman, whose bloodshot eyes seem sad and small in a surround of pillow-imprinted skin. The boys are still sleeping. This always amazes me. I might pass out for awhile but my sleep is fitful and by seven, after only three or four hours, I'm wide awake. It's as though my body can't sleep and clean at the same time. I feel bad for body, sort of. I ask New Woman to say good-bye for me, to tell them thanks, I had a great time. And then I drive back to my mother's place. My mother lives only a twenty minute drive away. Her place is still my home, not because it's where I grew up but because it's where she lives. I stayed with my mother after my father left and after my brother followed him and after my father didn't come back. I stay with her when I'm home from university. Nonetheless, I operate more and more like my father. I panic at the prospect of being without booze in any social situation. I make sure I am the one in charge of stocking up for weekends and evenings. I spend money I don't have. I love a good hangover, the fogginess, an excuse to do nothing all day but relive the blurry events of the evening before. Even after university, I connect most deeply with those who remain at the bar the longest. I adore friends who can drink to marvelous excess and feign interest in those who either can't or, inconceivably, choose not to. I can tell the difference between the two by matching my drinks to theirs. If they're ready to order another with me, or, even better (and most rare), before me, they are keepers. If, however, I have to hold back too much, I become uncomfortable. I feel I have to repress the most buoyant, convivial, indeed lovable me, the me I'm sure I like best. In these relationships I am my father at the edge of that coffee table, eager to be in my element, eager to be with the keepers. By the time I've driven across town to my mother's place, I'm sure I've aged a decade. My cells perk up slightly at the garlic sautéing on the stove. I follow them, my cells, as they settle like millions of tiny magnets onto her couch; there we lie and await sober conversation, lemon water and herbal tea. "Chamomile?" My mother seems so energetic, so… hydrated as she hovers by the tea cupboard. "Maybe. What else is there?" "Orange mango. Peppermint. Fennel. Apple spice. Lemon zinger. Dandelion. Raspberry leaf..." The list pours from a face so smooth she might have slept in mid-air. She knows I'm hung-over. The amount and frequency of my drinking may be a secret, but the drinking itself is a fact. She smiles, remembering how she once endured her own hangovers. After all, she was married to my father for several years. They drank together until we children appeared. She seems to trust that, like her, I will happen upon a good reason to stop. She seems to have a great deal of faith in me. I'm so fortunate, it occurs to me, to have been born to this woman who sees and hears and trusts the me that grows on tea and lemon water. "Dandelion, please." I've heard somewhere dandelion is good for the liver. It's the least I can do. ~ It's Christmas. I'm at my father's. I'm twenty-eight and all about the toasting. I've made rules that require everyone to sip and slurp together. "A toast to the chef!" "Here's to the turkey!" "What would we do without holidays?" "Here's to health...oh, and laughter" (that's two separate drinks). A few seconds of silence and somebody asks for the salt. "Here's to salt," says my brother, "And to the sand!" This is the only place where my life converges with my brother's. Here, drunk and at my father's, we connect. Otherwise, he has remained in this town with my father. He works with my father. He has a small boat like my father. He has chosen his friends like my father. My fairly aimless pursuits in the realms of school and travel puzzle them both. "Good one," I say with a proud nod. As glasses empty, I leap to fill them again. I'm wearing a red toque with a white flashing pompom. The tree is plump and lit and sparkling in the corner as though cheering me on. I bound into the kitchen. Empty glasses jingle like bells in my hands and the table breaks into applause. "Must be a bloody Jewish thing." New Woman has decided the friend I've brought along is cheating. "Relax," says my brother with a shrug. "We'll just deal again. How bout getting us another round, Sis? Here's to cards!" Father, Brother and I are on the team of the merry. "Lighten up or lift off" is our motto. On the whole, we're unimpressed by anything that doesn't leave us amused with ourselves. My father raises his glass. "To the cards," he confirms. We raise our glasses and New Woman slams her cards, all nines and tens, onto the table and breaks for the washroom. And then New Woman's ten-year-old granddaughter Carrie ventures towards us from the other room. She raises her glass of red Kool-Aid. "Here's to Jesus. Christmas is for Christ and we should all be grateful." Carrie sets her glass on the table, turns her eyes to the floor and retreats to the other room. The shots of Jack Daniels my father, brother and I bonded over an hour earlier become loud inside me. I can't quite hear her. She isn't making sense. She hasn't found our world yet ; we can't hear her. She's growing places we can't see for the glasses we must keep full. She doesn't try again, simply wanders away. I imagine her inviting us all to her baseball game. We probably wouldn't go. Or we might, so long as we could call it a party, bring our flasks of rum and whisky, our sheepskins filled with wine. Maybe it would be easier to say, sorry, we're busy, pick you up later. Later would always become "just one more round." She'd probably find another way home. "No, Anne Murray's fine," I concede. "Here's to Anne!" My father has already begun to dance his fun little moves on the living room floor. I take his hand and twirl beneath his raised arm but as I dip back over his arm that surprising new weight grows heavier still. I rush to the bathroom. The tears are confusing. This shouldn't matter. Carrie will be okay. Everything should be easy, fine, coated in red candy grins. But I can't let it go the way they can. I seem to be built differently. That I will toss and turn all night while my father sleeps soundly seems suddenly such a poignant detail. I see Carrie standing with her raised glass of Kool-Aid, grown-up enough to make her own toast, a valiant attempt to join in with the adults. I hear the pleasing suction of my dog's soft pads in the mud: the fierceness of grounding and the release of freedom. I wash my face and blink hard. I reset the flash on my pompom, and head for the card table. ZZ Top, New Woman's favourite album, plays on the stereo. I say I'm sorry, I don't know what happened. Father looks concerned. He doesn't like to see me upset, he says, and it occurs to me that he's never seen me upset. He's never looked straight at me -- both of us motionless -- he's only ever seen me from his drifting boat. "Well, good morning Sis. Hows about making us another drink?" My brother seems immortal at twenty-seven. My father nods and touches his glass, catches himself before falling from the stool. He opens his mouth but the words seem to roll back into his body. He raises a heavy finger instead, a sporting attempt to second that motion. I collect my belongings. It's time to head back to my mother's. As I hug my brother and father, I tell them I'll visit again soon. I wonder if they'll remember. I'll visit, regardless, I adore them both. In a few years, friends will comment on the lovely toast my father will make at my wedding, on how genuine and perceptive it was. I close the door behind me and shudder as the faint craving for dandelion tea creeps through my wine-stained veins. ~ Eventually I reach what feels like a deeper freedom. By eventually I mean that the drinking persists and things happen. An undiagnosed illness for example, that instigates a hard core parasite cleanse that ends, I'm embarrassed to note, in a night of tequila shots, which is then followed by another sort of undiagnosed illness whose symptoms leave me afraid to drink anything but milk thistle tea. I start to feel better. I get pregnant. I nurse my child. I emerge from Paige's parents' liquor cabinet, rife with roisterous memories, and a little dewy. I now drink more like normal people do. I befriend abstainers and moderate drinkers alike. It's as though the swinging pendulum of my mother and father has settled within me. At thirty-five, I'm at my father's dinner table again. It's getting late for my two and a half year old son, who is perched on the chair beside me. My brother starts pouring the wine. I protect my glass with a hand and tell him I'm fine with water. They're eager to celebrate – I've just told them I'm three months pregnant. "How about you? Would you like a glass of wine?" New Woman is including my son in the ritual. She is probably kidding but he cheers, "Wine, wine." She looks at me and says she'll get a smaller cup. I say, no that's okay, we're not doing that, as though it's one of the practical decisions parents make, like whether or not to use cloth diapers. The toasts are made and my son raises his glass of water. In my new role as sober mother, something unwieldy appears over the dinner table. I don't know what it is but I want to shield my son from it, as if with sunscreen or a wide-brimmed hat. It's not the alcohol per se, but has more to do with the mood of things, with an eerie lack of meaning: the toasting, the banter, the clever one-liners. I want him to know these things in the context of the heavier stuff. But he's two. His little eyebrows go up and down. He loves people; he loves a good party. I'm anxious to get us all back to the safety of my mother's home, despite the fact that these people are absolute teddy bears. They know safety: they've childproofed the staircase with a barstool. Though I suppose my brother can seem mildly angry at times. My mother tells me my brother was most upset with my father when we were a family. Perhaps that's what I sense in him now, the latent certitude of a life wrongly followed, the cosmic growling of unused potential, the unchecked expression of the alcohol-preferring gene. Under what circumstances might he have resisted the allure of his father's world? Might he still? On the other hand, he's turned out to be a decent, likable, independent human being who has his own home with a small vegetable garden. He takes my mother for dinner on Mother's Day. He laughs a lot. I put my son to bed and come back for a few rounds of cards. I like that I'm pregnant and can't drink with them; I like that I'll go to bed earlier and that I'll feel fine tomorrow. In the morning, my brother goes to work. My father stays behind to have breakfast with me and with his grandson. He draws a box of cereal from the pantry. I know how he likes his cereal, how he always fills his bowl so full of fruit -- bananas and raisins and peaches and whatever may be in season -- that there really isn't much room for cereal at all. Now, he pours and peels and chops and sprinkles and, with pride and enthusiasm, presents my son with his own bowl and says, "See? Now you need to know, this is a real bowl of cereal." Walking Our Mothersby Kristin Berger Something has switched between us, our roles are reversed, my hand is leading hers. A late summer sun sears our backs, shadows our faces. The meadow crests into nothingness, a clean sweep of hill emblazed by blue sky. Our feet seek the seam of hard packed clay between tall grasses going to seed. Our pace finds a rhythm in the rising heat, up the trail to a dusty summit. My mother's breath softens as a female marsh hawk skims over the abandoned orchard ahead of us. With deep chocolate and taupe feathers, the hawk pivots her head to the right, then to the left, searching for any scurrying vole, field mouse or exposed songbird. Our legs imitate her sweeping confidence, her owning of this place. My mother used to be my link to the world beyond the door, my anchor, when I was so little and light, I felt like I could lift off in a slight breeze. She opened the door for my brother and me to a quiet pond in the northern Michigan woods. Throughout dramatic changes in her life -- going back to school, divorce, single-motherhood -- my mother kept our cabin as a place of refuge, a center point for all our wanderings. We spent summers playing in mucky pond sand and writing our own lore on the pink undersides of birch bark. The dark canopy of white pine and northern spruce hid our "bear dens" and secret places. The pond and the woods were the world where we moved beyond boundaries, from doorstep to cattails, from chores to our imagination. Unless it was raining or time for bed, we could not quiet the day that called to us with its insistent humming. We followed our mother into meadows of knee-high blueberry bushes before the deer and bears could fill their bellies with the tart, wild fruit. We floated out to meet her on plastic rafts, the water cool to our fingers and toes, out to where she gleamed, oil-covered, in the sun. She showed us how to create rock animals, collages of driftwood, shells, and leaves with the pooling miracle of Elmer's Glue. She wove macramé from a low branch at the water's edge, the wind sifting both her hair and the rough ropes in pulses. She crafted owl-shaped wall hangings into shape, catching thick sticks with their knotted talons. When did it change, when did we crossover? When did I begin to lead her out into fields, into the brightness of the larger world? Was she the mother, the child, or the friend guided out of grief by another? The boundaries of our roles suddenly blurred as we closed our eyes from the sun, relieved for the moment by a brief, total darkness. My mother visits Portland in mid-August, deep within our "dog days", which is the most deceptive time to visit. The thought of rain, the memory of it, is as parched as the glaciers graying on the mountains. Her visit is to be short -- over the weekend we will attend a 60th wedding anniversary party for her best friend's parents. Friends and family are flying in from all over the country, joy at reuniting lifting them above the reality of the bride's ailing health, that this might be their last chance to be with her. In the cloudless sky, their planes approach from the east, brilliant white birds winging their way to land. It is a necessary trip for my mother, whose own mother died suddenly in May. Since then, she has not stepped back from the daily chore of living, and this trip might give her a chance to catch her breath. As the only child of her parents, she makes weekly, four-hour trips to visit her father. Her job as a medical office manager and the taking care of her husband and their six dogs and cats have taken its visible toll. She is weary, heavy eyed, and close to tears, especially throughout the celebration. At the party we sip wine, refold our linen napkins after the luncheon. We relax into the groom's words of gratitude, how full his life has been because of his bride, their children, grandchildren and friends. We all become fragile and open in the heat, with the wine, and with his declarations. After the couple kisses for the crowd clanging on their crystal, my mother excuses herself and leaves the room. I don't follow her. Motherless, she is finally at a loss, she is lost. She cannot chill her sadness with dismissive busyness. On vacation, there is nothing to do, no one to manage. My mother has never been without her mother, and no one has ever trusted solely in me to figure out the next step. In the late afternoon, my large, cool house welcomes us back with its thick mahogany doors, crown molding, and leaded windows. We wait out the afternoon as if waiting for a storm to break, the good clearing that comes from thunderclaps and a sharp, summer rain. I have washed and spread out new, striped sheets on the futon, tuckingin all the corners the way my nurse/mother taught me. Fluffed and stacked pillows promise her a dark and dreamless sleep. My mother and I fall into an easy routine whenever she visits -- the parading of new clothes, full photo albums, and gifts from her deep leather bag. We continue this way, unfolding, dropping the day around us like new, tight shoes. Open windows let the evening air sift in, heavy with the scent of blackberries ripening along the street. A moth invites itself in and heads for the lit candle in a brilliant death wish. We sip tea and the night wraps around us like a thin shawl. She lets me break out my tarot deck (a Zen Buddhist deck, not very witchy for a conservative, Lutheran mother), and watches the cards deliver messages for us to decipher. The images are full of lone figures, many of children on cliffs, at gates, on shadowy paths. Each are about to leap off, embark on a strange journey. There is no longer any pretense. No one, not even me, can tether her and she comes loose. She sits on a pile of pillows, low to the ground, where she can finally be grounded, cry, and begin to grieve. By morning, her face is sheet-stained and pink. I pour her a cup of strong coffee with cream and pull back the curtains. We sit on the porch rocking chairs like a couple of old ladies, watching the birds along the calm, blanched street. Later, I will take her to an appointment with my massage therapist and then to lunch with her best friend. But first, we decide to hike up to the summit of Powell Butte. We arrive at the gravel parking lot and the dog leaps out of the car and begins her mouse-pouncing dance. All the mountains are visible with low, hazy clouds circling them like skirts. My mother's midwestern trained eyes lift up as I scan the trees and air for any bird crossing or calling. We take a trail up to a wide and wild meadow -- from here I have seen fox and kestrels, western meadowlarks and lazuli buntings. Today, purple vetch twines around the tall grasses. Barn swallows nip at the air, chatting with each other past our shoulders. A marsh hawk takes off from her silent fence post and the air suddenly clears, severed by her low soaring. A rail-tie map at the summit radiates 360 degrees, pointing to the buttes and extinct and active volcanoes, etched below: Mt. Hood, Mt. St. Helens, Silverstar, Mt. Adams, Rocky Butte, The West Hills, Mt. Jefferson, and Jenne Butte. An old pear orchard leans silver, yet heavy with fruit in the nearly silent morning. The lightness that surrounds us contrasts with the night before, it lends a clarity about what is best to do for my mother, the flailing child. Beyond carefully mapped streets and their funneled traffic, the curve of the land is uncemented and alive. Our walking feels like a meditation into something fuller than this ordinary day. We can love ourselves, our situations and losses, and the land by following a thin vein of trails and accepting the given, imperfect views. Corridors to our buried hearts, we can learn to traverse our pain into another way of being, into a new identity. From child to mother to crone to crone. There is no promise of arrival, only an unending ramble. We grow warm under our layers, and by the time we get back to the car we are thirsty and hungry. The day's schedule waits. My mother will receive her first body massage, will walk down the crowded sidewalk like a woman floating. My hand will let go as she finds her own way past the bookstores, flower vendors and musicians. She will be suspended above her grief, even for such a small moment. Buoyed by her first solo flight, she will be confident that there is someone below waiting for her when she lands.
Girl-Shyby Kris Malone Grossman I’ve wept at Dr. Christiane Northrup public television specials. I’ve dreamed of marching on Washington with my little girl. So the second my tummy popped last winter, all my friends greeted me with a hug. “Going for a daughter,” they’d wink—I already have two sons—and I’d crack a joke about finally getting to gorge on miniature tutus and matching hair accessories. Then the sonogram flashed me another full frontal boy, and I started to cry. But not because I had to kiss those tutu dreams so long, that I’d have to stomach another bris, or even that nature had just issued a de facto death warrant for my mitochondrial DNA. I cried because I was profoundly relieved: I wouldn’t have to bring a girl into this man’s world. I know, I know, it’s not a man’s world anymore. Except that it is. Why else would I feel the nagging urge to hang my diplomas with the linens in the laundry room? Sure, on the better days, they’d serve as a reminder—to me and my kids—that I once excelled at something besides slinging waterproof sheets in my extended stay-at-home gig. Then again, they might also bring to mind my former students’ reaction to Judy Syfer’s 70s essay “I Want a Wife”: outrage and ridicule. “She should keep her place,” a steamed female reader said. “Sexism’s a thing of the past,” a male student added, and the whole class, save a young woman from the Bronx, nodded in assent. This was the same group that proclaimed, much as Norman Mailer once asserted, that one can identify a woman’s writing by its inferior, emotional tone—plenty to turn me emotional. Where, and from whom, had they learned this? It was the new millennium, and still the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, for goodness’ sake, but Mother Earth remained unfit for any daughter of mine. Granted, at the next class meeting I did distribute a stack of blind reads to illustrate that one cannot determine a writer’s gender (or anything else) by “sniffing,” in Mailer’s tradition, his or her ink—an exercise that devolved into an enlightening, if discouraging, class debate about women’s work (“not so bad”), the ERA (“quaint”), and Britney Spears (“liberated”). A more effective lesson may or may not have been a stroll through the university’s writing department, headed by men and staffed with a fleet of part-time female instructors effectively derailed from the tenure track (and health insurance) because they wished to cobble together a schedule that allowed them to breastfeed and earn, or maybe (as was my case BC: before children) to work as a freelance writer and earn a regular paycheck, even if it was a pittance, even if it included grading papers at home among other “hidden” work (not, come to think of it, so unlike housework)—a desire the school exploited simply because it could. The dean wants a wife, too, I almost told my students—multiple wives, and consoled myself: at least the restrooms in our country’s higher institutions of learning didn’t read “women” and “professors” anymore. The world of book publishing, where I had also been employed BC, was no different: Men occupied the hot-shot positions while a gaggle of women, jacked on caffeine, toiled after hours like Santa’s elves on the nether floors, a custom that made me long to stage a “Free To Be You and Me” revival—and made shudder for the girl I might someday bear. Fresh out of grad school, I’d managed to fast talk HR into bumping my starting pay from twenty two to twenty four thousand a year, because of my advanced degree, a feat I considered no small coup until I discovered that a male colleague in an adjacent cube leapt from the low forties to three figures in a matter of months. That, plus the fact that many publishing houses were pushing novels whose male authors regularly scored higher advances than female writers (because, as Mailer might have argued, their prose had “balls,”), chagrined me as writer. It also compounded my recent shock, as mother and woman, at a full-time mom who was recently quoted in the New York Times as deliberately declining to purchase books about the female experience because it “protected” her sanity. So much for pumping up those advances. I couldn’t help but remember the physician husband in the 1800s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” issuing his struggling, postpartum wife a companion prescription: No writing, it will only upset you. Thankfully, no women I know have taken such an outmoded cure, and a host of recent articles has stirred up serious food for twenty-first century thought. Such as how the majority of today’s parents, while they assure their girls they can grow up to inhabit any role they aspire to, rarely mention in detail the unique choices they as women might have to face. Choices that, the way our country’s work culture is structured, have yet to affect men in the same, often detrimental manner. Take for example, statistics underscoring the innumerable perks (promotions, raises) corporate men are afforded for having families, while women are penalized, or at best, marginalized, for the same. “Hey, Baby Girl! Bet you can’t wait to be pushed out of the office—for pushing out a baby! And should you stay, you just might earn unequal pay!” Or zero pay. For the past six years I myself have so-called “opted out” of the (paid) work force—by opting in to the domestic sphere to raise my children, a sphere to which I have yet to acclimate without assistance from a patchwork of sitters and various SSRIs that soften the edges around incessant wipe and diapering, spit-up scrubbing, and, in a Friedan-esque nod, peanut butter sandwich scarfing. My earning power having all but flagged, or even reversed course, I am rendered economically dependent for the first time in my adult life, while my husband amasses ever more raises and desirable titles and actually gets to do things like commute—thirty minutes of silence, not once but twice a day—and travel to such places as Parisian boutique hotels, sojourns that hare kare me with envy. Oh, to be served a meal, even airline grub; to recline, unmolested, in a coma-like state anyplace apart from the aforementioned laundry room! Eerie to consider my mom and her peers regarded their husbands’ travel in much the same way thirty-five years ago. Eerier still is the bizarre refrain I often employ to justify my having relinquished, if however temporarily, my previous professional pursuits: Good thing I was never driven to be a CEO. If I had been, I’d undoubtedly experience authentic ambivalence and about my current title as homemaker, as if my vocation as teacher and writer, becoming the very “anything” my parents always assured me I could be, clearly doesn’t count because of—like mommyhood—its unremarkable pay. As I did when my students protested Syfer’s essay, I have to ask: Where, and from whom, did I learn this? Certainly not my parents or husband or peers, all of whom concur: Mothering is a respectable job. A good job. The most important job in the world (along with fathering, of course). It’s just not always that fulfilling. Don’t get me wrong, I love my kids. And I do manage to eke out writing time between slicing bananas and reading Curious George; enough, anyway, to cover our annual diaper bill. And yes, my husband and I religiously refer his salary as “ours.” We even regularly dare to break those precious email chains referring to a mommy’s paycheck as “sunshine, smiles, and hugs.” Yet something on the home front still rings disingenuous whenever I remind my kids (and anyone who hopes to eat in my kitchen) that “mommy” is synonymous with “privilege” and “super important job.” If this were true, wouldn’t the hospital have sequestered me in the lush maternity ward for a civilized fortnight, rather than turning me out while I was still waddling and beholden to the Bermuda Triangle of pain (mammaries, loins) after a pitiful two days? No man on the planet, in such condition, would allow himself to be discharged from round-the-clock coddling, especially not to weeks of unpaid leave. And by the way, if mothering really were the most important occupation in society’s eyes, wouldn’t the government be paying moms for vacation time, providing us with our own health insurance, 401Ks, Social Security—anything for our daily grind, which entails raising future laborers, stay-at-home or no, who will someday fuel the economic pool? An economic pool, by the way, ensconced in a democracy that elects a disproportionate number of men into office, then slaps their mugs on all of our currency, relegating Sacagawea and Susan B. Anthony to rare stamp-machine peep shows at the local P.O. I was shocked, at age six, when my own mom picked up a bookshelf globe and pointed to various locales she claimed not only revered women but actually featured female figures and forms not just on money but in public places and all significant art. Not so enlightened a land in which government stiffs long to drape Justice’s breasts in the name of decency, or where priggish administrators suspend girls for using the word “vagina” in suburban high schools (where, for the record, a walloping double standard persists to this day, as my sweet sixteen sitter can attest). Note to self: Determine just how to explain to a child—girl or boy—that while our country champions family values, it can’t muster the guts to meaningfully support the notion, or by extension, truly value children. Truth is, if my husband were to expire tomorrow, there’s no way that this government, which scarcely supports its war veterans and their families, would truly assist me and my kids, the very kids our leaders claim we should be making number one. And let’s not forget another, equally daughter-dampening helping of cultural schizophrenia, or what I like to call the Victoria’s Secretization of America: the sexed up status quo encompassing everything from thong bikini underwear for elementary school aged girls to pee-wee princess manicures to the grocery-store checkout rags touting women whittled to pre-pubescent frames. Women waxed bald from the neck down and adorned with exaggerated, otherworldly, yet somehow virginal, breasts, a.k.a., giant pacifiers for even balder men: mothering, sunk to its creepiest form, while real-mom images languish in back-water Web sites and indie photo shoots. Bad enough I recently had to try to explain to my four-year-old just why it is that he sees our town’s coiffed and Botoxed female population swill mondo black coffees rather than eat, while the daddies huff doughnut holes; I can hardly imagine trying to convince a daughter—straight-faced, as I have my sons—that I and the spandex mamas hamstering on the treadmills in the gym adjacent to the town preschool do so solely to stay “healthy.” And earlier this year, when a relative competed in the Miss USA pageant (is it possible this prime-time, soft-porn parade actually still exists?), I was eternally grateful that I had no daughter to contemplate our beauty queen’s post-loss comment: “No cocktails! I want pancakes—I haven’t eaten for a year.” Eating disorders, of course, while perpetuated by society, are also genetically to blame, and my genes are packing a hearty helping of anorexia, which gathered me to its bony bosom at the age of twelve, courted me through college, and has yet to entirely loosen its grip. How could I, even after years of recovery, ever presume to teach a daughter that it’s far from normal to converse with a carrot—or to shed so much poundage you’re virtually erasing yourself, becoming invisible, the very antithesis of feminism? One could, of course, mount an argument against procreation by conjuring any number of genetic ailments—addiction, mental illness, both of which, like eating diseases, run in my husband’s and my families, and both of which could be passed along to either a boy or girl. At this rate, why reproduce at all? To raise more feminists, of course. And as a feminist—and mother, woman, human being—I do mourn the might-have-beens a daughter may have brought. Like simply nurturing a girl. Or marching on the capitol for women’s lives, as my own mom and I did. Or throwing an all-night fest when she gets her first period, dishing about the first stack of texts she buys at college, helping her navigate her own set of choices someday—choices that, for better or worse, won’t be so different from mine—and even observing her interacting with and learning from my husband, who considers mothering a hardcore feminist pursuit. Which, in the end, reminds me that even with three boys, we’ll have our work cut out for us. That now, more than ever, it falls to us to teach them: It’s only through their participation that this man’s world will ever change, enough to deserve its daughters. And, for that matter, its sons. Kris Malone Grossman studied at UC Berkeley and Sarah Lawrence College, and really does hang her diplomas in the laundry room. She makes her home in southwestern Connecticut with her husband and three sons. "Girl-Shy" also appears in The Maternal Is Political: Women Writers at the Intersection of Motherhood and Social Change, edited by Shari MacDonald Strong. A Summer's Day: Mother to Childby Maureen Sullivan Keleher You could always find the key under the rock, where Mom left it: rusty, in a soggy plastic bag, beneath the flat slate rock to the left of the back stairs. Only she carried her own key: everyone else used the key caked with dirt. It was constant, reliable, permanent. But now Mom is gone and the key is gone. We don't know where it went, only that Dad went to Scituate this summer and it wasn't there. We have to depend on ourselves now: our memories and our new keys. It is July, a year and a half since we buried Mom, and I've taken eight-month-old Sebastian on his first trip to Scituate. As much as one can infuse an eight month old, I want to infuse him with Scituate and with Mom. I want to feel summer, sand, and especially, her. When I put in a load of laundry--written in permanent black marker on the washer machine cover is Yale Elec. 6/2002: the last time the machine was serviced. I look around the rest of the garage and see how many things she, with her rough hands and chipping nails, was likely the last to touch. Those hands used to hang towels on the line in the back yard; used to organize and reorganize the garage; used to leave notes on the kitchen table when she was out. Those hands are imprinted on so many parts of this house. We didn't call the house on Ocean Avenue a cottage, the way most people refer to a summer place. Though it wasn't a house you could live in year round, it had two floors, five bedrooms, two bathrooms. That was the house aspect. The beach aspect was the sandy kitchen floor, the screened-in front porch, and the outside shower with a wood plank beneath our feet. "It's the beach." That's what Mom always said. She said it if we overslept, if we weren't productive, if we felt like doing nothing. "It's the beach." That was the beauty of Scituate: we didn't have to do anything here. Sitting or reading or napping made a day worthwhile. There were no bedtimes, no rules about food in the living room, no concerns about stains on carpets or couches. We used paper plates more often than at home and even the real dishes were old. The cars in the driveway were unlocked, the beach chairs and tennis racquets were left in the yard, and the key was under the rock. She told friends and relatives, "Come anytime. Leave your car in the driveway. Let yourself in: the key's under the rock." We have always called this house simply by the name of the town: Scituate. My parents bought it in 1976, when I was just four years old. The water heater took up the middle of the yellow kitchen, the stove was ancient, and everything needed painting: the blue gray exterior; the living room ceiling tiles where the rain leaked through; the white baseboards that I hated to dust. One summer Mom and her sister Margo took the white wicker furniture from Gram's old summer house, painted it, and reupholstered it in a royal blue floral. No project was too much. In the mornings Mom was up early, long before us kids, to cut the hedges, call Gram and do laundry, plant some flowers. By 8 a.m. she had repainted all the baseboards or defrosted the freezer or had five piles of branches for us to bag for the dump. She was fearless in attacking lawns and ladders and hedges. Now Dad has hired someone to clean the house, cut the lawn, and replace the windows. (Mom never would have spent the money on a cleaning person in Scituate when she could do things her way.) I'm glad not to have projects awaiting me when I go. But there's something missing, too, in having everything, or most things, taken care of. The rugs are vacuumed and we don't have to scrub the bathrooms, but the milk in the fridge is three weeks old, and the cereal in the Tupperware is sticky because it's from last summer. If Mom could see the dates on these things, she would see how we feel her absence, in even the ordinary. As Sebastian rolls over and bumps his head, I pick him up and hear her in my voice, "Oh, buster, you'll be fine, just fine." "Hey, toots," she would have said. Or "C'mon, sweets, let's go." Unflappable with babies, she easily gave them affection, holding and cuddling them. More reserved with everyone else, however, she did not so much give, as happily accept, affection. Dad used to embarrass her with his hugs and kisses; we kids simply followed his lead, knowing that even if she didn't run up to us, we were welcome to run up to her and hug and kiss her as much as we wanted. She'd turn her head so you kissed her on the cheek, pat your back, and then laugh. Upstairs were the four kid bedrooms and then Mom and Dad's, set apart beyond the bathroom. When the linoleum floor in their room creaked in the mornings, we knew that one of them was up. The beds were old, all hand me downs from our real house: when a new mattress at home was bought, the old mattress came to Scituate and became new again. The bed in my room is still the same single from childhood: soft, short, and low. Anyone who sits on it sinks into the ancient flowery spread, a reminder that his or her back will ache in the morning. Whenever I've gone to Scituate as an adult, with any kid bed to choose from, I still have taken the old bed in my room. There's comfort there. I wash the sand out of Sebastian's shorts in the upstairs sink and tell him about my birthday many years ago: In the kitchen, Mom and Margo prepared dinner for our family and some friends. Mom yelled up from downstairs, "Maureen, is there water running up there? It's coming through the ceiling!" I had left my bathing suit in this same sink, where Sebastian now sits, with the water running. I received no more admonition than that. It was summer, it was the beach, and it was my birthday. The summer after Mom died, I didn't go to Scituate much. I missed her most in this place, both in what was still here and in what wasn't. The staples of peanut butter, apples, and large gumdrops were no longer waiting for us when we arrived. But the five curling irons that often made her return to the house, in case they had been left on, were here; the extra sweatshirts for family and guests were still in her dresser; the kitchen still had the green tile that she chose seven years ago. Upstairs, on the old green carpet outside my room, was the imprint of the iron: one Saturday night, in her rush to get ready for her and Dad's weekly dinner out with the O'Neills, she ironed her dress right there on the rug. I love that rough patch. Whether Mom was in Waltham or in Scituate, she had her lists. The difference was, in Scituate not everything got done on the list in a day, and that was okay. If someone stopped by unannounced in Waltham, she'd run upstairs to change out of her robe and put on some lipstick or furiously wash the kitchen counters again. In Scituate, bathing suits or shorts and t-shirts were enough. Dishes in the sink were acceptable. Drop-in visitors were a welcome distraction, rather than an inconvenience. In Scituate she was less private, needing less time and space to herself. At home in Waltham her book would sit by the couch for months, picked up occasionally before she'd doze off. But in Scituate the book was on the porch, in her beach chair, or on the table by the couch. Long and chatty phone calls, like visitors, were more pleasure than duty in summer. In Waltham she might tell me, "I was trying to get out of here this morning, but so-and-so called and I just couldn't get off the phone. I have so much to do, and she could talk forever." In Scituate, the phone would ring and she'd say, "Oh, you can bring it out to me on the porch." She might still do laundry while she talked, but she also might stay on the phone after she finished folding the basket of laundry. Her ease with time in the summers at Scituate gave us permission to be less productive, sit longer, and stay in bed later. I told her once, her last year here, as we went into the bank to make a deposit, "I'm afraid that my kids won't know you, that you won't know them." She, who would never talk about death, or what came next -- for her or for us without her -- smiled. "Oh, they will," she said. "I will." So I take Sebastian to Scituate, and I try to become less scared of going, less scared of the emptiness: I want to feel her there in the pictures over the fireplace, in the cool air on the front porch, in the creaky floor by her bureau. On that bureau I find her comb, once her father's comb. I can still see the initials PJM on it: M is for Murphy, her maiden name, now Sebastian's middle name. I slip the comb into my pocket to take home for Sebastian. Back on the front porch Sebastian and I eat lunch, just as we all used to do on a summer's day. The dining room was for doing work or reading the paper. We ate there only when it was raining or too cold to eat out at the picnic table. At night, if there was no baseball game on, we kids might get to choose the show. In Scituate we had cable. We needed it for any reception at all, so my parents gave in to it long before we got it in Waltham. It was exciting to sneak watching a Michael Jackson video when Mom wasn't home. When her car tires or feet crunched the rocky driveway, we'd lie down beneath the windows, click off the TV, and rush to other spots in the house. No doubt she always knew: from the driveway you can hear the buzz of the TV still. The sun is not so high now, so Sebastian and I go for a walk to the beach, passing the post office, even though we no longer have a box. Still, I like walking by it, watching people go in and out, observing the kids, younger versions of my siblings and myself, as they hop on their bikes and pedal away. Across the street, Glavin's is gone; in its place is just another condominium for sale. I can't just walk in and buy a Globe or an ice cream anymore; I have to get in the car and drive to the supermarket one town over. Two years ago my Mom was too tired to walk far, but knew that some walking would be good for her. We ended up passing a yard sale with my sister Cathy. "I've never been to a yard sale," Mom said. She was sixty-two years old, and she'd never been to a yard sale. She was as frugal as they come: she'd go three towns over to buy chicken that was on sale and she faithfully cut her coupons on Sundays, but buying things second-hand never crossed her mind. Cathy and I bought a little wooden rocking horse for $5. Mom kept it at the beach for the grandkids: back then there was only one-year-old Sean; I wonder whether she had any idea that just a year after she was gone, there would be two more boys for that rocking horse, Sean's brother Justin and our Sebastian. Now it's low tide. I push the stroller on the sand, nodding to the dog walkers and runners. I remember myself as a small girl at this time of day, hunting crabs, collecting them in pails, then letting them go before leaving the beach. Years later, I took this walk with Mom, down to Turtle Rock and all the way to the house on stilts. Now I tell Sebastian, "Your grandmother could walk this beach all day. She'd read her book by the water afterwards. You would have loved her. She would have adored you." I tell him that she would have pushed this stroller heartily, would have brought him over to her friend Mrs. O'Neill's for a visit, would have treated him to an ice cream at Wilbur's. At eight months Sebastian doesn't understand me, but I need to tell him stories about his grandmother. I need to tell myself about her, make sure that I feel both her presence and her absence. I avoid the Waltham house now: it feels cold and empty. For a while I checked to make sure that nothing of hers was out of place there– pictures of her, the top of her bureau, her robe. I didn't want Dad to change anything, to let her be gone. Now he is selling the Waltham house, and I feel grateful. It hasn't been her house since she died. In the pictures her wiry gray hair is permed and wild and trying to be tamed; there is no wig. She is healthy. In her younger days she was thin, so thin that she could make fun of herself when she was older. "Everyone says I'm so thin now," said after rounds of chemo and radiation. "But when I was younger I was thinner than this. Oh, I was too thin, but I thought I was gorgeous." If Mom were here, she would be taking this low tide walk with Sebastian and me. I could always recognize her by the way she swung her arms when she walked the beach, by the way her hips swayed when she stood by the water. I imagine her here now. My fears disappear, and I feel more certain that she had a happy life. When I think of her at the water's edge, turning to wave up at me on the beach stairs, I remember her as a forty year old mother with five kids and endless energy. A woman who was not sick and never accepted a day in bed for any of us, including herself. Sixty-three years then seems longer, fuller, more complete. Her life seems less cut short. The portable crib and the stroller are still here. But she's not. She didn't tell us how hard it would be without her. I feel better when I feel her absence now: for a while I was afraid of forgetting. When I'm in Scituate, I see her everywhere. Where I don't see her, I miss her. When I arrive now, I don't pick up the flat rock to find the key to the back door. But then I go inside and I find her sneakers and a sweatshirt, and I smile. I see her young, healthy, and happy. She's trimming a hedge from the top step of a ladder in the yard, waving from a chair on the porch, smiling up at me from the water's edge. She's here as I swoop up Sebastian and say, "Hey, toots. Shall we go to the beach?"
Leaving Neverlandby Ser Jackson The day is hot. Our car is a work in progress with only two functioning windows and no air conditioner, but we've piled in for the half hour drive north to the next town. Only a woman who is seriously stir crazy would cram two active little boys into a hot car in the middle of an August day, even for a chance at companionship and fresh farm vegetables. We moved away from our community recently, and a streak of extreme heat and humidity isn't making the transition any easier. I have been cooped up with Luke and Henry for days, but today we have been offered free veggies if we can simply pick up the farm share for an online friend. It is in a posh suburb with a park and shaded fountains for kids to splash in. So we head out, into air that feels lush and heavy with possibility. By the time we arrive at the park, Luke and Henry have removed their shirts and all of our hair is matted to our scalps with sweat, the longer parts tangled in masses from the wind. Two open windows can produce a lot of warm bluster it turns out. Our water bottle is empty and we are all on edge. The walk across the asphalt and then through the grass to the fountains seems too long, but we make it. Luke has difficulty overcoming this sticky start to our outing, and immediately begins to harass another boy his age. He takes aim at him with the giant water gun component of the fountain. The boy tries walking away, but Luke shadows him across the park. "Why is this boy bothering me?" the kid calls to his mom, who shoots me a sharp look. "Luke, leave him alone. Come over here and play," I offer, more to the little boy and his mom than to Luke. Seldom able to recover from a bad start, especially when the day is topping out at 97 degrees, Luke is probably a lost cause at this point. Henry is begging—quite vocally now, at age two—to nurse. I decide that we should head into the air-conditioned changing rooms—we need to cool off in more ways than one. Luke changes into his homemade, batik, bug-and-butterfly print pants. They were a hand-me-down from one of his best friends in our old town, and he cherishes them. The pants are everything I look for in boys' clothes: colorful, quirky, gender-neutral. We're about to get back into the car, so Luke foregoes a shirt. I glance into the mirror before we head back out into the heat. As if feeling like a bad mom weren't enough, I now notice how wild my hair really looks and the heat rash that's broken out across my face. Our old neighborhood was a quirky, urban academic community where I almost always fit in and had a friend or ally on every corner. I'm feeling particularly offensive in this fancy suburb: I'm the mom with the weird car, the misbehaving kid with the odd pants, the nursing toddler (who has been able to ask for it for some time now, thank you very much), the ugly hair, and strange rash. At Luke's Waldorf school, in our old community, he was one of the more mainstream kids. He lusted after Spider-Man fruit snacks, and I sometimes let him have them. He asked for PBS Kids by name. But he didn't look odd in his crazy get-ups. Bug pants were nothing. He once went to school in a home-fashioned Peter Pan outfit, complete with green tights and a jaunty blue sash. Now Luke is about to enter public kindergarten, and I know things are going to shift for him. As we leave the changing room, we see the boy Luke has been bothering. "Are you wearing your pajamas?" he asks Luke. "And why aren't you wearing a shirt?" I feel myself stiffen. Luke still rides a pink and purple bike, and I'll be damned if I want this or anything else about his self-expression to change now, at barely age five. Self-expression clearly intact, Luke covers his ears and shouts, for the little boy and everyone else to hear, "Don't you say another word! Don't you say another word! Don't you say another word!" I usher the boys into the car, and we drive as quickly as we can to the farm share drop off point. We are dripping with sweat when we arrive. The boys get out and sit under the shade of a tree as I stand in line. I sigh when I see that the mother from the park has lined up behind me. She leaves her kids strapped into her air-conditioned car. I can't remember the name of my online friend. I tell the farmer I'm here to pick up the share for a friend whose name I cannot remember. He looks at me—the heat rash, the hair, the loud and shirtless boys who have begun to throw dirt clods in their boredom—and skeptically gives me a few vegetables before sending me on my way. Next weekend, we will visit our old community. It will be achingly familiar, sweet and comforting. No one will look twice when Luke wears his vertically striped rainbow pants with his horizontally striped sweater in fall colors. I will nurse Henry beside an acquaintance who is nursing her preschooler and her infant, the older child cradling the baby. As time goes on, we will visit less and less often. Luke will graduate to a red boys bike. Henry will stop nursing. Now that we have a garage, my husband might just finish working on the car. We will welcome the air conditioning. And now that we have a house and a yard—a far cry from our tiny apartment in the city—we will begin to fill this space. Our bikes, our projects, our shifting ideas and interests, will find a place where they belong. I'll save the Peter Pan costume in a box in the basement. Years from now, when Luke and Henry are nearly men, maybe I'll find that box. We'll look at the costume and I'll tell them this story. But how we get to that distant day is another story, one we'll all have to write together.
Erosionby Jes S. Curtis I am eroding--my goddess body of motherhood--my thick mane of pregnancy, is wearing away in chinks and pieces. I lost just one hair at first: I held it, wondering at the layered sediments of pregnancy sloughing off. Now my hair comes out in long fistfuls, the strands wrapping around my hand and fingers. It sticks to the shower curtain in variegated shades of blonde and brown, strawberry and black. It threads its way through my husband's underwear. I find it as I fold the laundry and pull and pull the piece of hair until it comes loose and floats away. It turns up in the bread dough, the cracks in the keyboard, the toes of my socks, the crevices of my son's neck. I find it underneath my pillow, long wisps curled and waiting for who knows what--perhaps the Tooth Fairy--or a tiny, winged postpartum godmother. I have to quell the urge to collect the hair, coax it from between my toes and underneath the couch cushions, into my lap. To keep a reminder of the way my body became two, the way it stretched to hold the universe: a relic of the moment I felt my son's first leap, somewhere between my navel and my hip, before its warmth is buried in my own strata of memory. When I want to remember my son's swollen cheeks and dark gray eyes just after birth, I have to pull out the photograph. His pink flapping gums of babyhood are already gone: first one tooth burrowed its way out, then another. He rolls onto his belly and moves without me, using his flailing arms to scoot backward, gathering an armful of carpet and then pushing it away. He gulps pureed sweet potatoes, bits of tomato covered in cilantro, and smashed avocado. He reaches for things with stick straight arms, equally excited for thick Russian novels, stalks of lemon thyme, and piles of rocks, babbling and shrieking tiny baby words I can't understand. I envy women with the heat of babies swelling in their bellies--I want this empty flesh that hangs loose and slides across me to hold something again. The importance was so obvious then, my whole being ripe and splitting with life. I didn't have to question myself; I was creating. Old men, young women, mothers with babies, and old, bent, blue-haired women would stop me in delis and libraries to grab my hand, pat my protruding navel: strangers reverencing life. But now the quiet to contemplate a body in progress is gone. My son is here, all elbows and knees, eyes and hands reaching for me. I help him stand and grab the chain link fence, and page through picture books, and roll across the floor, turning his laughing apple cheeks over and over. I laugh when he laughs: when the ivy hanging over the window rustles, when the fish in the aquarium arabesque, when the eensy weensy spider climbs a filament of air, when the pages of a novel crinkle in his hands. But between these gasps of joy for his joy, I hide tears of exhaustion, wiping the yellow squash from the wall, the table, my hair. After tucking his blankets around him again and again and again across the hours of the night, I pull my own blankets over my head and cry. If I am too tired and let my eyes half-close he will walk away from me, toddling out to the place where I can't even touch his fingertips, maybe pause to wave. I'll turn around; he'll be gone. And I, his mother, his great swelling earth, his milk, his breath, his blood, will be left with a pile of hair. A loose bit of skin. A wrinkle, a sag. An exposed and gaping space.
Peeling Back the Truthby Melanie McGauran I am excited when I see the inaugural issue of The Onion poking its masthead out of our mailbox; it's a six-month gift subscription from my 27-year-old stepson Andy to my 13-year-old son Will. The humorous newspaper was first introduced to me when Will had shared a "best of" book of the paper's articles in the bookstore, and our mushrooming laughter had drawn ire from the quiet book patrons not standing in the Humor section. Although it is poor mail etiquette, I can't help myself, and I open it briefly, just wanting to pocket one fast laugh. But page six changes this. There I see a prominent ad for a store in the city, and it's featuring adults-only merchandise and very little imagination. The pages drop precipitously from my fingers but still manage to land in perfect folds on the table. What have I done? My shoulders sag. I had agreed to this gift. The book was truly hysterical. I never considered that the newspaper version might contain NC-17 advertising. I peel through the remaining pages finding one more personal ad page that makes my eyes water. I encouraged Andy to buy this. Will is ecstatic to receive it. How do I squeeze through this without going back on my word? Responsible Mom, sitting on my left shoulder, quickly leans in and whispers, "This is inappropriate and you know it. You have to take it away," while Cool Mom, lounging on the other side, softly coaxes, "Oh, it's OK, you know he's already heard or seen this language, most likely on the internet by now. Maybe he won't even notice it. He loves that you think he is mature enough to read the publication -- why spoil that? You don't want to disappoint either of them, do you? Besides, it would be hypocritical at this point anyway." I shake my head; Cool Mom sure does have a way with words. She's quick, too, always ready to give her opinion, hoping to debate Responsible Mom right into the dusty kitchen corner. Cool Mom's approach gives the benefit of the doubt. She allows more freedom. She likes to say YES. This is, of course, why she is always preferred in the eyes of the child. But Responsible Mom has a tremendous duty. Her choices maintain the integrity of her own set of values, and instill them. This often translates into a NO. And when, on any given day, my decision-making skills do not generate an immediate YES or NO, the two of them hop onto my shoulders, ready to do battle. I particularly remember the Battle at T.V. Hill when I witnessed other moms placing one hour per day limits on T.V. viewing time. Responsible Mom pulled out all kinds of impressive stats about diminished grades and a deterioration of imagination in support of a limit, while Cool Mom coaxed and cooed about educational shows he might miss, reminding me that every child needs some down time. Her final words, whispered in my ear, were "You watch all kinds of news, talk, drama and reality shows." While a beaming Cool Mom looked on, I chose not to limit Will's viewing habits. But Responsible Mom is no pushover. Tired of waiting once for a promised phone call after a sleep-over, and not being able to get through on the phone herself, she drove over to the friend's house, and abruptly pulled her son out of a lively video game marathon. She thought there was a lesson to be learned about remembering promises. So both sides know that I will listen, and right now, Cool Mom is glowing like a Cover Girl. She knows I'm in a particularly heightened conflict about this newspaper because I have already said YES to it, and I hate to go back on my word. She's sure she's got this one in the bag. I sit quietly at the kitchen table for a moment, make a decision, and retrieve some scissors. First, I double-check that there aren't any continuations of any front page stories on the condemned pages, and then I just go down the folding line and cut a couple of entire pages out like they were never there. Whoosh – ghost pages. Responsible Mom should be pleased; I'm removing the suggestive material. But there's a hitch. I'm not really being responsible since I am sneaking this action, so I still get the credit for being Cool Mom. Being preferred in the eyes of the child is a powerful thing. I finish cutting, put the newspaper where he looks for his mail, and he is thrilled to get it and read it. I say nothing. A week later the mail arrives, and I recognize the green banner stashed between a gas bill and a request for money from my alma mater. I jump for it, crushing my fingers together for good luck that any ad I saw last week is long gone, a memory, then I see the exact same ads are there. Blood rushes to my brain; it's an emergency. This is going to be a problem. I have set a precedent. I will have to sneak behind Will's back every week for the next six months, altering the paper like the fabled elf who always got the shoes repaired while the young boy slept. "But by doing this, you're just allowing the joy of the gift to continue while still protecting him," Cool Mom reiterates. "What is wrong with that?" It's at this point that Responsible Mom gives Cool Mom a withering look and announces in a steely voice, "You know what you have to do." Will arrives home and asks if the new issue has arrived. I tell him "yes," and then pause and say, "Will, I've got to talk to you for a minute. I have to say something about your paper. When I told Andy it was a good idea, I didn't know about the advertising they carry. When it came last week, I kind of looked through it first, saw some offensive ads I had no idea were there, so . . . " and I gulp here, "I actually removed a couple of pages." Will is looking down at the paper in his hands but raises his head to look at me when I confess. "I can't expose you to this, it's inappropriate, and I'm telling you because I'm going to have to continue to edit before you read it every week." I am expecting fireworks, condemnations of my actions, accusing remarks that I don't find him mature enough to handle these things (as a teenager, he is very sensitive to that these days) or that I did something to his "property" without his knowledge, but he just looks at me and says, "Oh, I don't care. Whatever," and leaves the room. A weight lifts off my shoulders. In fact, a weight does lift off my shoulders as Responsible Mom stands up to finally go get some rest. Cool Mom just sulks away in disgust. What's left of Real Mom waits for the dust to settle, and heads off in search of the vacuum.
Varanasiby Faith Paulsen Bells clang. The night air is smoky, pungent with incense, fire and ash. As the boatman pulls the creaking oars of our boat, I look back at the stone steps leading down to the river, the ghats cluttered with colorful parasols, flags flapping, swarms of people. Statues of gods and goddesses stare at me from the roof of a building painted in yellow and red vertical stripes. Over a loudspeaker, a deep male voice chants in a language I don't understand. My son Paz understands a little, so I look to him, but I can see from his bowed head and his hand on his little brother's shoulder that the moment is too solemn for him to translate. Our guide, Punam, pulls her paisley shawl around her. I love listening to the melody of her speech, the way she pronounces "we" like "vee," and draws every syllable out like the elastic hours in an Indian day. "We can say it is a misconception that the River Ganges represents the goddess Ganga. No. Ganges IS the living goddess. She has the power to cleanse our souls. Every dawn and every dusk we offer these prayers and salutations to Ganga to prepare for our soul's journey to liberation." Gazing into the water while I observe the twice-daily rite of a culture that is not mine, I am missing my own annual ritual. Back home, it is the morning of Thanksgiving. I'd flown to India in a flurry of urgent longing to join my eldest son, 21-year-old Paz, an exchange student whom I hadn't seen since that day five months ago when I kissed him goodbye at JFK airport. But I'd also left with a pang of worry, leaving behind not only my elderly parents, my father in his wheelchair, my mother bending over him, but also 18-year-old Seth, my middle child, a brand-new college freshman. I'd composed detailed instructions and a list of phone numbers where I could be reached, but I worried. Will they all be okay without me? As if my very presence could keep them all safe. I was afraid of what might happen to my parents and second child without me there. The raw fact still pulsed inside me, that despite my best efforts, loved ones could slip through my fingers. In September, despite numerous trips to the vet and all the care I could give him, our old cat Yoda hauled his cancer-wracked body up onto his favorite sofa to die. About six hours into my 15-hour flight, I discovered my right hand unconsciously curled into a tight fist, the muscles taut all the way up my arm to my shoulder blade, as if it was in my hands to control the details of all of our lives. And now, here I am, beside my husband, Bart, two of our sons and our guide, in Varanasi, India's holiest Hindu city. My hand still knots into a fist, so I reach in the dark for the warm pocket of my husband's jacket. Feeling my touch, he turns, "Everything okay?" "Just cold," I say. Before dusk, we'd walked through the dimming streets, past stalls heaped with flower garlands, past a queue of beggars in single file on the descending steps of the ghat, each person enfolded in shawl and turban as the air grew chilly, each pair of dark eyes peering quietly, persistently, at my pale Western face as I walked by. In my right hand I gripped my purse, and in my left hand, the slippery fingers of 11-year-old Gideon. And inside my purse, I carried a small package: a snack-size zip-lock bag containing a portion of Yoda's ashes. On the pier, children approached us offering trays of dujas, little paper cups of lit candles. I didn't know what they were, and was afraid to take out my wallet, so I shook my head, but Paz eagerly accepted one, slipping a coin to the grinning little girl and murmuring, "Shukriya." Picking my way past the children, down the wet stone steps, I asked Punam about my bag of ashes. "Would it be okay? Or is it inappropriate--" As we balanced ourselves onto a small boat rowed by a skinny man in a dirty pink shawl, Punam handed each of us a duja. She said to me, "It is okay." The boat begins to move on the river, parallel with other boats of worshippers and other tourists. I gaze into the duja cupped in my hands. The squat little candle nestles in a cradle of golden marigolds, a circle within a circle, juggling a tiny sip of flame, warming my face. Gideon sits beside me, his eyes wide with the same childish solemnity I now feel. I wonder if he is setting aside his fifth-grade worries in this ancient ceremony. "Gideon, we put it in the water," Punam tells him, "We let it float away. We make a wish." She bends at the waist, leans over the side of the boat and demonstrates. I reach down, down, place my duja and open my hand, my fingertips grazing the brown skin of the water as I set it free. The cup wobbles, the fragile little flame struggling for balance, then floats away, bearing the candles and yellow flowers to the goddess Ganga. Further downriver, my candle joins a procession of other flickering candles on the quiet water, surrounded by the whispers of other people and the swish of oars. "When a Hindu dies in Varanasi, it is said that he is instantly li-ber-ated from the endless cycle of birth and death. Hindus come here to die, or to be cremated. See?" Punam points to a structure on the dark riverbank, a cave-like building studded with many small fires. "This is the crematorium, Manikarnika Ghat. It is a great honor to be cremated here and to have one's ashes committed to the Ganga." The smoke fills my head, a different kind of smoke than I've ever smelled before. Punam continues, telling us how, when a Hindu dies, his nearest male relative lights the funeral pyre himself, with the family present. Then when the ashes are completely cool, they are swept into the Ganges. How strange this seems to me, I was not present at Yoda's cremation, I will not even be there tonight, if my father has another stroke. I take out the zip-lock bag of ashes. I had planned to spill them into the river myself, but now I look at Paz and see something I hadn't seen before, a new confidence in his jawline as he looks back at me. The priests stand in a row on the ghat, each under a parasol lit with neon, performing like dancers in unison. Faces fill the space behind them, perhaps thousands of worshippers. Over the tinny loudspeaker, the priest chants an endless mantra repeating the words, Krisna and Rama and although these are not my words, not the thoughts I'd be thinking if I were home, taking my Thanksgiving pies out of the oven, I would still feel the same reverence that I now see in my sons' faces. And looking into these two faces, I imagine the face of the child who is not with us, and I know right now that Seth is doing all the things I worried he could not do without me to remind him. In my absence my normally quiet son sits at the kitchen table and chats with his grandparents about his new life at college, new friends, his favorite professor. My father supervises while Seth builds a fire in the apartment fireplace. Still chanting, the priests lift their oil lamps to the river, ringing their bells. I can feel my husband's warmth next to me in the boat. He looks at me, then at our sons, then down at my clenched right hand. My fingers relax and slowly open, like a lotus flower, like the cup that holds the duja candle, which I can still see, following the flickering procession as the current carries it farther and farther away from me.
The Free Range Bionicleby Cora Goss-Grubbs If I'd been driving, we would not have made the turn. But I'll admit I did sigh with relief when that massive, colorful tangle of tubes appeared before us, surrounded by an empty parking lot, and crowned with the infamous golden arches screaming CHEAP AND EASY. I was low on blood sugar, sleep-deprived, and bleary-eyed from fighting traffic. We were on our way to a family retreat and just needed quick food where no one cared if my kids ran around screaming like chimpanzees. So I didn't protest when David made the turn and parked in the back lot. We spilled out of our Prius and snuck through the door, hoping other retreaters wouldn't happen to drive by and see us. We were going to a Unitarian Universalist retreat, and I didn't want to have to explain our restaurant choice to our liberal religious friends. There was no line, but my family had to wait anyway while I contemplated the menu. Simon tried to crawl out of David's arms and onto the counter to push the cash register buttons. Henry collected straws from the dispenser, apparently trying to count how many it held. Futilely, I searched the menu for words like organic and free range. "Don't they have anything on a whole wheat bun?" I muttered. David rolled his eyes. Hadn't the owners seen Supersize Me? Oh yeah. We were at McDonald's. The founders of fast, greasy food for families. I gave up and ordered a chicken sandwich with fries for myself and a chicken McNugget Happy Meal for Henry and Simon to share. David ordered a Big Mac. We corralled the kids into a corner booth with a high chair. When they called our number, I volunteered to get the food. "Boy or girl?" the woman behind the counter asked. "Huh?" In my famished haze, I wondered if I still looked pregnant after fifteen months. "Is the Happy Meal for a boy or a girl?" "Boy…but…" Before I could explain that I don't force my boys into neat little boxes that dictate they should like only violent or fast toys, she'd grabbed a dark plastic action figure, thrown it into the bag, and slid the tray of food across the counter. "Enjoy your meal!" she cheered, then dashed away. On my way back to the table, I peeked inside the Happy Meal to take a look at this action figure. It was a Bionicle, a blue and grey robot with glowing eyes, sharp teeth and giant clawed feet. One hand held an oversized phallic weapon, the other a disk-launcher, complete with cardboard disks. In all his four-and-a-half years, Henry had never played with a toy as nasty looking as this one, at least not in our home. I avoided showing Henry the toy, keeping it in the bag as I unloaded the rest of the meal. Generally I delay showing him a restaurant meal toy until he's done eating. In this case, I hoped to hide it altogether, waiting a day to see if he asks for it before getting rid of it. That is a trademark of my parenting style: rather than make an on-the-spot executive decision about what he can and can't play with, I hide the offending toy until he asks for it. Sometimes he asks As we devoured the greasy food, I considered trading in the boy toy for a girl toy. But when I saw girls walking by with Little Mermaid crowns, I realized their toys were just as sexist. Why turn Henry on to a story about Ariel: the mermaid who gave up her home and life to pursue a prince she didn't even know? Was that any better than a violent action figure? Once Henry's McNuggets were in his belly (he doesn't like fries or hamburgers, which is somehow a consolation to us) and Simon's food was littering the floor, David offered to take the kids to Playland. I found myself sitting at a table alone, with nothing but indigestion and my thoughts to keep me company. I took a deep breath. It had been a long day of packing for the weekend retreat. I contemplated the fun we were told we'd have: meals made for us, late night games and conversation, kids of all ages to play with, woods to roam, and porch chairs to read in. All this apparently came with a view of the Puget Sound, and a slower pace than our busy lives. "Boy or girl?" I heard the employee ask a man at the counter. "Girl," he shot back, clearly more familiar with the question than I was. "But she usually wants the boy toy. Hold on." He walked into Playland and yelled: "Does she want the boy toy?" "The what?" the mom asked. "You know, the manly toy." "Boy toy," the girl yelled back. I smiled. Chewing on a cold fry, I wondered who chooses Happy Meal toys. Do they live in the real world, where children are not so stereotypical? I couldn't help but see those toy choosers as my enemies. Simon was easy to protect—we had a good year before he learned about restaurant toys and the greasy, sweeter choices on the menu. But Henry was catching on, bringing his own ideas and choices—and society's influence—into our complicated parenting mix. My oh-so-deep mothering thoughts were interrupted by two giggling girls. They leaned into the Happy Meal display poster and conspired. "I got the Ariel necklace last week. I hope they have the lipgloss now. What do you want?" One of them pointed at the 'boys' section. "Eww, Bionicle. I hate those." I decided to take a closer look at this sign. Before our visit to McDonald's, I'd never heard of Bionicles or seen The Little Mermaid. According to the Happy Meal sign, Henry could "help save the island of Voya Nui with Bionicle figures." Each of the eight Bionicles had "their own cool battling functions," referring to the weapons they held in each hand. The Inika are the good guys, the Piraka are the bad guys. Henry was blessed with a Piraka named Vezok. "As bitter and corrosive as the dark sea he thrives in, Vezok finds a strange joy in harpooning anyone or anything that crosses his path." The girls' section included eight different Little Mermaid items: Ariel necklace, lipgloss bracelet, floral crown, mirror compact clip, treasure keeper, under the sea glasses, sea flower barrette, and the Ariel purse. Every item was pink and sparkly and designed to make a girl look pretty. I felt nauseated. With 30,000 restaurants serving 50 million people in 119 countries each day, McDonald's has serious influence on the world's children. Here they are teaching kids that boys play war and girls play dress-up. Men act and women appear. Yet McDonald's had also given me time alone while my boys wore themselves out scrambling around the giant rat-maze of tubes in Playland. Where else could I steal a few quiet moments to reflect on the ways that this leading global retailer undermines parents? Of course! At the retreat! I gathered our garbage, bemoaning all the waste. When I saw the Bionicle in the Happy Meal bag, I considered throwing it away as well. But I imagined the six-year-old in a Chinese sweatshop who probably made the toy. I couldn't just let Vezok go straight to a landfill without at least giving him a chance at making someone happy. Besides, I thought, it might come in handy in the car at a desperate moment when the kids are bouncing off the windows. I pocketed the toy and went into Playland to hurry my family to the retreat. We ended up spending the weekend chasing our kids from dawn to dusk, then collapsing into bed moments after they fell asleep. No adult conversations, no late night games, and no forest walks. Driving home, I asked Henry what his favorite part of the weekend was. "McDonald's," he replied. I sighed.
"What's this?" he asked, his eyes alight. I played dumb. "I don't know." "Where did it come from?" "Probably a restaurant." "Which restaurant?" For some reason, I decided not to mention McDonald's. Maybe I didn't want to remind him that fun things come from fast food restaurants. Maybe if I didn't mention that this particular Bionicle "finds a strange joy in harpooning anyone or anything that crosses his path" he'd discover for himself a kinder, gentler side to Vezok. But immediately he started "killing" things with the weapons in the robot's hands. I reminded Henry of our shooting rule: You can point play weapons at furniture or toys, but no real people or animals. Then I just watched. Henry's imagination is usually sparked by music and books, not as much by objects. He doesn't know what to do with a puppet once it's in his hand, and he rarely does role play with toy people or animals. To my dismay, the Bionicle ignited his imagination. As I ate an apple with peanut butter at the kitchen table, Henry ran to get his homemade "Music Show" puppet stage. He wanted to act out the Bionicle attacking the apple. I played along, making the apple run away in fear. He did it again, this time with singing "because it's a music show!" In operatic voice we enacted an apple-and-evil-robot chase around the puppet show stage, entertaining Simon as he chewed his own apple wedge. I looked into Bionicle and discovered that they're made by Lego, one of the world's largest toy manufacturers. Leaving little to kids' imaginations, Lego has created a prefabricated world where these creatures do battle, complete with a description of each character's personality, strengths and weaknesses. Scholastic has even published a series of Bionicle guides and adventure stories. Apparently the Inika came to the island of Voya Nui with the goal of finding the powerful Kanohi Mask of Life and using it to save the life of the Great Spirit Mata Nui. But first the Inika must face the Piraka, six evil guys on the island. But Henry didn't even know he was playing with a Bionicle, let alone one that lived on an island with a gang of evil comrades. Instead, Henry decided that when Vezok points the disk-thrower, he is good (luckily he didn't find the disks in the drawer). But when he's got his harpoon extended, he's bad. Rather than playing out Lego's one-dimensional story of good guys versus bad guys, Henry was creating a character with both good and bad traits, like a real person. Oddly, this Happy Meal toy was growing on me. With my son's influence, Vezok went from a mean, ugly killer to a multifaceted, devoted friend (not to mention a good dancer) that Henry would enjoy for weeks. Don't get me wrong: I still believe that someone out there is trying very hard to make my boys into soldiers. But ultimately, their influence won't make Henry turn away from his operatic leanings. Not as long as we're his parents. A few days later Henry wanted to name his new toy. "Corduroy's good but there's already a bear with that name. There's Mr. Fuzz and Polly…" his thoughts drifted, considering toy names he'd already chosen and seeking the perfect one for Vezok. "I know," he giggled. "Apples-and-Peanut-Butter-Go-Crazy!" "Can I call him Apples for short?" I asked. "Sure!" I picked up the Bionicle and looked him full in the face. (Okay, he was still ugly. But in a cute, cuddly sort of way.) "Apples," I said, "welcome to the family."
Unprepared for Furyby Sarah Weld I park the car, ready to meet some friends for dinner. Looking forward to a pleasant evening, I get out and shut the door. But when I look inside the car my husband is still in his seat, glowering at his shoes. "C'mon, honey, we're going to be late," I say through the glass. "I won't get out," he says, stomping his foot. I walk around to his side and open his door to help him undo his seatbelt. He tries to hit me and bite my arm. After ten minutes of cajoling, I finally manage to get him out of the car. We walk a few paces together and he sits down on the sidewalk. "I don't want to go," he says, undoing his shoes and hurling them into the street. Quietly and patiently, I crouch down and ask, "What's wrong?" He screams in my ear. I sigh and wonder how much more of this I can take. ~ Every detail of this story -- my anticipation of a visit with friends, the glowering, the hurled shoes -- is true, except one. If my husband really acted like this, I wouldn't put up with it day after day. I would seek counseling for him immediately and have him evaluated for a psychiatric disorder. But this story isn't about him. It's about my three-year-old. Like many women I know, I last spent time with toddlers when I was one myself. Now, as a parent of young children, I'm expected to deal with this kind of scenario almost daily. Back in the days when girls grew up surrounded by women immersed in all stages of child-rearing, this classic child stubbornness must not have come as such a shock. If I had spent my childhood caring for younger siblings and neighbor children, my own toddler's behavior might have seemed familiar. These days, many women grow up like me, with little or no contact with young children until we find ourselves taking care of our own. ~ I furiously typed the first draft of this while my almost four-year-old daughter, Naomi, raged upstairs because, for some mysterious reason, she didn't want to brush her teeth. She was trapped in a cycle of two options overwhelming to her -- should she put the toothpaste on her toothbrush or should I? After a futile effort to meet her needs I retreated to a downstairs room and slammed the door. She was the world's sweetest baby until the age of eleven months, when she turned herself stiff as a board on the kitchen floor rather than be picked up. Once, crying, I called the advice nurse for help after Naomi hurled her antibiotic at the wall, staining it Amoxicillin pink. "I know this is small consolation now," said the nurse, "but you'll be glad she's got this will when she's older." I suppose she's right; when some teenage boy is pressuring Naomi to go all the way, I will be glad of her ferocity. But now her concrete will infuriates and defeats me. Before having kids, I would never have described myself as quick to anger or yell. Since having children, however, I too often scream, slam things down loudly, and drag my children roughly into their rooms. It feels awful. I wonder what the neighbors hear during the summer when the windows are open wide. I worry that my children are sometimes frightened of me. No one ever prepared me for their constant, unfounded obstinacy. From an early age I was schooled in cooperation, learning that if someone flat out refuses a reasonable request, they are at odds with society's expectations and should not be indulged. If someone persists in destroying my property -- scraping metal across my newly finished floor, picking flowers from my garden, drawing on my walls, smashing hard objects into my glass tables -- I get to file an official complaint. Not so with the contrary child. There is no complaint office, no ombudsman. I have to suffer through the behavior and wearily refer to it as a developmental stage. I am expected to handle the fourth tantrum of the day patiently, intelligently, and elegantly. But let's face it. Kids can be a royal pain in the ass. And patient and elegant are pretty hard to achieve. ~ When Naomi was two, I parked my minivan alongside the city playground where we had come to meet some friends for a pleasant morning of two-year-old play and grownup chat. "Okay, Naomi," I said brightly, looking forward to some adult contact. "Let's go to the park." "No!" "C'mon, sweetheart. Look! Rachel and Nicholas are already here." "I want to open the door myself!" My easy morning at the park already poisoned, I did my absolute adult best to control my temper. But I also raised my voice some and tossed some books and toys furiously around the car. I waited alone on the sidewalk to give Naomi the chance to open the door. But by then, she was too far gone. And since her full-force tantrums usually took about twenty minutes to subside, I decided to carry her to the enclosed kiddie park. It was safer to let her rage there than on the sidewalk. I picked her up, no mean feat, and placed her into my tantrum carry mode. Perfected after countless previous scenes like this one, this method involved holding her around the middle, face down horizontally, so that her legs kicked behind me and her arms waved in front of me, allowing me to remain wound-free. We set out like a loud two-headed writhing serpent. About halfway to the park I heard someone yell, "Hey lady! You're hurting her!" A homeless man, just waking up in his sleeping bag under a nearby tree, was yelling at me. A woman rose, disheveled, from her bag and shouted, "Yeah, she's just a little kid!" "I'm just carrying her this way so she won't hurt me!" I yelled back. "Oh," they said and settled back into their bags. Naomi's powerful will has always been impressive. She once wore nothing but her underwear in the car on the drive to preschool because she had refused to get dressed. Once we reached the school, she realized her predicament and hurriedly dressed in the van. Fighting with her, which I don't do very gracefully, gets me nowhere. She once went without chocolate cake, her favorite dessert, rather than eat a single green pea. ~ Two years later, the tantrums have greatly diminished. They still erupt now and then in their familiar fury, but things are not as hard as they once were. My kids get in and out of the car pretty easily, and it's been a long time since Naomi sat down on the sidewalk and refused to continue. But her willfulness is part of her DNA and my husband and I are resigned to living with it forever. I have also grown familiar with my reactions, and recognize that anger can seethe inside me as well. We have developed an auto-tantrum response mode, a list of firm tactics that work for us: counting to one hundred in a separate room, never negotiating, giving her space to rage. Yesterday, I asked Naomi, now six, to stand up so I could brush her hair. "No," she said from the floor. "C'mon Naomi, please stand up," I tried, my voice already rising. "No," she repeated, not looking up. "Oh, come on, Naomi! Why do you have to be so difficult about everything?" I hurled the brush into her lap. I stormed out. She slammed the door. And so it continues – our eternal push and pull. After eight years of practice, I can switch more easily between what I can expect as a courteous, well-behaved adult and what I can expect as a parent -- but casting aside a lifetime of learned social behavior has been difficult. I still wish there were a warning we could give future parents, a sign reading, "Beware. Leave behind all you know of social convention. This is a different land." Our children will not always be kind to us. The best we can do is to give other parents a chance at redemption amid the tumult of parenting, and let them know they are not alone. Whenever I see a parent, usually a mother, faced with a defiant three-year-old in the grocery store, I am filled with sympathy. It takes enormous energy to deal politely with the cashier and the unsocialized raging beast that has replaced your child. If I can catch the mother's eye, I flash her what I hope is a knowing and empathetic smile, willing her strength and grace. Dear Emby Jeanette Barszewski Dear Em, I could call you Emmett or Emily, but technically you're just a flutter, a whisper beneath the radar. It will be a while before I know what inevitable path your androgens or estrogens have sent you down, whether basketball practice or shopping for shoes will be your priority. And then it still won't matter, will it? You're my seedling, the beloved, miraculous little weed I prayed for all my life. You make me soil, mama earth, and I want you to take root. I fear you leaking, hot scarlet between my legs, when I am taking notes during a meeting, or when I'm nauseated, trying to creep up the stairs out of the subway. Let's make a deal, Em. You hang around in there until it's safe for you to come out, and I will do my best to make it safe for you to come out. I will pack away my fear along with my size ten everything. You will inherit Daddy's smarts and deadpan commentary on the state of the nation, along with my excellent health and flair with a pen. Okay, you might also get a taste for heroin or develop a need for lithium, but we will do our best to make sure you prefer flowers, or moonrises, or the Three Stooges. See, Em, my mother was afraid of most things: afraid of leaving the front door, or of losing her soul behind it. Like her, I became terrified of taste and touch, of sunlight on my skin, or January cold setting into my bones. It took me years to climb down from my leaning tower of neuroses. I want you to live, Em, but also to breathe. To find your own way to freedom, however you define it. I will help all I can, and hopefully I'll know when to get out of your way. You are my miracle, my fervid wish made flesh. Daddy and I had given up hope. You weren't going to happen without hormone injections, or donor eggs and swimmers in a $100,000 Petri dish not covered by insurance. I wasn't sure if that journey was worth it. Daddy and I took another journey to forget about it for a while, to be something other than people who did not have you. We took a plane across the country, and then another plane across an ocean. An ocean I swam in once, as a girl. We reached the Big Island that keeps making more of itself from fires in the heart of the sea. A goddess named Pele lives there in a volcano called Kilauea. Pele makes earth into liquid fire, and sends it surging up from mountains that surf and crash on tectonic plates in the deepest dark of the Pacific. Pele makes fires that burn through the earth, then flow in molten, ruby rivers back to the ocean. Armed with walking sticks, sunhats, and plenty of water, just like the safety video at the ranger station said we should be, Daddy and I set out near sunset. We walked the lava, black and blazing in the sun, with the blue-green hope of the sea shimmering in the distance. The lava was smooth and rippling, or creviced and crackling like glass under our feet. Sometimes the lava was too hot to walk on, with rivers burning beneath, and sulfur venting on the surface. After a few miles, I couldn't keep up. I made Daddy stop and sit. I explained that he needed to go more slowly. Daddy got annoyed and said his feet hurt when he walked too slowly. I said that it wasn't my fault that Daddy forgot his boots and had to hike in cheap-ass sneakers from the Wal-Mart on Kauai. I was embarrassed because I was crying when a bunch of German teenagers sat down near us, but after that Daddy made sure to go a little slower, and I tried to go a little faster. So ember, embryo, my little spark, Daddy and I kept trekking over the black hillocks strewn with boulders, an ebony lunarscape under blue sky bleached almost white by the unrelenting sun. We could see steam rising off the sea in the distance, clouds roiling and flecked with shooting stars. Finally, we reached the shore where the rivers of fire returned to the ocean. We sat for a while on the black rock being ground to crystal by our boots and butts. The lava flared, exploding with molten rocks, as it hissed into the sea. Sometimes the fire burned so fiercely, the ocean boiled so ferociously, that everything was eclipsed by scalding clouds. After a while, Daddy wanted to get closer to the fire and hiked toward the rivers burning down the mountainside. I crouched alone, on the obsidian, transfixed. I will admit this to you now, Em: I may embarrass you when you're a teenager because I have a tendency to literally stop and smell the flowers. I am intoxicated by lilacs, and the sight of a deer can bring tears to my eyes. Although I hide it from fellow New Yorkers, with their suspicion of anything that smells even faintly of god, your Mommy is, at heart, a moon-worshiping, wind-dancing, god-or goddess-loving pagan. I don't chant and shimmy around bonfires at midnight deep in the woods with other naked witches anymore, but I do believe in the many faces of divinity, especially when I see them. That day, as the sun's blaze faded and the volcano's fire made the blackening ocean seethe, I hoped that Daddy wouldn't get lost trying to find his river of fire and have to be rescued by helicopter. Then suddenly I began to feel it, the land creating itself, a new continent being born over millennia from the center if the Earth. I felt like I was seeing the fire in the heart of stars, the god-heat that makes the galaxies spin and the universe expand. I prayed to Pele then. Maker of these fire rivers, Mother of these islands, alone in the center of the widest and deepest of the world's vast oceans, Pele, if it pleases you, give us a child. Grant me a spark for my womb and heal our weary hearts. And, I swear, Em, you were conceived the very next day. A month later the doctor said it was your little yolk, the darker bubble in the haze of the sonogram. I could see your little heart beating in the darkness, my little ember, coming into being. Human Behavior Experiment(2002 – 2007) by Blake Wandesforde I hit one of them again today -- a swat upside the head -- after which I looked from the corner of my eyes for any redness. They say that when you hit a child, you don't see the real swelling, but at that moment I wasn't focused on the lasting effects of my actions. I didn't stop to consider how far my temper might go toward shaping my children, nor stop to remember the example I'm to set. I didn't stop myself at all. When I need a fix of sweet release, I can't always think about the way my sticks and stones will ripple the waters. My own mother swatted me several times but without much force; over time, she ceased to scare me at all. My father spanked me twice. My parents were progressive and hated themselves for the handful of times I was struck. My father was getting his Ph.D. in behavioral psychology; a disciple of B.F. Skinner, he did not believe in corporal punishment. Instead my parents believed in and taught "mind over matter." Evolution was a call to action: Walk upright and use only that which separates you from the animals, they told me. And as an adult, I thought I had a handle on it, that I had earned my opposable thumbs. It never occurred to me that I would fall prey to the instincts of my least evolved self. And then I had children of my own. Motherhood is canonized and criminalized but rarely acknowledged as the animal endeavor that it is. For some women, pregnancy hints at the mother-animal they will become. One woman might flit around like a humming bird while nesting. Another might hibernate through her first trimester. Me? I craved meat. One evening, in my third trimester, I ordered a well-done cheeseburger from the local diner. When it arrived medium rare, I crumbled it into a ball and threw it as hard as I could at the wall. Half-cooked meat splattered and clung to the kitchen walls. Then I sat down and cried while my husband -- a prince and, by default, beast of burden -- cleaned my mess. That should have been a strong indicator of what was to come. If those three trimesters don't direct you to the section of the zoo with your name on the cage, the "fourth" trimester will. The first three months with a new baby are like sitting in a sweat lodge until the visions come and you speak incoherently. You emerge blinded by the light and are given a new name: Two Breasts Leaking, Two Arms Aching. Without adequate sleep, nutrition, or the diversions you have come to rely on, you will quickly have a vision of your inner animal. I am no shark, I was never going to eat my young, but I am no lamb either. I roared the lion's song from within the confines of motherhood. It was not my daughter's needs that I found unbearable; it was my own drive to meet those needs. She would always need me, I knew; she was a baby and a perfect one at that. But that I would always answer her call was far more alarming. If the scent of my skin soothed her, I could not deny her my touch. If the sound of my voice soothed her, I would sing us both to sleep no matter how dry my throat became. I would never be free again, and I knew it. When my daughter was days old, I sat nursing her in a fog on our bed. Bleeding and sore, I bent down and whispered in her ear, "I wasn't done yet." It was a secret, something you cannot express without baring your roughest sketches of desire. I was not anxious about thank you notes I couldn't write or the bathroom I couldn't clean; I was mourning every dream left unrealized. I had imagined that after my baby was born, I'd have "date night" with my husband and write the great American novel before her first birthday. I had even imagined continuing to work. But after my maternity leave was exhausted, I wheeled my stroller into my boss's office and sobbed. "I can't . . .leave her," I stammered. My boss thought I was crying because I was so torn. But I was crying because I was no longer in control. I was reduced to something animal, painted into a corner by my own instincts. I meant it literally. I might as well have been sewn to her. I could not leave her. In the movie, The Missing, Cate Blanchett plays the frontier mother of two girls. When her oldest daughter is kidnapped by Indians, Blanchett's character sets out on a journey to track the tribe and reclaim her child. As the journey becomes increasingly dangerous, Blanchett's father advises her to give up the search and go home. "I don't know how," she admits, as though something else is in control: an animal that cannot be reasoned with. This is the mother-animal we admire: The Protectress. She is noble and her mane is shiny. I am that fierce Protectress -- sometimes. Take for instance, the day two four-year-olds sat under the jungle gym and told my three year-old daughter she couldn't play with them because she was boring and stupid. My mommy wires cauterized, curling the hairs of the mothers I passed on my way to kill somebody. I got under that jungle gym, snatched the shovel from one of the chest-puffing cubs and roared until the screws loosened and the empty swings rocked back and forth. The girl began to sob uncontrollably and the nannies began their advance. It was clear to us all that my response had not been measured. So I circled slowly, spit to the side and lurched one last time, just to watch them flinch. Then I took my daughter's hand and sauntered away. Okay, it's not exactly the same. I still come out looking crazy. My husband would have infiltrated, talked smooth, stayed cool, and had those ankle-biting Barbies whistling while they dug their own graves. He walks upright and does not apply scorched earth tactics on the playground, at the office, or at home. But being a mother separates you from that which separates you from the animals. This much love is not reasonable. It drives me like the taste of blood drives the mad predator, and I pace in my cage -- waiting to pounce at the first glimpse of the animal in others. Often those others are my own children, looking to me for guidance and a strong sense of self. With the right example, they will ride humanity's natural trajectory away from the animal kingdom and towards Enlightenment, if you will. So why can't I pick on someone my own size? I am blessed to have the children I have. They are not the kids whose teeth you want to knock out for the good of mankind. They are not the toddling hyenas who leave bite marks on their mothers and laugh, nor electric eels tossing themselves like live wires around the room. Can those children really be reasoned with? What is the recourse when words fail? It is not, I think, hitting. I do not use my giant paws as instruments in something orchestrated. I do not hit my children because I think it is good for them, that they need it, or will be the better for it. I hit them because I am unable to breathe. Motherhood occasionally knocks the wind out of me. More often, there are aspects of this feral gig I relish. Licking and grooming my young, pulling the splinters from their pads and encouraging them to prance again. I love to nibble their necks and show them the world. And, while I don't always like what I see, believe it or not, I love the mirror they show me. My youngest is my carbon copy, both inside and out. I understand him but find him far more difficult to deal with than my daughter who, like her father, is reliable, even, and true. My daughter can both finesse a situation and accept no for an answer. My son, on the other hand, bumps up against resistance and gnashes his teeth. He is triggered by infractions so slight they cannot be seen by the naked eye. God, he makes my blood boil! We are animals, the two of us, and my daughter bravely sticks her hand in our cage to comfort us. Braced for the tantrums of my son, I have come to depend on her as the human being she is. When she embraces her nature as a four-year old, I am surprised. I don't have time for it. Can't she see I am busy backing my unbroken son into the stable? Can't she see my own cage door coming unhinged? Sweet child, do not get too close. Please do not feed the animals. The human behavior experiments of the late sixties and early seventies showed us that people would approximate animal behavior -- which is to say, behave predictably -- in a designated set of circumstances. Placed in a mock prison environment, volunteer "guards" will exhibit sadistic behavior. Stripped of their identity -- given numbers and shackled -- the volunteer "prisoners" will break down. Otherwise upstanding citizens are quickly reduced to the moral ambiguities of their job descriptions. Within social constructs, people play their parts. As mother, I am both prisoner and prison guard. Did you think I wouldn't object to the bars? Did you think I would never abuse my power? I was raised to believe I could do anything. So vast were my possibilities that as a little girl I cried trying to decide what world to conquer first. Yesterday I cleaned the same room three times. I spoke to no one over four years old, read nothing without pictures, and emptied 14 items of clothing into a laundry bin that will overflow before I can start this cycle over. Take one woman, tell her she can do anything, and then create a circumstance in which she can do nothing. It is a sophisticated form of biological sabotage: give a woman someone who needs her and, unable to resist the call, she will sacrifice her own needs to meet the needs of others. In other words, she will step aside for what she cannot step over. But I do not go gently. Six years ago, if you had shown me a picture of my daughter's face and told me someone hit her, my stomach would have lurched. I would have enjoyed a rush of righteous indignation against the perpetrator, sworn that would never be me. I didn't get into this mommy thing with violence in mind. I wear Birkenstocks, followed the Grateful Dead, for Christ's sake! I vow repeatedly to be smarter than the animals, but I cry over spilt milk and when they color on the wall, I froth at the mouth. And sometimes, when the decibel levels rise beyond the capacity of my human ears, beyond the reach of reason, I spank. I don't want to be Nature's bitch -- a puppet tethered to biology and made to dance to the beat of some primal drum. I see other women defy the ties that bind them to the animal world. But for a girl who could do anything, I find myself unqualified for the world's most natural task. I can protect my children from everything but my beast within. It rears its head when you ask me to fade away. It growls when you ask me to have no dreams of my own. And then, on dark nights, when the wind howls and both cubs are nestled in our den, it whimpers in reverence. Admissions Rouletteby Colleen Kearney Rich With typical teenage lope, my son Andrew takes his sweet time getting to the car. It is April and we are headed down to Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, my much-loved alma mater, where he has been accepted for admission this fall. I would love to "sell" Andrew on VCU and Richmond, but I am also here as the competition. A large part of my job is getting high schoolers just like him to choose my employer, George Mason University. As a publications manager and the chief recruitment writer at Mason, I choose images and craft copy designed to convince young people that Mason is the place to be. Still, here we are, on the way to VCU's "block party," as the school calls its spring open house. It's one more attempt on the part of the university to sway potential students to accept their offer of admission. Andrew's chosen to wear an Ohio State sweatshirt, which doesn't bode well for VCU's chances. These spring open houses are the 'universities' last chance to turn an accepted applicant into a first-year student. It is always a bit of a gamble. You accept more students than you have spaces for, knowing that some will go elsewhere, all in hope of hitting that perfect predecided number, no more, no less. Almost every school, including VCU, expects a deposit and commitment by May 1st. Andrew walks around the car and stands facing the trunk until I realize he means for me to pop it open. I do. He is looking for a place to stow his overstuffed school backpack, someplace that won't interfere with his legroom. "What's the backpack for?" I ask as he gets into the passenger seat. "In case of I have time to do some homework," he says. This is absurd, even insane, but I don't laugh. That would be a bad way to start this trip. Andrew has been accepted at six colleges, so as he faces the final quarter of his high school career, he spends much more time thinking about lacrosse and the post-graduation beach week than about schoolwork. Ohio State is still a front-runner, as is Virginia Military Institute. I want him to go in-state for practical, as well as financial, reasons. I once wrote a university ad that pitted a co-ed in a cap and gown against a Toyota Sequoia. My tagline was: An SUV or a degree? I heartily believe that a public education, especially in Virginia (which has some of the best universities in the country), is still one of the best buys around. The ad never quite captured the imagination of the university higher ups and went unused. The lesson: Everyone wants to be valued, but no one wants to be a bargain. As I drive down Interstate 95, Andrew reads to me from the Sports section of the Washington Post, which I am surprised to find has actually covered his Friday night lacrosse game -- another lopsided victory for the Westfield Bulldogs. The final score was 14-1. Andrew assures me that it would have been a shut out if they hadn't been a man down. "Who was out on a penalty?" I ask. "Me," he says. "Slashing." He proceeds to demonstrate how he came to slash the kid with his stick -- accidentally, of course. His 6-foot, one-inch frame already fills his side of the front seat. There is little room for a demonstration. "In the face?" I ask, horrified. "He did have on a face mask," Andrew says. ~ The trip to VCU is a relatively simple one for me, having done it so many times. I already know where I am going to park and where to check-in for the block party. Andrew has also been to Richmond dozens of times over the course of his life. He tells me that he loves Richmond; he just can't see himself at VCU. "I'm just not one of those people who can sit around in cafes drinking espresso and listening to poetry," he says. "Not everyone in Richmond is going to poetry readings," I tell him. "There are other things to do, lots of things." He knows this. In addition to the block party, we hope to squeeze in a visit to the Edgar Allan Poe museum and some Bottoms Up pizza down in Shockhoe Bottom. The campus is crowded and we follow the clumps of black and gold balloons to get where we are going. Andrew mutters something about feeling like a lemming. "Ohio State has almost 60,000 students," I tell him. "There you can be a lemming every single day." When we arrive at the site, one of the Admissions greeters, an older man, also notices Andrew's sweatshirt. "Uh-oh," he says amicably, then rigorously shakes Andrew's hand. "It was the only sweatshirt that was clean," Andrew tells the man. This is Andrew's third experience being courted by a college. He has already spent the night in the barracks at VMI, learning from the cadets that "it is better to be from VMI, then at VMI." I am not opposed to him attending a military school if that is what he truly wants although the idea of being a "rat," which is what they call the first-years there, doesn't look very appealing with its grueling physical challenges and five-minute showers. But then I don't wear black paint under my eyes and chase around other guys with a long stick and shoulder pads. On the other extreme, we attended an admissions event for Ohio State at a posh Tysons Corner hotel with elegant hors d'oeuvres and gifts from the university. (Andrew ended up with an Ohio State laundry bag.) A young woman from Ohio State even called the house one night to congratulate Andrew on his admission and Buckeye scholarship and ask if he had any questions about the university. He applied to Ohio State without ever seeing the campus. He only knows the football team. Sometimes I think he is just savoring the attention; other times I am certain he is torn in his decision making. Then there have been his attempts to "court" colleges or, more accurately, the colleges' lacrosse coaches. Since he was small, before he even knew what lacrosse was, he wanted to go to Penn State: a school one of his uncles attended. Throughout high school, he has attended Penn State's lacrosse summer camp. This final summer he chose to wear his Westfield jersey instead of the t-shirt that came with the price of the camp so they would remember where he was from. By the end of the camp, the coaches were referring to him as Westfield, but there were still no offers to play lacrosse for Penn State. He has been accepted to the university, but not to the State College campus, which isn't like going to Penn State at all. I watch the papers for stories about his friends. One of his teammates is talking to the coach at University of Virginia, a Division I team -- for lacrosse players like Andrew, a dream come true. Lacrosse isn't everything, I tell him. It is another four years -- if you stay healthy. Then there's the rest of your life. "If you were me, where would you go?" he asks. "VCU," I say. I stand by my decision. VCU and Richmond have everything a young person could possibly want: a good education, attentive professors, an excellent music scene with lots of clubs, and plenty of museums and parks. At VCU I had the chance to be independent in a city that wasn't as big as New York. It was just the right size. ~ Although Andrew is classified as "Undecided," we choose to attend one of the breakout sessions for specific majors. I am surprised when he wants to go to the Humanities session; on our previous visit, we had focused on the School of Engineering. A bad experience with a mousetrap car in Honors Physics has changed his perspective and possibly his life course. "It was pathetic," he tells me as we climb the stairs and walk in the direction of a young man holding up a Humanities and Sciences card. "It didn't even go 35 feet. Plus I had to push it. Mr. S said nothing. He just walked away." Now we are looking at Political Science or International Studies, maybe History. One of my old professors is representing the Political Science Department. "I had him for State and Local Government," I whisper to Andrew. "I'm amazed any of your professors are still alive," he whispers back. All of the faculty members are very entertaining, particularly the gentleman representing Philosophy, who is quite droll and clearly understands that his chances of picking up a potential major are just about nil. The chair of the History Department makes reference to the War Between the States and Richmond's rich resources as the capital of the Confederacy. She mentions a recent research project conducted by students at Hollywood Cemetery. "Oh, we have to go there," I tell Andrew. "Today. It's close." Hollywood Cemetery is one of those ornate old cemeteries with massive mausoleums and all kinds of monuments and statuary. Presidents are buried there, as well as Civil Wars heroes -- including those from VMI, which was burned to the ground during the war. Andrew chooses to chat one-on-one with the guy from International Studies. At VMI, he tells me, they have a combination major in which you can study both Political Science and International Relations. He wants to know if that is possible here. It turns out that the program isn't an exact match, but the man assures him that such a combination of course work is possible. After the breakouts break up, it is time for lunch, campus tours, and what the admissions counselors have labeled in the open house program as "Fun." Fun comprises a student organizational fair on the one plaza. As the weather is marginal, so is the fun. A number of fraternity and sororities are on hand, as are the typical student government-type organizations. They are not helping my cause. Waiting in line for the pizza lunch, we read the inscriptions on the bricks in the plaza. Andrew is captivated by the brickwork that covers the campus sidewalks, instead of concrete. I am surprised to recognize a few names. "He's an English professor," I tell Andrew, pointing to one brick. "And you're standing on Buzzy." Andrew lifts one of his huge white sneakers and says, "Get with it, Mom. He's Buzz now. Don't call him Buzzy." I look down and see that he is correct. The president of one of the fraternities when I was a student here has dropped the "y" from his name. For professional reasons, I wonder? "How come you don't have a brick?" "They cost money," I say. The truth is I still have one of my brick brochures -- the university sends me one every year or so. It's with my bills and my magazine subscription renewals. One day, I just might feel nostalgic enough to write a check and mail it. ~ The start of the campus tours is still 45 minutes away, so I improvise. "What do you want to see?" I ask Andrew. We are sitting on a grassy knoll outside of the Performing Arts Center, watching people wander past. "I still can't see myself here," he says. "I don't see anyone like me." "That's ridiculous," I say, but there are some really unusual people milling around. One of the prospective students is particularly hard to miss. His hair is cherry red and his bangs stop in the middle of his horn rim glasses. I already spent about five minutes in the break-out session trying to figure out if the child of the couple sitting in front of us was male or female. I thought it was a boy. Andrew thought so, too. "I just want to see some stuff. Show me some stuff," he says finally, and we begin an impromptu tour. "That's where I took biology lab." I point to construction rubble on the other side of a fence. "They're going to put a dining hall there. "This used to be the heart of the campus." I point to another space between buildings. "They had bands every Friday afternoon and sold beer. This is where you saw everybody and started your weekend." We fly through the nearest classroom building: Hibbs. We walk the halls, peek in classrooms, and read the walls. You can find out a lot by reading the walls. We wander past the advising offices where they are advertising graduate programs from around the country. "Hmmm," I say by one bulletin board, "I didn't even know West Virginia had an M.F.A. program." West Virginia is one of the schools that Andrew got into. "Did you know they have more Rhodes scholars than any other American university?" he asks. "No, I didn't," I say, surprised that he really read the literature. ~ Since VCU is an urban university, its campus is unusual in that the university has bought up portions of the city and turned it into whatever they needed. The historic row houses along West Franklin now house the academic departments. A hospital on Grace Street now serves as administrative offices. Huge portions of the once decrepit Broad Street are home to a new fitness center and art studios for the school's nationally ranked art programs. I want Andrew to see Ginter House. Built in 1888, it is probably the most beautiful building on campus, with amazing ornamental woodwork and structural details. And it is haunted. I spent a lot of nights in the attic of Ginter House, where the campus newspaper used to have its dark rooms. I used to carry around a key to this historic landmark. That key would do me good right now. The house, which is now the Provost's Office, is locked on weekends. We slip into the one vestibule and peer through the leaded glass. "Wow," Andrew says. "It reminds me of the hotel in The Shining." "The heart of the house is a huge double staircase. We'll have to come back on a weekday. Even if you don't decide to go here." We are still standing on the stairs of the Ginter House when one of the campus tours strolls by. We quickly join the ranks when the student conducting the tour mentions that they will be going to the dorms next. The tour guy isn't the greatest. He mentions twice that the residence hall space is limited because VCU is a commuter school. I am half-tempted to contact the Admissions Office on Monday to complain. What he says might be technically true, but it doesn't give the full picture. A big part of the VCU experience is eventually moving out of the dorms and into the plentiful and affordable apartments through the Fan: the neighborhood adjacent to campus. When I went to VCU, a student could live in an old, architecturally interesting row house; walk to classes, the laundromat, and neighborhood restaurants that served the best baked spaghetti in the world; and get her phone cut off because of her roommate's long distance romance. Real-life experiences to savor in later years. The tour guide also misspeaks a couple of times. At one point he tells the group that the oldest dormitory, Johnson Hall, doesn't have heat or air conditioning. One mother shrieks, "No heat?" and he corrects himself: just no air conditioning. He colors his speech with the phrase "and whatnot," which is very distracting. We now know that the building on the corner contains the Office of Admissions, Financial Aid, "and whatnot." Not particularly useful information. "He managed to get five 'whatnots' in those last two sentences," Andrew whispers to me. When we get down to the next corner, our guide tells us that this is the end of the tour and we will be returning to student commons. Another mother wants to know what is "down there," pointing across the street, past Monroe Park. "Oh, the building with the cone is the School of Engineering," the tour guide says and the crowd scans the horizon looking for a cone. "Actually, it's a pyramid," Andrew finally says loudly. "On the roof." The people look at him and then look back at the horizon. "It's a new building," he continues. "It's really nice inside -- lots of wood trim." When the light changes, a handful of people cross the street and head down to check out the new building. I drag Andrew into the housing complex across the street, which the tour guide has assured us is nearly impossible to get into because it is reserved for upperclassman. "It was designed by a prison architect," I tell Andrew. "Oh, great," he says. "No, really. All the rooms open up onto a courtyard so you can see what's going on." We pass a computer lab monitored by a young man who does look like Andrew. "I'll bet he doesn't drink espresso or go to poetry readings," I say. "Mom," he says and rolls his eyes. ~ Don't you want him to go to Mason? people always ask, including the dean of admissions, who is a good friend as well as a colleague. No, I don't. I think he needs to be away from us, managing his time, finding out what he is interested in, finding out who he is -- really is, when not under the influence of his high school friends who have known him since elementary school. College is a chance to reinvent yourself -- a opportunity that isn't to be passed up or taken likely. There have been a number of times I've wanted to reinvent myself over years, to wipe that slate completely clean and start from scratch. But a completely clean slate would leave me without an Andrew, and that's something I couldn't face. I'm still waiting to see how the story ends. A Kite in Novemberby Kathy Moran A kite bobs and darts, waving wildly in the wind. From the hospital window, I cannot see who is flying it; a line of trees blocks my view. But I picture a family: perhaps a son and father, or maybe a mom and dad with a daughter. The combination of parent and child doesn't matter. Just a family -- a happy family. Dingy gray clouds hang low on the horizon, though above them the sky is blue. The wind blows other clouds -- mounds of whipped cream -- across the sun, creating shadows and light that play tag among the cars in the parking lot below. There must be a park across the street; walkers and joggers, bundled against the cold, traverse a path that meanders past the trees. It's odd to see a kite in November; kite flying is for March. Yes, March winds can be as blustery cold as the wind today, but that cold carries with it the promise of spring, the promise of life. November holds no such promise, only the forecast of barren winter days. Aren't they cold? I wonder of the family. I'm cold, and I'm not even outside. The oranges, browns, and yellows of the autumn foliage splash against the gray horizon, looking like a modern day Monet. Burning bushes ring the parking lot in brilliant red. I'm surprised that anything can be so vibrant this day. In the room behind me, my son and daughter-in-law are saying goodbye to their baby. Stillborn -- stillborn -- just two weeks from his due date. The grandparents, aunts, and uncles have said our farewells, passing the baby from one to another, kissing his cold brow, and hugging him to our chests, rocking him in our arms. Now we wait in the hall to give the parents their last minutes with their son. The pregnancy had no complications. The doctor called it an accident: a cord-related, fatal accident. How could a baby have an accident, safely cocooned in his mother's womb? Accidents happen on the street. People who jaywalk have accidents. People who run red lights, people who drive over the speed limit, have accidents. When my cell phone rang Friday evening, I thought it was my husband calling to tell me the score of the football game: a contest between local cross-town rivals. A big deal in our town, though I had chosen to skip the excitement this year. But Caller ID displayed my parents' number. Pushing "Talk," I braced myself, expecting to hear that something had happened to my father. Funny, I didn't think it might be my father calling about my mother, just as I didn't expect my mother to be calling about my grandson. "There's something wrong with the baby. They can't find the heartbeat." "Jeff's trying to reach you. Jim didn't answer his cell phone. When Jeff couldn't remember your number, he called me." "Where is he?" "At the hospital." "I don't know." "What?" Several phone calls and torturous minutes later, I reached my son. Even as he answered, I believed he would explain it was a mistake. Would say the doctor had located the heartbeat. Instead, he sobbed. "My baby's dead!" Everything was fine at yesterday's checkup. Last night the baby's hiccups made Mama and Daddy laugh! But he had. Brock had died. Sometime between Thursday and Friday evening, the cord had wrapped around his neck. When Krista sat down to dinner and took a drink of ice water, Brock did not wriggle; he always wriggled when she drank cold water. Nothing. Fear gripped her, so Jeff took her to the hospital for reassurance, believing they would be sent home with smiles and relief. Instead, the ultrasound revealed no heartbeat, and the staff took Krista to labor and delivery. Krista had delivered her son -- a life-like doll -- warm and pliable as clay. His little mouth was slack. Open, close. Open, close. For a moment, we could pretend that Brock was asleep -- until we saw the unspeakable grief in Krista's red-rimmed eyes and Jeff's broken countenance. My faith tells me I will see Brock again, that God will comfort me as he has been faithful to do in other sorrows. I know people will send cards and food, give hugs and sympathy. That's what people do when someone dies. I know some will avoid me because, unfortunately, that is also what people do in the awkward moments of not knowing what to say. I will go through each day, putting one foot in front of the other: preparing lessons, grading papers, cooking dinner, washing laundry. At some point, I will recover my joy. But not today. Today I watch a kite soar across the sky as grief anchors me to the ground. Our Choiceby Constance Sommer Our son, Liam, is wonderful. You should meet this boy. He's sweet, he's funny and so bright! We brag about him to our friends. We don't mention that nine years ago we considered aborting him. ~ At my 16-week pregnancy check-up, my obstetrician took a sample of my blood. Then she ran a test. Her colleague, whom I'd never met, phoned me with the results at 9:30 p.m. on a Thursday night. "Your triple-screen results are in, and they are showing an increased risk of Down's syndrome," said Dr. Nancy O'Neil. Her voice was like a BB gun: pop, pop, pop. I motioned for my husband to mute the TV. I hadn't chosen to get pregnant at age 30 out of longing for a baby to hold; I had wanted to avoid having "problems" more common in older mothers. Down's syndrome would have topped that list. But my body tested like that of a 38-year-old. My ultrasound, scheduled for two weeks out, was shot-gunned up to the next day. Dr. O'Neil told me I should strongly consider following that with an amniocentesis. "Wait!" I said as she paused for breath. I wasn't sure I wanted some high-tech test involving a long, slender needle piercing my abdomen. "Please, can we just wait on all this a few more days? We don't know if we want to do amnio. We need to think about it for awhile." "You don't have time to wait." Dr. O'Neil sounded like a schoolteacher repeating a lesson for a distracted child. "You need to get the results of the amnio back before it's too late." "Too late?" "To terminate the pregnancy. If you're going to terminate, you have to do it by 20 weeks." I hung up, and my husband, Bill, said, "Don't worry now. Let's see what happens tomorrow." After he went to bed, I sat up, staring at the TV for hours, distraught at what I might be carrying inside of me. If this was a Down's baby, it wasn't going to look like my baby pictures. It wasn't going to think like me. I didn't believe it would act like me. What would I do with a child like this? There's no question that, had I been married to a different kind of person, I would have planned to abort. Before becoming a mother, I believed that if I was careful and deliberate, I could manage my life and have everything. I could have the beautiful little girl and the handsome baby boy, the stylishly decorated home, the loving marriage, and the flourishing career -- not sequentially, but simultaneously. Bringing home a Down's baby would rip that canvas in two. The idea of such loss in control sent me into near panic. I wanted that baby gone. But the decision wasn't mine alone. I'm Jewish, from a small, secular family in Los Angeles; my husband is Catholic, from a devout, extended family peppered among small cities in the Northeast. I marched for a woman's right to choose. He attended a Catholic medical school where abortion was not on the curriculum. I once had a "Pro-Child, Pro-Choice" sticker on the bumper of my Honda Accord; he persuaded me to scrape it off before our wedding, so his family wouldn't be offended when they came into town. To describe Bill as anti-abortion, pro-life, would have been an exaggeration. He grudgingly conceded the occasional necessity of termination. But first he would look for another option. When we married, people whispered that it wouldn't last. As Jay Leno launched his monologue on the night of my doctor's call, I wondered if this pregnancy would prove those people right. I stopped looking at my belly then and there. I needed my space. The next morning, Bill and I faced each other over the breakfast table. My husband is a busy doctor who leaves home early in the morning and returns well after dark. At the time, I too boasted a frantic career. But as a newspaper journalist, my earning potential was one third of his -- and that's being optimistic. Whatever job sacrifices lay ahead were going to be mine. The brunt of any disabled child burden would fall on my shoulders. "I need to get that amnio," I said midway through my bowl of cereal. In Bill's family, women trust in the Lord and don't take prenatal genetic tests. But he didn't marry one of those women. "I could barely sleep last night, and I don't think I'll be able to sleep for the next five months and I'll be so stressed and worried and--" "Okay, okay," he interrupted. "I know. I figured. We'll do it." There are some arguments not worth having. We knew we might face a blistering battle over whether or not to keep this pregnancy. Better to keep the peace as long as possible. Bill shrugged and gave in -- for the moment. ~ I don't believe a person has to get an abortion to prove their pro-choice mettle. I don't even believe a woman has to be willing to get one herself, should the occasion arise. That's what the "choice" is all about. Well, for three weeks in the fall of 1998, Bill and I learned all about choice. Choice was our daily companion -- the drag in his step, the ache in my head, the knot in the muscle behind my right shoulder. We found it's easier to talk about a choice than to make one. ~ I'd looked forward to the ultrasound since my first missed period, eager to get a glimpse of our incipient baby. When the time came, I told myself to look, but my head turned away from the screen. For 30 minutes, the doctor and technician waved the ultrasound wand over my distended abdomen. Still, at the end, no one could tell us conclusively if our baby had Down's. We did learn were having a boy. This meant the fetus had a name: William Murdoch Howell IV. And a nickname: Liam, the Irish derivative we agreed upon years ago as a more palliative alternative to Bill, Jr. Not that we would refer to him as Liam for a long while. You don't name something you might not be keeping. The ultrasound was on a Friday. We had to wait until lunchtime Monday for the amnio. The whole weekend, I tried not to ponder this: one out of every 400 women miscarries after having an amnio. This baby might be fine. And I might be about to kill him, just because I couldn't live with the possibility that he wasn't fine. ~ Before getting our amnio, we had to undergo genetic counseling. Bill and I arrived at the perinatal office promptly at 11 a.m., then waited for an hour to see the genetic counselor. In the meantime, we flipped through photo albums of healthy babies delivered by the practice. I wondered if these doctors ever delivered a Down's baby. Would they put that picture in these peppy scrapbooks? The genetic counselor looked comforting and familiar, like a college dorm mate I might have had. She had brown hair, soft brown eyes, and a gleaming ring on her finger from her wedding the month before. Her name was Julie. Soon we were down in the muck of it with Julie, flipping through an abbreviated list of deformities and abnormalities they would test for. Julie downplayed the possibilities. But I imagined anew this child inside of me: his spine twisted, his head bulbous, his limbs missing. We learned that an amniocentesis can tell you whether your baby has Down's, but not how severe that Down's will be. It couldn't tell us if our kid would grow up just this side of normal, landing, say, in a group home with a paid, menial job, or spend his days unable to talk or feed himself. Our amnio wasn't for another hour and a half. Time for lunch. At a deli near the medical offices, Bill and I sipped our soup in near silence, then returned early to the perinatal office. I was shivering on an exam table, the nurse swabbing alcohol over my exposed tummy, when the doctor breezed in, smiling and shaking hands. Soon he set about poking my belly with the needle. I thought I might cry. "Don't be so nervous! This is no big deal." He guided his needle through my uterus with the help of an ultrasound monitor. "Look at your baby," he suggested, pointing to the screen. "Isn't he cute?" ~ We were told it could be a week to 10 days before we'd have the amnio results back. We decided to think about other things. My friends called me. I didn't call them back. My mother-in-law called and meticulously discussed every conceivable subject, except the upcoming amnio results. I knew she prayed for me and her unborn grandson at Mass every morning. My parents called daily from 1,200 miles away. They warned that a special needs child could crush my life. "I've talked to _________ about it," my mother would say, referring to one of her many girlfriends. "And she agreed with me that you do not want to do this to yourself. Connie, you have no idea what you are getting into." She was right. I'd never even changed a diaper. But I did know one thing. Whatever choice we made, somebody would never forgive us. ~ A week passed, then two, and still no test results. Unable to restrain myself any longer, I went online and looked up "Down's syndrome." I think I'd hoped that a Down's baby would suffer enough misery that I could justify his early demise. Instead, I learned that Down's children are happy, maybe even happier than me. The misery, if there was to be any, would be purely mine, of my own making. I wasn't used to making life-altering sacrifices for somebody else. But I'm also a person who has always prided myself on being there for friends and family, when someone needed me. And someone obviously needed me now. I thought, Maybe my future won't look like a Norman Rockwell painting. Maybe it will involve more hardship, more pain, more abnormality than I expected. I considered what Bill and I had to give a child: not just love, but two parents, a home, money, resources… Nobody was more equipped to handle this than we were. ~ Three weeks post-amnio, I got a head cold. My back hurt so badly I could only sit for 20 to 30 minutes at a stretch. Finally, one night, we sat down to have The Talk. Bill wanted to keep the baby, regardless of what the test showed. I wasn't surprised. A day or two before, a patient had come to see him with her Down's child. The boy was functional, though he clearly needed extra care. His mother clearly adored him. This, for Bill, was not only inspirational – it was a sign, maybe from God himself. We were going to have a Down's baby and we should hold that baby tight and love him fiercely. Bill said he was ready. I knew I'd never be ready. But I'd also realized something in the last few weeks. An abortion is not an eraser, wiping clean a messy chalkboard. An abortion is itself an incident, a thing you have to live with, long after it's over. I imagined going through the rest of my life knowing this thing about myself: that I had denied somebody a chance to live because I couldn't face the challenge of raising him. I didn't want to be that person. And then there was my marriage. I realized that if I kept a Down's baby for Bill's sake, I could grow to resent my husband for saddling me, the primary caregiver, with such a tremendous responsibility. I could -- but I probably wouldn't. I would probably love that baby and soon be unable to imagine life without him. And my parents, the ones who urged me not to keep a Down's child -- I hoped they would adapt as well. Children tend to burrow their way into your heart, want it or not. But if I insisted on an abortion, Bill's mother would be heartbroken and bitterly disappointed in both of us. Bill, stuck in the middle, might be ridden with guilt. He might get angry. He might never forgive himself or me for the loss of that child. And then what? What if the abortion germinated in our happy marriage like a cancer, destroying it from the inside out? There are some risks I just don't take. I told Bill I would keep the pregnancy, no matter what. ~ The next morning, I saw my doctor for my 20-week check-up. "You mean they haven't given you the results yet?" she asked. The nurse put me on the phone with the perinatal office; the results came in the previous evening. "Your baby," said the genetics counselor, "is fine. All the tests are normal." I staggered out of the office and down the stairs to the lobby. I called Bill and we both sobbed. It was like we'd been living in someone else's life for the past month and finally, our old existence was restored. At work, I felt Liam kick inside me and, for the first time in weeks, I was glad. ~ That was nine years ago. Liam began third grade this fall. He has since been joined by Eli, 6, and Sarah, 3. That means we've debated this same question two more times. I'd like to say that we stuck by our principles and bypassed future prenatal genetic tests, since we planned to take a pregnancy to term, no matter what. But the truth is we're more undecided than ever. We once had so many ideas about parenting -- children should be seen and not heard, babies should not spend the night sandwiched between their mother and father -- that have gone up in so many clouds of smoke. We now see that there is no right or wrong way to raise a child. We just keep doing it our way, and hope they turn out well. And so, we've come to believe, there is no right or wrong answer to the question of keeping a Down's baby. Some families would thrive; others would fall apart under the strain. We are stretched pretty thin as it is and frankly don't know which category we would fall into. No, the lesson we ultimately took from the nearly-Down's episode was this: test aggressively and early. By the third pregnancy, we decided to do an even riskier procedure at 10 weeks, so that if we needed to abort we could do so under cover of a normal miscarriage. That's not to say we would have. We've also learned this from our children: you love them no matter what, and you always underestimate what you can handle. I'm not sure what we would have done if an unwanted result had come back either of those times. Life, especially life with children, continues to surprise us. A choice is not only freedom. It's a terrible responsibility. Testing: One, Two, Three?by Gretchen Clark I’m late. This can happen, but saying so doesn’t help. Don’t panic doesn’t calm me down, either. We are careful only reminds me of what careful can mean. Careful for me has meant the pill, it’s not 100 percent, "You’re pregnant," due in August, "Congratulations," pink rattle balloon, "It’s a girl." I’m worrying about something or nothing. Yes or No. Plus or Minus. I need to know which one it is. Now. As we drive to the drug store for an EPT, I look in the rearview mirror at their reflections: my beginning and end. My oldest and youngest. My A and Z. My bookends. One for each hand. That was the answer from a bridesmaid sitting next to me at a wedding reception six years ago. Part of the same bridal sea in dark, silky blue dresses, we were navy waves rolling towards the beautiful white foam that was our girlfriend. Over champagne and cake we talked love, marriage, and kids. The other bridesmaid asked, "How many do you have?" Bite of cake in my mouth, I held up one finger. "And you?" A sip of bubbly. "Two. One for each hand." I was on a seesaw back then. I felt up for two, then down with one. But those words, one for each hand, slammed me to the ground, convinced me in their simple poetry, their biological symmetry, to have one more child. With that decision, I willingly did not pass Go; I sent myself back to the first square in the parenting game. I reset the clock and pushed Snooze on my self. My daughters -- my Careful and Planned -- walk into Walgreen’s with me and head to the toy aisle first. I let them pick whatever plastic shiny pieces of junk they want so that I can then slip into the female need aisle without them wondering why. I find what I’ve come for, but I can’t get to it. My answer, my test I need to solve this problem, is locked in a glass case. I know why without being told. I can imagine a scared teenage girl with no money of her own, needing to resolve the same problem and fearing the answer, like I am. I was that girl. Once upon a time. Uncertainty can make a girl desperate; make her beg, pray, and steal. I understand her: the teenager, the woman, the mother. We are everywhere, hiding our secrets in bedrooms painted off-white. None of us wants to have to ask for the item we need, to be forced to make uncomfortable chitchat with a stranger while he or she fumbles for keys, fiddles with the case to unlock it, touches and then hands over the keys to our fate. I buy the bribes for my kids and leave without the one thing I came for. My gaze returns to my daughters' reflections as we head to the grocery store. One for each hand. We are even, not odd. No one is solo on any rollercoaster. We are four chairs to a square dining room table. No one sits alone on the plane. We always have partners to Tango. On Aisle 10, I grab a test, drop it in the plastic basket, and let the girls pick out sugary, neon-coated, turn-your-tongue-blue-green-or-purple-red candy concoctions at the checkout line. I put the test and the treats on the conveyor belt and hope the cashier doesn’t comment on my very personal item, mixed in with the sweets. Weeks earlier a cashier stopped scanning my groceries to deeply inhale from a cinnamon apple candle I was buying. I felt inappropriately invaded; she became a dog sniffing things she shouldn’t. This Safeway clerk only eyes my one product, then looks at the two blonde, tangle-haired girls trailing me: one small, one tall; both skinny; one tan and freckled, one daisy petal white; both blue-eyed, knobby kneed, thin-wristed. I see her contemplating a third for me. I’m doing math in my head, too. While the clerk is adding, I am desperately subtracting. Two is the perfect number for me. Two is enough. Three would be too much. Three would be More. More sleepless nights, more sore nipples, more sit-ups to do, more books I want to read stacked into a corner that I’ll get to when . . . . More claustrophobic feelings, more crustless sandwiches to make, more homework to figure out, more cupcakes to bake. More memory loss, more two-minute showers, more dinners eaten cold or not at all. More sheets to wash, more tantrums to shush, more questions to answer, more patience to find. More red Popsicle stains to scrub out, more vomit to clean up, more afternoons at the playground, more Thin Mints to sell, more space between me and my husband, more clothes to fold, more lost socks to find, more anger to contain, more toys to trip over. More time spent standing in front of a kitchen sink, more time sitting on a fold up chair in an elementary school cafeteria, more time with my head in an oven. More wondering, When is it going to be my time again? There is already too little left -- of time, of me. Two plus One. One more would take away. Definitely. Mentally. Physically. Emotionally. Three would make Less of me. When we get home I use my third diversion, the Cartoon Network. With my girls coming down from their sugar highs and succumbing to the sedation of animation, I disappear into the bathroom to find my answer. I pee, hold my breath, cross my fingers, watch the clock, say a prayer, then take a look at the stick. I get what I want: hours to think, uninterrupted sleep, the crack of freedom opening up, the space to reconfigure myself, to fill up again on literature and, possibility, the opportunity to ask myself, What do you want to do today? And then to answer. In that lovely blue minus line that halves the pregnancy test window, I see wholeness. Just like in a high school Algebra equation, a negative can produce a positive result. This time I pass. By failing. Falling to My Kneesby Shelli Graff Angel Hearing the news that I'm pregnant again is like having cotton candy for the first time. Rick walks through the kitchen door with balloons for me. "Let's call everyone!" "Shouldn't we wait?" We're still early in the pregnancy. I sit down, holding my stomach. "I don't feel very good." "That's so exciting!" Rick kisses me, then prances out the back door shouting, "Love you!" I inhale his joy, drag myself out of the chair, and make my way down the hall to our bedroom. How ridiculous, the term "morning sickness" is. For me, it's all-day and night sickness, coupled with sheer exhaustion. I sink into my bed like an anchor thrown overboard. I'm having another baby, a sibling for Sara. * * * Sitting on a lime green couch reading Parenting magazine, I wait for my first exam since becoming pregnant. My unwelcome friend, nausea, is finally gone; I feel like myself again. "Angel?" the nurse calls. I follow her into the exam room, undress, and put the two-by-two sheet over my lap. It is always so damn cold in here. I look at the ultrasound machine next to me. I'm at ten weeks and can't wait to see the first picture of my baby, to hear that beautifully strong heartbeat. ~ Thirty-fiveish, blond and blue-eyed, Dr. Ruby Weiner struts into the room. I am reminded of one of my favorite Barbie dolls. "So, let's see. You're about ten weeks." Dr. Weiner flashes me a businesslike smile and takes out the Doppler heart monitor. "Let's take a look." The tips of her narrow fingers are cold as she rubs gel on my stomach. She places the monitor on my lower abdomen and searches in slow, concentric circles. She lifts the monitor, then tries another area. "Is something wrong?" I ask. "Not necessarily." She makes no eye contact, just focuses on the Doppler monitor and my belly. She finally offers that cordial smile. "I'm going to do an internal ultrasound." I put my feet in the stirrups and watch her turn on the ultrasound machine. I imagine myself in a surreal, comic-strip world where everything is flat and two-dimensional. In this alternate universe, the room is a vibrant shade of pink and Doctor Barbie is a plastic doll, all boobs and hair. She delivers the news in cheerful smiles and rhymes: "Well, I see the gestational sac, ~ Wherever I go, I see pregnant women: at the grocery store, at the coffee shop, at the gym, at Sara's preschool. They are everywhere. Following me and tormenting me. It's a conspiracy. I'm the only woman in all of Boulder, in all of Colorado, who isn't pregnant. ~ "I was fine three years ago. Why is it different now?" I ask the fertility doctor. "You never know," Dr. Schooner tells me. "After forty, fertility drops significantly." "So, it will be harder to get pregnant?" "Look, you failed the Clomid challenge test. As you age, your eggs age. Your body is working much too hard to produce them. Your egg quality is no longer good. If you get pregnant, which is doubtful, you'll miscarry." Dr. Schooner says this like a CEO reporting my company's financial prospects. "Don't I have any good eggs? Not even one?" "Not even one." ~ Rotten eggs. I have rotten eggs. I walk down 13th Street, pass the Boulderado Hotel, and turn the corner toward the Book Cafe. I wonder if people are looking at me, if they know about my eggs. I argue with Dr. Schooner in my head: there is always a way. I'll simply make it happen. I'll be like I was when I was fifteen -- a figure skater training for the Olympics. So I have bad eggs. It's a terrible fall, but it's time to get up, dust off the ice, and try again. I know about effort. I'm good at self-discipline. I can do this, I tell myself. It's the height of spring in Boulder; thousands of multi-colored tulips line the Pearl Street Mall in every imaginable shade of pink, yellow, orange, and red, a magnificent palette of color. I breathe in the crisp air and feel the warm Rocky Mountain sun. A pregnant woman walks by. I'm now part of that club, one of the millions of women battling infertility, another woman who desperately wants to have a baby. Maybe it's a longed-for first child, or maybe it's her second or third. For one reason or another, we've all been deceived by our bodies, betrayed by our empty wombs. ~ As I prepare for my double axel, a shiver runs through my body. For this moment, I'm alone in the center of the ice. Round and round I go. I fall and lift myself up, ready to try again. There is no such thing as failure. I can do it. I will do it. Rounding the corner, I begin my preparation. I turn and jump into the air, only to fall once more. I try again and again: spinning, turning, flying, and jumping. I am at home in the cold, dank grayness. Determined, I build up speed, step forward on |