by Chelsea Cain
‘Do I haaave to?’ I whined more now that I lived with strangers and ate brown food.
‘Don’t you want to pay respect to Mother Earth? Do something symbolic with soil on this sacred day?’ Mom asked.
She was serious.
I was nine.
I shrugged and put my mittens on.
It was dusk and so cold you could see your breath. We stood over the frostbitten tomato plants in the garden. Mom read poetry by Native Americans. Dad tried to get a shovel into the frozen compost. (Something symbolic.) Each adult said why she was thankful. My sister rolled her eyes and stomped her feet to keep warm.
‘Didn’t Pilgrims kill Indians?’ I whispered to her.
‘Yeah, Pilgrims were jerks,’ she whispered back. She was eleven, knew more and was much cooler than I.
‘Why do we celebrate Thanksgiving if Pilgrims were jerks?’ I asked. All the adults looked at me.
‘I can’t feel my face,’ my sister said. ‘I’m going inside.’
We all followed, except Dad, determined to get his shovelful.
The mashed potatoes had brown worms mixed in. Or maybe they were just the skins.
‘Most nutritious part,’ Mom said.
‘High in vitamin A,’ said Dad. ‘I think it’s D,’ she corrected. Somebody lit a joint.
I poked a drumstick with my fork. I’d seen a turkey farm on TV that morning. So many birds, all dead now. I thought about becoming the youngest vegetarian in America.
‘Eat your salad,’ Dad said.
It was covered with tofu-tamari dressing. Brown liquid with white clumps, clinging to green leaves. I shook my head no.
‘Why not?’ he asked.
I bit into the cranberry sauce. My face puckered. Saliva rushed to my mouth.
‘Sugar’s bad for you,’ a man from the commune said when I spit it out.
‘I know,’ I retorted and grabbed some pie to save my palate: bland and thick with pumpkin strings.
‘I made that too,’ he said.
Dishes piled, oil heating on the stove, the adults retreated to the living room.
‘Oops, nature calls,’ a woman of the commune said. She rose from the pillows, skipped past the bathroom and out the rear door into the wooded backyard.
I was so glad I hadn’t invited any friends over that year.
The next school day at lunchtime I peeked under the table into my sandwich baggie.
Dead bird.
My stomach growled, but I still couldn’t do it.
In 1971, the youngest vegetarian in America decided brown bread with just ketchup wasn’t so bad.
Suzanne M. Cody
Rewriting History
Dear Isabel, aged four and a half months: Jr It is 8:30 P. M. It’s November. It snowed today. Not a lot, just a little, enough that you noticed it touching your fat little hands and chubby pink cheeks when I carried you out on the porch to see it. There was a sharp breeze from off the harbor and you started making that breathless ‘Huh-huh-huh’ sound like the wind was whipping your little baby breath right out of your lungs. I brought you inside right away because I don’t think that sound indicates pleasure or delight. I could be wrong. I’m still pretty new at this baby thing.
It is 8:30 P. M. and you are asleep and I should be, but I am up looking at my reflection in the kitchen window, eating generic Applejacks with rice milk and wondering at the fact that I am lucky enough to be your mother. I have never been lucky. It has to be a fluke. You are so lovely and alive and aware and I am clearly too unbalanced and insecure to be your mother—to be anybody’s mother. But then I love you so intensely and I find myself consistently doing my best to do the right things for you. And for the kitty, too, who is currently constipated and leaving little shit trails on the kitchen linoleum where he drags his impacted butt. You and the kitty both have poop problems and need glycerin suppositories. This is so much of my life now, your poop, the kitty’s poop—I have become a mother. A challenged mother, but a mother just the same. And I am constantly blown away by that one fact. I am a mother.
This afternoon you were cranky—your teeth are coming in early and painfully like your mama’s before you and I deeply need to understand why childhood has to hurt so much. Design flaws? Or is this supposed to build infant character? I strapped your small fussy self to my chest, twisting and folding the Maine Baby Bag so you could look outward without a strap cutting across your face. I think it’s designed to work like that. Still, I kept walking into the bathroom to check in the mirror and make sure your lips weren’t turning blue. That would be just like me—accidentally killing you when I am just trying to make you feel better. But you fell asleep dangling off me like an extra appendage and I stood at the kitchen counter thinking and rocking. (Stand several young mothers together in a group and in moments they will all be rocking back and forth at just about heartbeat speed. Not only will they not notice themselves, they won’t notice anyone else doing it either.)
Ani DiFranco is spouting Riot Grrl dogma from a cheap boom box I bought at a pawnshop. Our welfare checks won’t even cover the rent. I just smashed my glasses all to hell rolling around on the floor with you. The phone bill is seventy-five dollars and that’s mostly service charges. I am paying off a defaulted student loan. The hospital is hounding me for the rest of the cost of your birth—I would think labor would be payment enough, for Christ’s sake. But you would still be worth every penny, if I had it, if we had it. Someone once told me it was better to have no money because then you didn’t have to worry about what you were going to do with it. Clearly, that person had money and no children.
What you and I look like isn’t quite the picture I had in my head when I envisioned having a baby, my only baby. I didn’t see a secondhand crib and store-brand disposable diapers. I didn’t see innumerable calls to the Department of Human Services and long mornings trying to make you be patient in government waiting rooms. I didn’t see a low-income housing apartment full of furniture scavenged from the unburned sheds on Nonny and Crampa’s property. No. No, this isn’t quite it. But it’s okay—it’s okay. I have you, and creative poverty is a familiar coat to wear, and we have it pretty good, considering.
I am going to make sure that you understand that these aren’t the things that count, in the end, in the big picture. I try to keep that in perspective. We live like this so I can be home for you, with you, to make sure, absolutely sure that you do have the really important things. When you cry, I am the one who picks you up right away. When you are hungry, you have the comfort of my breast. When you are tired, I am the one who rocks you to sleep. I know the games and the blanket and the toy you like. I have witnessed every developmental breakthrough and have cheered you on. I want you to feel safe and stable and secure in the knowledge that I am here for you, and that I will always be here for you and it doesn’t matter how our life looks from the outside. Here, on the inside, things are as they should be. You can depend on me, okay? Okay. Unsolicited advice is the mainstay of motherhood, and generally the bane of single motherhood. If you make an unpopular parenting decision (like, oh, exclusively breastfeeding the baby for six months—or, even worse, co-sleeping ), you have no one to support you, to back you up. No one to consult, to ask ‘What do you think about…?’ I have a deep and desperate need for you to have an interesting, creative, healthy childhood. Not having a basis for comparison or anyone I’d particularly trust to give me advice on that topic—the healthy part, anyway—I’m sort of winging it. Taking that into consideration, what do you say we lay down a couple of ground rules, just between the two of us, and talk about them later, eventually, when you figure out how to express yourself in words. This mother/baby thing is pretty fluid, but it would be nice to have a few things to be sure of. Okay? Okay.
I, Isabel’s mama, do solemnly swear (in no particular order ):
…not to leave pot brownies where you might get into them.
…not to ever send you blithely off to school dressed like an extra from Hair. It was a Co
dy family outing when the movie came to town, and yes, I went to school the next day in a long flowing skirt, a gauzy blouse and flowers in my hair.
…to have a car that runs reliably and has heat, a complete floor and no ‘creative paint job.’ My most memorable childhood ride consisted of a partially burnt out, candy-apple red Volkswagen bus replete with painted underwater views on both sides and ‘The Nautilus’ in curlicue script on the doors. Right here would be a good place to let you know that I was never, as a child, ashamed of your grandparents or our groovy hipster life out in the middle of nowhere. (We lived in Freedom, of all places, in the immediate vicinity of Unity and Liberty.) Granted, the people we were surrounded by were similar—young couples and families escaping back to the land from various major metropolitan areas, a lot of artists and writers and performers. Most are divorced now, and many of their kids are lazy or crazy or both. Go figure. But the point, my angel, is I never thought twice about being chauffeured around in that bohemian behemoth. In fact, I was likely pretty pleased with it at the time. Yet, one blindingly rainy, windy, miserable New England afternoon as your Uncle Nik, Aunt Gwennie and I bounced around, unseatbelted and carseatless in the cavernous rear of The Nautilus, your Nonny was struggling to control the car against the weather. Dwarfed at four feet ten and one hundred pounds by the entire counterculture driving experience, Nonny peered anxiously ahead for oncoming lights as the bus wove back and forth across the double yellow line. She didn’t see any, but the more minuscule rear guard paused from its raucous game among groceries and clean laundry to note the flashing blues coming up behind. ‘I smell bacon!’ we shouted as Nonny hauled the bus to the side of the road. So, up walked Mr. Backwoods Cop, thinking, certainly, that he was about to make a major drug bust—buncha fucked-up hippies can’t even control their psy-che-del-ic-ve-hi-cle—and what did he find? One harried little woman and three slightly grungy children. There was a short pause as he stood outside Nonny’s window, rain pouring off the brim of his hat. Then he told her to be more cautious driving in heavy weather and walked back to his car, clearly disappointed to have nothing of substance to tell the boys at the diner. Of course, had he looked, he might have found a little something in the ashtray.
…to always have enough money for food. Our short, moneyless phase was difficult enough when I was a proud little kid. How many times did your Nonny try to hand me food stamps as I headed out the door with the other kids to buy chips and Cokes at the general store? And how many times would I spend my money instead, money from babysitting or collecting bottles by the roadside, and do without non-food things I could have spent it on instead?
…to use wood heat only in a decorative holiday fireplace or as an emergency backup to the thermostat.
…that sleeping in tents will be for recreational purposes only and certainly never a necessity in the house. When my family first moved from the one-room hunting camp that was our temporary Freedom residence to the one-room cabin that became our permanent one, we had to sleep in tents pitched in second-floor lofts, tucked under the peaked roof. The walls were so full of holes that without the tents we would have been nothing but mosquito meat. The cabin did tighten and expand, eventually, into an actual house. Your grandfather had a penchant for taking his chainsaw to walls, ceilings and floors whenever that expansion mood took him.
It’s all gone now. The house we built from logs hauled from the woods and fields on our property burned to the ground last year during those crazy ice storms—two and a half months after I found out I was pregnant with you, one month after Nonny finally got fed up with Crampa’s drinking and left, two weeks after your Uncle Nik and your Grampa held a wild holiday bash that completely trashed the house. C’est la vie.
…to give you limits and guidelines, and discipline you when you willfully and unreasonably defy me.
…to sometimes disapprove of your clothes, your habits, your friends, your music. I had to make an intense and creative effort to rebel against Nonny and Grampa. What’s left when your parents are giving you your dope, when you talk to your mom in detail about your sex life, when your dad likes to listen to louder music than you do, when you can come and go pretty much as you please? Or when you want to dress like Annie Hall and your mom thinks you should dress like Janis Joplin? Or when your parents think your rebel boyfriend who drinks too much, listens to punk rock music, lives on his skateboard and is constantly getting suspended from school is a really cool guy? Where do you go from there? Either you become a drug addict or a Republican. Or both.
…not to have you pass out free puppies or political bumperstickers at country fairs.
…to let you be a child for your entire childhood. When I turned eleven, your grandpa told me I could leave home whenever I wanted—eleven was old enough to take care of myself. Or, if I wasn’t going to leave, I could at least participate in the family as a fully functioning adult. When Grampa had his first free-love affair that we knew about, he and Nonny talked about it with me—and I was about twelve. I put Nonny and your aunt and uncle upstairs in Nonny’s bedroom to watch TV and sat downstairs alone, waiting for Grampa to come home from a self-abusive drunken tear to have it out with him myself.
Drugs were also a big issue between your grandparents and me right around this time. Once they didn’t make it home until dawn because they accidentally took Quaaludes thinking they were speed and fell asleep on someone’s couch. ‘Never,’ I scolded, ‘take anything unless you are absolutely sure of what it is.’ I think kids these days take for granted how little responsibility they have-the nineties are much more restrictive about parental sex and drug usage. But getting parents to use condoms might be more than even I am ready to deal with.
…to have indoor plumbing.
…that you will always feel safe around the people I bring into our lives—and if you don’t, that you will feel able to tell me. One of Nonny and Grampa’s friends in particular made me distinctly nervous. If he dropped by when I was alone, he would stick around for a while to chat. Nothing ever happened, but I do remember standing at the kitchen sink one afternoon taking a very long time to wash a carving knife as he lingered and asked me questions about my boyfriends—who they were, what I did with them. I was eleven and hadn’t really gotten around to boyfriends yet (though it wouldn’t be long). I just kept washing that knife over and over, rubbing the sponge along the blade as if I were meticulously removing every possible invisible particle of food. One clean knife.
…that there will be no part of my life that you are privy to that you can’t talk about at school—you’ll know what I mean one day. Or maybe you won’t, since I haven’t indulged on a regular basis since I was twenty and don’t see that changing any time soon.
I’ll warn you now, though, that under the influence of marijuana the women in our family miss out on the good stuff and pass out immediately. If we use it at all, it’s for insomnia and menstrual cramps. Also, I will not be your teacher or your dealer. I knew how to roll a joint when I was twelve—Crampa taught me. And I have never in my life bought a bag of weed.
…to teach you to dance like Nonny taught me. We are great dancers—loose hips, don’t you know.
…to teach you independence while still letting you depend on me.
…not to subject you to views of my male friends’ penises. I had a pretty good idea what constituted big and small in the penile arena before I was ten. The swimming hole was bathing-suit optional, or more like bathing-suit discouraged—at least until the kids (namely me, as the oldest) reached puberty at which point nudity became divided along the age line.
…to always surround you with energy and creativity. Notwithstanding a little of this, a little of that, I want so much for your childhood to resemble the best parts of mine. Sneaking out my bedroom window and down the woodshed roof to skinny-dip with the boys on sticky summer nights. Coming home from school to General Hospital (the groovy Luke and Laura Ice Palace years) and hot tea and fresh bread on blue-cold winter afternoons. Dressing up in
costume and walking in innumerable parades, leading kazoo bands, singing at parties, performing in variety shows, acting in plays. Learning how to cane chairs and grow sweet peas, can tomatoes and freeze spinach, make macrame necklaces, forge chain mail, ride a unicycle, juggle pins, putty windows, chink walls, spud logs, paddle a canoe, sail a catamaran. Contra-dancing. Scavenging for lunch in gardens. Knowing what a fresh vegetable tastes like. Picking wild strawberries and raspberries and blackberries. Helping animals into the world. Stretching out in a field on a cool autumn night, someone’s thigh for your pillow, your stomach someone else’s, watching the stars and humming Beatles songs.
…to teach you to trust people and to love them with all your heart and soul. Okay, I admit you’ll get hurt. A lot. But it’s worth it, I promise. I promise. I promise.
…to be a good mother to you, whatever that means. Whatever you need that to mean.
We will talk. When you can talk.
All my love, Mama
Contributors
Paola Bilbrough is a New Zealand poet and reviewer based in Melbourne, Australia. Her collection of poems, Bell Tongue, was published in June 1999 by Victoria University Press in New Zealand. She is currently working on a novel. From time to time she still thinks nostalgically of communal, subsistence living.
Carin Clevidence attended Oberlin College and the University of Michigan and received a Fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in Story, Field, Grand Tour and the Asahi Weekly of Japan. She lives on the south shore of Long Island with her husband and daughter and is currently at work on a novel.
Suzanne M. Cody and her daughter Isabel are currently residing in Iowa City, Iowa, with Isabel’s father. Suzanne divides her time between being Mama and working at Prairie Lights Books while looking for the next writing project worth giving up nap time for.