Growing Girls (9 page)

“Be careful of those jaggers,” Anna said to Sasha.

“Jaggers” was a word she must have picked up in preschool. It’s a Western Pennsylvania word. I was born in Eastern Pennsylvania, where we said “sticker bushes.”

“Anna,” I said. “We don’t say ‘jaggers’; we say ‘sticker bushes.’”

“‘Sticker bushes’?”

“Yeah.”

“Sasha,” she said. “Be careful of the sticker bushes because they can hurt your fingies.” She paused. “Mom, do we say ‘fingies’?”

“Sure.”

This was how we talked. This was who we were. We never said “butt.” We said “bummy.” We always said please and thank you and before we left the table we all said, “Beez a beez a beez a beez?” ever since Sasha invented it.

Every family has a language and this was ours. You bring jaggers or sticker bushes from your youth, and then there were all those invented words like “fingies” and “eggy-egg” and “niptydoops” that mysteriously fly in, if only for a little while, like colorful birds.

“Momma,” Anna said. “Does Daddy say ‘sticker bushes’?”

“Yes, he does,” I said. (Or he would now.)

We were about three feet into the impossible thicket. I could see a small clearing on the other side of a partition of thorns, a break. A destination. We were working single file. I snipped, they stomped. We had never embarked on a project nearly this ambitious. I figured it would take months, a little each week. There was no rush. We didn’t need the path. There were plenty of other avenues up the hill. I loved the woods and wanted a reason to introduce the girls to them.

I began to think of the woods in the same way I thought of Sasha’s language. A new path. A clearing. A deliberate attempt to get from here to there.

“What about this one?” Anna asked, pointing to an innocuous branch on the ground.

“Well, that’s the kind you just step over,” I said. “We don’t have to cut that one.”

“We’re not going to cut this one?” she said, disappointed.

“Honey, you can just step over stuff. We don’t have to cut every single thing.”

“Come on, Sash,” she said. “We have to step over this one.”

I imagined, one day, when the girls are ten and twelve or sixteen and eighteen, walking with them on this path, reminiscing about this time. I imagined a time when they’re thirty-four and thirty-six and I’m hobbled with arthritic knees, watching squirrels collecting acorns from the corner of my nursing home window. They’ll be out here together, just for old times, saying, “Can you believe Mom made us do this?”

“Sasha, say ‘sticker bush,’” Anna said. “Sticker bush? Stiiiiicker buuuuush?”

“Ssss,” Sasha said.

“No, that’s not right, Sash.”

“Ssss,” Sasha said more urgently. I looked to see she was pointing at a stick on the ground.

“That’s right, sweetie, we’re not going to cut that one. That’s the kind you just step over.”

“Sss! Sss!” Sasha said, her frustration growing.

“Anna, what is she saying?”

“I don’t know, Mommy. I don’t know!”

“Sss!” Sasha implored. “Sss!” Her face got red. She began blinking furiously. “Sss!”

And then she started to cry.

“What is she saying? What? What is the matter?”

“I don’t know, Mommy! I don’t know!” Anna kept saying.

“SSS!”

Anna started to cry.

It went on like this, two children crying over nothing, or maybe one crying over something and the other over nothing, the one feeding the other.

“Okay, okay, it’s okay!” I said.

I picked up Sasha and I held Anna’s hand. We headed home and I never found out what happened.

One day I was in the shower shampooing and I heard a horrible sound that might have been a tree falling on our house. But it was quicker than that. It wasn’t a boom or a thump or a pow, but a crack, sharp and angry. Then: nothing.

I came charging out of the shower, ran down to the kitchen, where Alex and the girls were eating eggs. All three were mid-chew, their eyes bugged out. “What was that?” “Are you okay?” “What was that?” Something big had happened. Outside, the rain was beating on the geraniums.

“My, what a big noise!” I said cheerfully, but the girls picked up my fear and reached for comfort. Together we tiptoed around the house, looking for the answer to the noise. In the living room we smelled smoke. We saw a hole in the wall, about the size of a quarter, with scorch marks around the edges. “Okay, we were hit by lightning,” Alex said. Overreacting, but maybe not, I took the girls outside and we sat in the car above
the safety of rubber tires while Alex investigated, making sure our home wasn’t about to blow up. After a few minutes he seemed pretty sure it wasn’t.

So many things were … off. A clock had fallen off the wall. There were holes in the gutters. There were more holes in the living room walls. Ajar of peanut butter had jumped off the dining room table and landed upside down on a chair. It seemed the work of ghosts. Skippy, our mule, was out there chasing one of our four fat geese. The goose, white and flapping, appeared terrified. Skippy had never shown any interest in the geese before. “Skippy, leave that goose alone!” There had been a pot of petunias on the picnic table near where the goose was flapping—but the pot was missing. The petunias were right where they had been before the storm, centered on the picnic table, but the pot was four feet away on the ground. How did the pot get out from under the petunias?

It seemed like a whole bunch of magic tricks were going on with no real purpose or scheme; the lightning had just done a random reformatting of things. Nothing seemed too crazy and so at one point I went and checked on Sasha to see if the lightning had given her the gift of speech.

“Iss,” she said, pointing to the TV, which was also now broken.

I wondered if this was a sin of some sort, wishing a lightning-inspired miracle upon my child. I wondered if that was tantamount to suggesting to God that I thought my child
needed
‘a miracle, that His work up to that point wasn’t quite up to snuff.

I went to find Alex to get his opinion on the matter, but he
was busy in the bathroom noticing that the ceiling fan was blown. It once was white but now it was brown, burnt around the edges. The lightning had zapped it, too.

“You were standing under this thing, soaking wet,” Alex correctly pointed out. I was right here in the shower when the lightning came into our house and mixed everything up and burnt holes in our walls. “I just don’t understand why it didn’t zap through you, too,” he said.

We stood there staring up at the burnt ceiling fan.

“Jeeezus—” he said.

I walked around with that one for the rest of the summer and into the fall, noticing a most fervent and eager desire to stay alive. Poof! It could have been me, fried from the inside out with one quick zap. Poof! I imagined over and over again and too many times what would happen to Alex and to the girls if I up and died; I imagined all the trouble, all the subtracting, and then I went to get all the routine checkups I was overdue on. My gynecologist told me I had fibrocystic breasts—she said they were like oatmeal—not that that in itself was a problem, just that I’d need a diagnostic mammogram, not a regular one, meaning they would take extra pictures and maybe do a sonogram. The mammogram place was all atriums and skylights, very modern and cheerful, and try as she might the radiologist with the long ponytail just couldn’t get the look she wanted. She kept calling me back in for more X-rays, and more, and more, and in between X-rays I sat in that dark room with the sound of little fans whirring and waited. “We’re just going to have to take another.” This went on for more than two hours with no one explaining anything to me, which I did not
take as a good sign. Waiting in a room alone like that, waiting for someone to come tell you what sort of monstrous tumor they were all so fascinated by, or ten monstrous tumors, or perhaps sixteen smaller ones, waiting in the dark like that is a fine time to take note of exactly just how far fear can propel the imagination. Soon I found myself curled up into a tight little ball, arms wrapped around my legs and feet purple and freezing, and I was in tears. The crying wasn’t about dying so much, not about fear of the great unknown—really any of that. The crying was buried in the thought: Well, now what? Another mother gone. First the ghost-mother, then the adoptive mother; they’d see pictures of me in their scrapbook.
Remember her? Oh, yeah, she’s one of those moms we had early on, right?
Another mother gone. How much subtraction could these girls take?

Nothing, as it turned out, was wrong with me. They didn’t find any tumors or even pre-tumors. And I didn’t get hit by lightning. And my blood pressure was normal and so was my cholesterol. Nothing was wrong with me except that now, in a way I never knew before, now I was a person who couldn’t read a book on the beach, now I was a person who knew a kind of tired that went deep into my bones, the fatigue of mothering that could lead a person into prison fantasies. Now, really for the first time, now I mattered.

fashion statement

We’re working in the barn, putting down some hay. Anna in this moment is just two and a half. She has hold of a rake, and she’s mirroring my every move. Except I do not have a pink tutu around my waist to negotiate. The tutu, which features several layers of tulle, each edged with sparkles, has an elastic waist. Thank goodness. How else would it fit over her snow jacket? It’s an amusing look, the sort that would send a lot of parents running for cameras, and later, into slaps of laughter.
Oh, look at that silly getup you put on that day!

I have stacks of pictures like this. I stopped taking tutu pictures months ago, when it became clear that this was more than just a moment to capture. Anna now wears her tutu to the playground, to the grocery store, to the zoo, to bed, everywhere. I keep two backup tutus hidden in a drawer in case of
emergency. Like so many little girls her age, she has embraced dance. She’s a twirler, a slider, a leaper. Recently she learned that, somewhere in this world, there are tap shoes. She saw a girl in a movie going
clickety clack
with her feet, and understood it as destiny.

“Oh, I’ll die if my kid goes into a tutu stage,” my friend Wendy said. “But don’t feel too embarrassed. She’s bound to grow out of it.” Embarrassed? It had actually never occurred to me to be embarrassed, although I was certainly getting weary of the questions from strangers. (No, Anna is not now enrolled in ballet lessons. Yes, she probably will be someday. Uh-huh, she sure loves that tutu.) But embarrassed? I wasn’t, after all, the one in the tutu. Nor was I, however, ignorant of the reality that a child’s outfit can be a billboard announcing the parenting style of the attached parent.
Hello, world, lam a mother who allows her kid to pick out her own clothes. Yup
. I figured the tutu stage might be a dry run for a day about eleven years from now when Anna comes home with green hair and lots of nose piercings. How will I be? Will I be a parent who encourages self-expression? Or one who cracks the whip and disciplines free-thinking right out? I believe, at least in the abstract, in the lessons taught by the former. “I am a parent who encourages self-expression!” I announced to Wendy, and I fluffed Anna’s tutu. This was back before she wore out her white tutu, precipitating a need for a purple, which she wore out; we have recently moved on to pink.

“Oh man, if it were me I’d toss the tutus,” my sister Claire said. She has three kids, two of them toddlers, and said the tutu deal would not fly in her house.
“Mom is in charge in our house.”

First Wendy, now Claire. Busted. Apparently, I was indulging my child by allowing her to have as much tutu as she wanted. Like sugar. I got defensive. I said lots of kids have security blankets, binkies they haven’t grown out of, stuffed animals with little stuffing left. Surely good parenting isn’t a matter of depriving your child of the thing that makes her feel secure.

“No,” Claire said. “But you need to set limits to establish who’s boss.” Of course. I reevaluated my stance on the tutu issue, which really hadn’t been an issue before.
Be the boss. Establish boundaries. Set rules as to when the tutu is acceptable and when it is not
.

Yes, well. I suppose I haven’t made a lot of progress. Exhibit A: the tutu over the snow jacket that Anna is sporting today. When is this going to end? What have I done? Is it too late?

“Okay, sweetie, I think we’re done here,” I say, wrapping up the twine from the distributed bales of hay. “Let’s go up to the house and get cleaned up.” We have errands to run, a day of shopping. Anna does not want to get changed. Anna wants to wear this same outfit to the mall. As if. Does she think I’m some pushover of a mother? “Listen, we do not wear stinky barn clothes to the mall,” I say, all strict and righteous. “That is the
rule.”

Soon enough she agrees to clean purple slacks and a clean purple shirt, and when it comes time to choose coats, she picks her favorite leopard-print faux fur. “Anna’s tutu?” she says, handing it to me.

“Are you sure, honey?” I say.

She throws me a look that is half horror and half exasperation.
You expect me to go out in public without a tutu?