‘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
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.