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 Cody 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.