Growing Girls Read online

  The kids. The farm. A weekly column to write, a monthly column to write, three feature stories to write, a book to write. Teaching. My garden, such as it is. The goats need to be wormed. Skippy’s hooves need to be trimmed. E-mail. Old friends and new mom friends. Calling my mother. A birthday card for my sister. A dentist appointment. Helping Sasha learn how to talk. Standing by the pool applauding because Anna finally got the courage to put her face in the water.

  Nothing so spectacular. Nothing heroic or memorable or even honorable. Just too damn much.

  Any working parent, or, for that matter, any parent, goes through days with the circus plate-spinner image in her head. Getting everybody fed, and Jimmy to soccer practice, and Betsy to ballet class, and little Junior out of his stinky diaper—all at the same time—conjures up the notion of the classic circus performer. Implicit in the metaphor, of course, is a certain admiration for the person who can stand in front of a crowd in a flashy outfit and get even one plate spinning on the end of a long pole, let alone two, three, four, five, six, seven, and eight. Watching something like that is sure to trigger awe. But sooner or later, certainly when the guy gets up to ten, twelve, maybe fifteen plates spinning on the end of long poles, and he’s dashing madly about to keep each one a-spin, you might look at him and think: But why? You know, what is the point of this exercise? Has mastery of this particular skill set advanced the course of humankind?

  Responsibility. The circus performer has accepted responsibility for each spinning plate, and so that’s what we watch and that’s what we admire. Accepting responsibility is good, is righteous, is noble. Anyone will tell you that.

  “The price of greatness is responsibility,” Winston Churchill said.

  “Knowing is not enough; we must apply,” Goethe said. “Willing is not enough; we must do.”

  “Do more than is required of you,” George Patton said.

  The history of the universe is littered with people making inspirational and enduring statements about taking, accepting, and celebrating personal, moral, political, and social responsibility.

  So, go, Plate Spinner, go! I should celebrate my plate-spinning pursuits, not duck them, and for pity’s sake not whine about them. I should be proud. I should come up with an inspirational and enduring quote.

  Oh my God, one more thing to do. One more plate. Is someone throwing plates? Is this a dirty trick? A practical joke?

  Now, shirk is a good word. Can you shirk anything besides responsibility? You have to admit it’s impressive to have a word, responsibility, so powerful as to have its own dedicated word to describe the act of defying it. Shirking responsibility should have been on those tablets Moses came down with, or maybe the point was too obvious. Everyone knows shirking responsibility is wrong; God didn’t even need to remind us of that one.

  Shirk. To shirk. Shirking. What a delicious word to play with and roll around your tongue. Oh, I could taste it. I could smell it.

  It smelled like Bob Evans biscuits. Yes, it did. And Bob Evans was where, I decided, I was bound.

  I pulled into the Sunoco, turned around.

  Liberation! I was a drunk going for a drink. I was a straight—A student skipping the whole stupid exam and refusing to care about this, her first F.

  Wee-hoo! Bring on the biscuits.

  Playing a little hooky now and again is good for the mind, of course it is, good for the heart and good for the soul clogged with sins. Drano for the soul. Mr. Plumber! Oh, I was long overdue.

  I remembered Kaitlin’s mom saying something to Tritan’s mom about going to the Bob Evans on Route 18, but I might have heard that wrong. I knew of only one Bob Evans, and it was just off Route 19. So first I looked on 18, then got lost trying to take a shortcut over to 19, thinking how stupid it is to have a Route 18 and a Route 19 in the same town, 18,19,19, 18,1 wondered if Bob Evans had oatmeal. Blueberries? On 19, I got stuck behind a truck carrying half a mobile home that had the whole road blocked up. I wanted to cry. I wanted biscuits. I never wanted biscuits so bad.

  I found Bob Evans but not my new friends. They had either already left or else there was another Bob Evans somewhere I didn’t know about.

  I drove home. “I’m worthless,” I told Alex. “I can’t handle responsibility and here I’m no good at shirking it either,” I said. I was an alcoholic who decided to fall off the wagon—only to find all the liquor stores closed. At a time like that you don’t feel saved from yourself. No, you do not. You feel cheated.

  “Rotten day,” I said. “I am having a rotten day.”

  Okay, so now the ducks have moved from the pothole to an unopened package of Owens Corning forty-year roofing shingles. The wrapper on the package is bubble gum pink. The ducks are eating it. All nine ducks, just tearing away at that package with that spastic nibbling action ducks are famous for.

  This can’t be good. What is the matter with those ducks?

  I swear to God they’re playing with me. “If you don’t fill up our Barbie swimming pool we’re just going to stand here and eat plastic!”

  Eventually, I give in and get the hose. When Alex and the girls get home, I’m standing by the Barbie pool watching the ducks splish and splash, holding the hose.

  “I thought we weren’t going to let them use the Barbie pool,” Alex says.

  “I couldn’t take it anymore,” I say. “I have a responsibility to these damn ducks.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “They were eating the roofing shingle package.”

  “Yeah—”

  “I’m taking care of the damn ducks. Because this is my re-sponse-a-bila-tee. Do you understand?”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I have re-sponse-a-bila-tees,” I say.

  “You have a creepy look in your eyes.”

  “Re-sponse-a-bila-tees! Tra la la!”

  “Sweetie, are you okay?”

  “Ma! Up! Up!” I hear, as if through a tunnel. It’s Sasha, standing right here at my hip, her arms up in that pleading way she has. I sigh. One more thing is going to put me over the edge.

  “Up! Up!”

  One more thing.

  “Up!”

  What, I don’t want to pick up my own kid? It’s too much’?

  She’s all shriveled and waterlogged in her bathing suit, and I can’t take one more thing, not even this tiny little thing, but no matter. I am her mother. I am called to duty. I scoop her up. She smells like a chlorine bomb. I balance her on my hip and the smell of her and the feel of her next to me, making my shorts soggy, is a rescue.

  The exhale coming out of me seems to fill the valley.

  “Sweetie,” I say. “Aw, sweetie. Did you have fun at the pool?”

  “Yes.” She puts her cheek next to mine, squeezes.

  “Aw, sweetie.”

  My God, motherhood is a rescue. It just is.

  “Come on, girls, let’s go inside,” I say.

  “You okay?” Alex says.

  “I’m okay,” I say, handing him the hose. “How about you finish the duck bath and I’ll do the kid bath.”

  “I’m turning off the hose,” he says. “I am turning it off.”

  I take the girls in. I check their heads for ticks. I peel their bathing suits off and start the bath and offer bubbles and little cups and plastic frogs. They want it all. I sit next to the tub. I always sit right here on the floor next to the tub, in case either of them should go down and I have to immediately yank them out. This has never happened, not even close, but you hear stories.

  I like it on the floor. I have magazines here. I root through the stack and can’t find one Newsweek I haven’t already read. What, we don’t get any magazines besides Newsweek? I pick up one of Alex’s psychological journals and flip through. In the bath, Anna says her frog is a Kitty Frog and proclaims that Sasha’s is a Princess Frog and so their story begins. Bubbles are castles, cars, horses. The Kitty Frog does what the Princess Frog tells her to, until the Kitty Frog decides to spit and burp and then it gets gas. The Princess
Frog thinks this is hilarious and gets gas, too.

  “All right, girls,” I warn, “this is getting gross.” I turn to Alex’s journal and read. I read about a woman at Université Laval in Quebec, sitting in a room sorting capsules. Fifty capsules. Her job is to put them in bottles according to color. She does this, then hands her work in to the researcher in charge of the inane task. The researcher then explains the purpose of the exercise. He tells her that he specializes in the perception of color and that he has been mandated by a pharmaceutical company to undertake a widespread project concerning the exportation of a medication for a virus spreading in Southeast Asia. The region is very poor and its population uneducated, so they need to develop a system of colors that will make the distribution of medication fast and accurate.

  “Hmm,” I say to the girls. “Hmm.”

  “Kitty Frog has a terrible bellyache, Mommy,” Anna says. “She just has the worst gas.”

  “Princess Frog has di-a-reee-ah!” Sasha says, believing herself to have found the funniest line of the day.

  The girls howl and I go back to the capsule sorter, who tries again after getting the point—her ability to sort the colors correctly will directly influence the manufacturing of the medication.

  So she sorts again, and naturally she’s more careful the second time around. Forty other women and ten men are asked to perform the same series of tasks, first without the knowledge of the drug’s purpose, and then with it. Some of these people have been pre-identified as scoring very high on a scale of perfectionism, the rest average.

  Only after they are finished with the second round of sorting do the subjects learn the rest of the story: this was all a sham. There is no widespread virus, no poor population, no drug, no pharmaceutical company. In actual fact, the experiment was intended to test a burgeoning theory among researchers seeking to understand obsessive-compulsive disorder. Was “an excessive sense of responsibility” at its core?

  “Hmm,” I say to the girls. “Hmm.”

  The Princess Frog has started to attack the Kitty Frog and water is everywhere so I pull the plug and the girls get out of the tub. I wrap towels around them and then I rake a brush through Anna’s knotty hair and then I recheck both of them for ticks. Anna has a freckle on her scalp that looks exactly like a tick and I can never seem to completely convince myself that it isn’t one.

  I have an excessive sense of responsibility, I think. Or just excessive responsibilities? How can you tell which? Apparently, if I’m guilty of the former, I’m screwed up. An excessive sense of responsibility, I read, is at the root of obsessive-compulsive disorder. “Checking behavior” is one of those buzz terms they use when they talk about OCD. People with “high incidences of checking behavior” are said to have the disorder. There’s a line. Normal people sometimes need to double-check themselves. OCD people have to quintuple-check, over and over again.

  An excessive sense of responsibility is said to be at the root of this. And what it comes down to is this: you think you’re more important than you are. You think your actions matter more than they actually do. Despite what you believe, you are just not that critical to keeping the earth spinning on its axis.

  I know I’m not. I know! I kick the journal across the bathroom floor, so as to rescue myself, and this rotten day, which appears to be officially decomposing.

  The girls are exhausted and give me little trouble going to bed. Anna stacks her four special pillows just so, with her designated Guardian Angel pillow right there next to her head, and the ice bag she has come to like on top of her head, and the little glasses of ice chips surrounding her. It’s … complicated. It’s a ritual. She has moved in and out of a million crazy bedtime rituals, and daytime rituals, too, now that I think about it.

  “Angel of God, my guardian dear,” she begins, then, “To whom God’s love commits me here, ever this day be at my side to light to rule to guide—no dreams for Anna until she’s a grownup and Sasha would like good dreams only—amen.”

  Anna thinks of herself as a general in the war against bad dreams. She has it worked out that guardian angels are the soldiers doing the dirty work (if they see a bad one coming, they’ll kick it into the sky where it will dissipate, like some exploding asteroid) and if she says the prayer, with that little extra line thrown in, she won’t get any bad dreams because her guardian angel will have thus been dispatched. To give herself extra protection, she cancels out all dreams, not just the bad ones for herself, and she would do this for Sasha if she requested it, but so far Sasha has not. This system, apparently, works quite effectively.

  “Good night, girls,” I say, wondering if I should curtail this child’s imagination. Should I start her now understanding that she is not central to the universe spinning on any particular axis?

  God, I have so much to do.

  “I love you, too,” Anna says. She never waits for me to say it first, but rather for the send-off line she has come to depend on:

  “That makes me happy,” I say.

  “I luff woo, Mommy,” Sasha says.

  “I love you girls a thousand million trillion percent,” I say.

  “I love you infinity,” Anna says.

  “I luff woo more!”

  “All right, girls.”

  Alex is in bed eating ice cream, a huge bowl of it atop a piece of chocolate cake, finished with whipped cream and a cherry he is saving. He’s watching Law & Order. Mr. Relaxation. Mr. Not-a-Care-in-the-World. I want to be him. I want to … get there.

  “I don’t think I have excessive compulsive disorder,” I announce.

  “Oh?”

  “There’s a link between OCD and an excessive sense of responsibility,” I say. “But I don’t think I have that, either.”

  “No,” he agrees.

  “I just have a lot of responsibilities,” I say. “Any mother does. Anyone who takes the job seriously. And then when you throw work on top of it, it’s … a lot.”

  “Of course.”

  “But it does not mean I have excessive compulsive disorder.”

  “No,” he says. “If you did have obsessive-compulsive disorder, you wouldn’t be calling it’ excessive compulsive disorder.’”

  I look at him. “Is that what I said? ‘Excessive compulsive disorder’?”

  “About sixteen times,” he says.

  Oh. “Well, that’s good news then, isn’t it?”

  “I think so.”

  I climb into bed. We stare at the TV. He eats his ice cream. I close my eyes and begin a list of all the things I am not going to worry about if and when I awake at 4 a.m., as per usual, which I know is a recipe for insomnia and so I yank myself free. I start counting backwards by threes, get stuck at seventy-two. I say my ABCs. Nothing is working. I try Anna’s guardian angel prayer, slightly edited. No dreams for Mommy until she’s, um, dead, amen.

  I drop like a bomb into sleep. I do not have any dreams. In the morning I awake, stretch, look out the window, and prepare myself for another day of forgiving the ducks. Where are the ducks? Every morning they’re usually right here, outside the bedroom window, pecking through the geraniums for bugs. Why aren’t they here? I throw my sandals on and head down to the pond to see if perhaps God has taken care of this job overnight; the sight of nine gleefully splashing ducks would certainly fit my mood on this post-perfect-sleeper morning. “Hallelujah, ducks!” I will say.

  But no. I find them leaping into the air, one, two, three, taking turns trying to access a puddle formed at the bottom of the girls’ tire swing.

  “This, ducks, is getting embarrassing.”

  So, Zoe’s mom just called to say Zoe is expressing some confusion about Captain Jesus. We have just completed day three of camp.

  “Mom, I thought Jesus was dead,” Zoe reportedly said. “The nails through the hands? The cross?”

  “Well, He did die, honey, but you know that’s not the end of the story.” She started to remind Zoe of Easter.

  “So He came back as a captain? He drive
s a boat?”

  “No, honey. That’s not the real Jesus.”

  “Yes it is, Mom. He is real. I saw Him.”

  “No, sweetie, that one’s more like a mascot. Like, at Disney World?”

  This explanation apparently did not help Zoe sort through her spiritual crisis.

  I tell Zoe’s mom that it’s probably very good Zoe is articulating her confusion about Jesus returning to earth as a nautical figure. I tell her Anna has yet to even mention the captain, although at night she has been walking around our house in song:

  “Love one anudder. hove one anudder. hove one anudder … as I have loved you.”

  She was already on to the second verse before I had a chance to correct her:

  “Care for each udder…”

  I was so afraid of the possibility of finding out that Anna thought this was a song about cows that I decided to just let it go.

  She is such an unaware child. Academically, she is rungs ahead of her classmates, but ask her what she had for lunch and she will look at you blankly. She will, no doubt, grow up to be a book-smart person with little common sense and dressed, now and again, as a kitty. She has been dressing as a kitty on and off since she was two, a headband of fuzzy ears, feather boa wrapped around her waist to simulate a tail, and whiskers painted on.

  “Face it, she’s eccentric,” my sister Claire recently said. This when she got wind of the fact that Anna had started sleeping with the ice bag on her head, and the ice chips on her night-stand. She just wanted to sleep … surrounded by ice.

  “Whew,” Claire said. “Eccentric.”

  “And your point is?”

  “I just want to understand her mind—”

  I suppose I could try to curtail Anna’s odd behaviors, try to rein her in, but why? What good would it do? She’s a happy kid. She’s well behaved. She does well in school and has begun to form friendships. Sometimes I imagine her having been adopted by another mother, someone with little patience for neurotic behavior, someone who would try to reason with her and I think, Whew. She landed in the right place.