Growing Girls Read online

  Her room has drawings of ponies all over it. She draws them and then names them: Catt Sweet, Butterfly Summer Candy, Popsicle Rose Bush, Moonlight Dream.

  I’m scanning the walls with all these drawings and all these made-up names, and I am wondering what sort of fairy tales go on in my little girl’s head.

  So much goes on here.

  Tomorrow I’m going to be a wreck because I’m not sleeping. I have to prune. The thing about farm life is, so very much cutting goes on. All the weeds coming and going. The redistribution of vegetation. I was thinking about this while I was outside with the girls, and then I looked up and faced the fact that one of our Norway spruce trees really is dead. The agony I felt for that tree sent me spiraling. Did I pay enough attention to it during its life? Did I sit under it and get a good feel for its shade and its particular aroma?

  And what, then, of my daylilies? I wonder if I’m making enough fuss over them. Just because a flower is in bloom, does that mean you have to keep visiting it? How much visiting is enough? And if I don’t save the primroses from getting choked by the morning glory vine, does this make me bad?

  Everything keeps coming back to this: bad mother.

  My mother often says she was a bad mother. When I was six months old, her parents came to live in an apartment in our basement and then her dad died and then her mom went senile. “You can just wipe the entire decade of my forties out of my life!” she’ll say, and then she’ll turn to me, recognizing that that wipes me out. She apologizes for not being there.

  I am aware of no infractions whatsoever; I think of her only as a good mother.

  What’s funny is that I never think of myself as a bad daughter. And yet I was so mischievous. I was a naughty, naughty daughter who never got caught because my mother was so busy with all she had going on. So, why don’t I carry “Bad daughter!” around instead of “Bad mother!” when I think of myself? It’s funny but this is simply not the way it works. Probably if you were able to listen in to the contents of women’s minds, you would hear a lot of them saying “Bad mother!” to themselves.

  When Mike built the chicken coop, he was supposed to put a little hinged door on one side with a ramp off it so the chickens could walk outside and do their pecking. Then we were going to enclose the whole little chicken yard with chicken wire to keep the raccoons out. But Mike ran out of time before he got the door made. He said he would be back in July. Meantime the chickens live inside the coop and the only time they come out is when we let them out and sit there with them. Other than that, it’s an indoor life. Can you believe I wake up worrying about this? I worry that my chickens are missing out on worms and grubs. Then I think I better call Mike and nag before it’s too late and my chickens get some kind of disorder like kids who watch too much TV. The amount of time I spend thinking about this takes away from time I could be worrying about whether or not our mule Skippy needs his hooves trimmed and if I had spent more quality time with Greg, our goat, when he was a baby maybe he wouldn’t buck me in the head when I bend over to pick up his food bowl. Bad mother!

  If this weren’t me I was talking to, I would say, “Relax.” And: “Don’t you understand?” Feeling like a bad mother is the only way to be a mother. Motherhood begins with worry. This is the first thing you have to have, and if you have a lot it just means you’re big enough to carry it.

  I think loneliness is an occupational hazard of motherhood. And by motherhood I mean the job of any caretaker. Being in charge of the mental health of four chickens means you don’t get to be a chicken.

  “Freedom isn’t free!” said a sign on the way to Gretta’s. And then I saw another sign down the road saying yes to Jesus. I’m glad Gretta doesn’t have signs on her lawn.

  Oh, and one more thing. I’m a bad mother. Sasha tells me this whenever I correct her with even a tiny dose of authority. “Bat!” she yells, which is how she pronounces “bad.” “Bat! Bat! Bat!” She of so few words.

  If I were a good mother, Anna would have more friends. She would have neighborhood friends to ride scooters with. This is what I want for her. It’s funny I worry about her more than I worry about Sasha. With so little language, Sasha communicates so much already. Anna is internal. She doesn’t even want friends. She has Sasha and she has her ponies.

  Sometime during the summer of 2001, when we brought Sasha home, Alex woke up in the middle of the night and noticed blood everywhere. “I need help!” he began saying, through gasps of air. When I saw the blood, I figured he’d been shot. I had no idea who would want to shoot my husband. He was sweating and saying, “Help!” I called 911 and helped him get to the bathroom because the blood was pouring out of his rectum. The EMT guys got right to work, sticking needles in him and strapping him onto the cot, and I tried to be calm but as they wheeled him over the patio I felt a duty to tell them that they’d neglected to take his blood pressure. “When you can’t feel a pulse, you’re not so much worried about the number,” one said. The last thing I saw was Alex’s white feet as they closed the ambulance door. “Um, will someone call me or something?” I said to the driver. Anna and Sasha had, remarkably, slept through the ordeal and I cleaned and scrubbed up all the blood before they awoke to see it. It was something to do while I waited to hear if my husband was still alive.

  The EMT guys, it turned out, saved his life. Without their intervention, Alex would have “bled out,” as they say on crime shows. A few days earlier Alex had gotten a routine colonoscopy and a tiny polyp was removed. This resulted in a scab somewhere in his large intestine. When the scab sloughed itself off, it let open the floodgates. This probably wouldn’t have happened if someone had told him to stop taking the ibuprofen he uses to control headaches. But no one did. The ibuprofen thinned his blood and he nearly bled out.

  Later on I wrote about this in a magazine article, more as a way of fulfilling a contractual obligation with the magazine—and as a public service to anyone getting a colonoscopy, and as a way of venting my outrage at the people who never told him to stop the ibuprofen—than as a chance to make the business of my husband’s rectum public. That part was a little hard to negotiate. In the story, I said something about what it was like to live out in the middle of nowhere at 3 a.m. when you’ve just witnessed an ambulance door closing on your husband’s white feet. I wrote about how I sat there and in my shock I couldn’t think of what to do, other than clean up his blood. I wrote about how I felt it would have been rude to call anyone before the sun came up. I have no idea how I came to this conclusion. Who understands the workings of the brain under normal circumstances, let alone during a time when you’re terrified your husband is dead? Anyway, in the magazine article, I wrote about how I figured I had to wait until 6 a.m. before I could call anyone, and how at six I called my friends Wendy and Gretta and they both took the girls so I could join Alex in the ICU.

  Our neighbor George and his wife, Pat, saw the story in the magazine, and Pat was upset. “You could have called me!” she said. “You could have called me at 3 a.m. and I would have come right over.” She was right. I know she would have. I have no idea why I didn’t think to call her.

  Then I didn’t hear from her for a while. And George didn’t put sheep on our fields like he used to. And he didn’t plant alfalfa on our one field or oats that we would split with him. And the following spring they didn’t invite us over to see the sea of baby lambs frolicking.

  So then, just a few weeks ago, Gretta drove with George to a sheep disease conference. They got to talking about us. This was nearly two years after Alex nearly bled out on a hot summer night. George told Gretta that Pat had been quite upset that I said, publicly, and to a national audience, that country people were the types of people you can’t call at 3 a.m. if you need help.

  But—this was a story about Alex almost dying, not about George and Pat.

  But!

  And so began the feud we’ve been having, which I didn’t actually know we were having, and I am not entirely certain we are having, with our ne
ighbors for nearly two years.

  So much goes on here and yet so little seems to happen.

  At speech therapy this morning, Miss Sandy tried to get Sasha to say “apple.” She could say “ap” and “pull” as clear as day. Ap. Pull. Ap. Pull. But when she tried to put them together it kept coming out “apap.”

  birthday chicken

  The story of Birthday, the chicken that ran backwards in circles, began on my daughter Anna’s fifth birthday This was our virgin voyage into the chicken world, and easily enough we got sold on the virtues of “silkie bantams,” a breed known as being fancy “I’m telling you, these are the poodles of the chicken world!” the woman at the feed store said, intending this as a selling point.

  It wasn’t, actually, the fancy part that attracted me to silkies. My heart did not go aflutter at the thought of a fluffy chicken with feathers extending clear down its legs and onward to its toes, which, I learned, number five instead of the more typically chicken four, and are black instead of the more typically chicken orange. Also, silkies have blue earlobes. According to the American Silkie Bantam Club, certainly their most devoted fans, these “beguiling oddities” have charmed people for centuries, most notably Marco Polo, who wrote of them during his journeys to China in the thirteenth century.

  And good for him. As for me, I was drawn to the fact that silkies are said to be docile, far more so than your average chicken; with relative ease they will befriend your kids and turn themselves into pets.

  So for her fifth birthday, Anna was presented with the gift of four silkie bantam peeps. They were the size of golf balls, two white and two “blue,” a term farm people prefer to the word “gray” whether you are talking chickens or horses or goats. We kept the peeps in a box in our kitchen, and soon enough I made up a list of chicken rules and stuck it on the refrigerator. BE GENTLE. YOU MUST BE SEATED ON THE FLOOR IF YOU WANT TO HOLD CHICKENS. NO RUNNING WITH CHICKENS. DO NOT DROP CHICKENS. DO NOT CARRY CHICKENS ON YOUR HEAD OR ON YOUR SHOULDERS. IF YOU PUT CHICKENS IN DOLL-HOUSE DO NOT COVER THEM WITH BLANKETS OR LOCK IN LITTLE OVEN. OR LITTLE TOY BOX. OR LITTLE CLOSET. The list kept getting longer as the chickens grew and the girls could squish them into only increasingly larger enclosures, a kind of a blessing.

  Anna named the chickens: Birthday, Mary, Marie, and Shintzee.

  “Shintzee?” I said.

  “No, Shan-cee,” she said.

  “Shan-cee?”

  “No, Mommy, Chaun-tee.”

  This conversation happens every time. I have no idea what that chicken’s name is.

  Birthday’s condition came on suddenly enough. One day we looked in the box and one of the gray chicks looked exactly like what you picture when you say, “She was running like a chicken with her head cut off.”

  Her head appeared to be missing. She was just a little feather ball, scooting backwards, around and around and around.

  Anna, who already had emerged the best chicken handler of the family by a very long shot, reached in and picked the crazy chicken up. She looked underneath her. “It’s here!” she said. She eased the neck straight and there it was, right where it belonged: Birthday’s head. Birthday looked around, shook that head, and seemed, at that moment, to be back with us. “Well, good,” we all said.

  But the next time we looked in the box, there was Birthday, headless and scooting backwards again. The other chicks didn’t seem even a little interested in this apparent fit, except when she bumped into them, and they would simply bump back. The condition did not stop Birthday from eating or drinking or growing, but it was, by anyone’s reckoning, creepy.

  “You ever heard of a chicken tucking its head under and running backwards?” I said to Dr. Hurley, our vet. I Googled. I could find no information whatsoever on why a little chick might get stuck in spasms of this or any other sort.

  We decided Birthday would grow out of it, kind of like a baby with colic, and every day we hoped, as we got on with our new life as chicken people.

  “We have to get them out of the kitchen,” I said to Alex. “We must not become people with chickens in our kitchen.”

  “We are people with chickens in our kitchen,” he said.

  “We must stop,” I said.

  We moved the chickens into the living room. The March winds had not died down; it was still too cold for outdoor peep survival. And they were so small and defenseless against our dogs and cats, some of which actually drooled while looking upon them. The worst offender was Marley. It seemed especially insidious to me that a poodle would have dining designs on the poodles of the chicken world.

  One morning Anna found Elmo, our orange cat, standing on top of the little chicken box, reaching in. She shouted and scared him off and right then and there her bond with the chickens grew stronger. “Did I save the day?” she said. “Am I the hero?” I told her yes, and yes, and yes, and tried not to worry about her need for validation.

  As for Birthday, she scooted backwards and backwards and backwards for nearly a whole day after the Elmo incident. We came to understand the chick’s condition as one of nerves, the spasms most acute during times of stress. Each time, you had to pick her up, ease her neck straight. And each time, from the way she’d shake her head, it seemed she was thankful for the help. “Whew. Thanks. I just couldn’t get it together there….”

  Soon enough, as Birthday emerged a full-grown hen, we decided she had a rare neurological disorder like epilepsy that would perhaps affect the quality of her life only in spurts, and this was just who she was. “Is that chicken okay?!” people visiting our house would say, horrified by the display of chicken seizures. And maybe, by simply getting used to it, we became indoctrinated into our new world as chicken people in a full and profound way. Sort of like when you see people at restaurants dining with relatives who have tubes up their noses. These people just go about eating their pork chops, paying no mind to the fact that one of their own is attached to an oxygen tank. At some point they crossed the barrier from these people to those people, so fully and completely that they’d forgotten all about it.

  This is the kind of chicken people we became. People with chickens in our living room who without fanfare turned into people with chickens living outside in a brand-new chicken coop under the Norway maple. This turned out to be a perfect place for a chicken coop because there was already a picnic table there and so we had a place to sit and watch as they entertained us with their pecking and squawking.

  Now, brooder is an interesting word. People who worry a lot in silence are known as brooders. But then again so is a hen sitting on her eggs. The more I get to know chickens, the more I realize half our language comes from chickens. Well, not half. But an awful lot considering this isn’t Latin or anything. Cooped up. Egghead. Hatch a plan. Henpecked. Pecker. Cock. Chickenshit. Chicken-scratch. A lot of chicken words are meant to deliver attitude, which isn’t surprising to me now that I have chickens. Chickens aren’t background animals like fish or sheep or horses. Chickens are in-your-face animals. Chickens, if you have them, come to bracket your days. The rooster hollers all morning, and then in the evening the hens have left you their mysterious gift of eggs.

  Silkies are said to be excellent brooders, to have a tendency toward “broodiness.” This, too, is usually meant as a compliment.

  Once a silkie hen has decided to set on her eggs, there is very little that will bring her from the nest until those eggs have hatched. Apparently, other breeds of chickens get distracted, or disinterested, or maybe just impatient. But a silkie won’t give up. In fact, a silkie hen will hatch and raise most any kind of poultry or game fowl. Many breeders of quail or pheasant who prefer to hatch naturally as opposed to in an incubator will keep a flock of silkie hens for this purpose. A hen that begins to set is said to have “gone broody.”

  I never knew I had an opinion on such matters, but when I learned that silkies were broody, I started loving them. It opened my heart. Sort of like, “Good girl, sitting on your eggs like that!” Here were chickens that inhe
rently understood the sacrifices of motherhood, chickens I could look up to. Wouldn’t, after all, that mama hen rather be out with the boys pecking on the ground for worms and aphids and centipedes? Wouldn’t she? Instead, silkies had a higher calling. Here were chickens who stayed home and brooded.

  The women of my mother’s generation stayed home and brooded. The women of my generation got trained out of that value system and were taught to be courageous enough to go out and peck with the big boys. Saying that someone is henpecked nowadays would be more of an insult to the offending female, who surely has better things to do with her time, than it would be to the subordinate male, who, anyway, has enough to worry about trying to figure out what happened to his almighty cock.

  Chicken language, I’m telling you, is everywhere. The average person probably can’t get through a day without having a thought that has some long-lost connection to a chicken.

  Anna’s connection was far more literal. Her first summer with chickens was indeed an all-chicken summer. She would sit for hours after dinner, while I gardened and Sasha dug for worms. Anna’s bond with those chickens made my heart leap. Soon I even stopped questioning her judgment as she went about selecting which chicken to put in the bucket of honor. The chicken would fit in that bucket as if in a little nest, only it couldn’t move because the feet didn’t quite reach the bottom. It would just sit there going “bawk bawk,” as a chicken does, while Anna looked at it. Eventually, she would curl up on the picnic table next to it, and tell it stories of the stars or the moon or show the chicken how her tongue had turned green on account of an ice pop.

  Naturally, since she was the easiest to catch, Birthday became the chicken most likely to be placed in the bucket of honor, and so you could say she became Anna’s favorite.

  Summer probably always does this, but summer slowed me down. I was supposed to write a book about being a mom, to organize my thoughts into chapters and figure out a structure to hang them on, to make a lasting point, but somehow I decided to go ahead and become a mother instead.