Growing Girls Read online

  Brooding is more something I do when I’m working. I know so much more about sitting around worrying about a work project than I do about worrying about kids. This could just be a fact of life for older moms. We’ve worked and worked and worked and if we are lucky enough to finally have a child or two, we find ourselves suddenly catapulted into a most alien kind of chaos.

  Work is so much easier. Anyone will tell you that. To have a desk, where you have everything all lined up, and a schedule you more or less get to agree to. Work. I am a worker. This is so funny because I never really think of my work as work. I certainly never thought of myself as having a career. Writing, work, this is just who I am. I am a person who sits at a desk and makes phone calls and taps at a computer keyboard and sips coffee and calls her mom at five. That I am anything bigger or smaller than that has come as sudden news to me.

  Brand new.

  News.

  And now I find that this, too, is a cliché, that women my age all across the land know this one. Bankers and lawyers and scientists. I always figured those people had themselves bracketed. They picked real careers. They picked office jobs. They picked out suits and they took trains to tall buildings. I thought they knew what they were doing, whereas I was just sort of a drifter. They made choices. Career first, then husband, then kids. Or a different sequence depending on how things best added up. The point is, they chose to be workers or wives or mothers, whereas I actually had no choice. I had one thing I knew how to do and I had to pay the bills, so I did it. Then I started liking it, then I started loving it, and then I realized it was: me. The rest of the picture? The husband, the children? Oh, well. You can’t force one kind of love over another, just because you think it would be your preference.

  You read in newspapers and newsmagazines about women nowadays who were so busy with careers they never had time to forge relationships and now there’s no ticking or tocking left on the biological clock. This is usually leveled as a sort of criticism. These women were either foolish or self-indulgent or both. Too bad, ladies. You should have stuck with the way it was in the old days, back when women just stayed home and brooded.

  It’s easy for any sad woman to buy into this. I bought into it when I was in a mood to feel sorry for myself. But then I forgave myself because I was a drifter. I was just doing what I was good at, while waiting for love. I was developing the one part of me that at least vaguely seemed worth developing. I didn’t completely care about me, or my mind, or my talents—did that somehow vindicate me for putting off motherhood?

  I wonder why it’s easier for me to diminish myself than it is for me to admit that I am a woman who quite vigorously forged a career. Stuck so far back in our minds, all the way back to a place that precedes even chicken language, is the notion that the brooders are the superior class of our gender.

  Of course I was forging a career. Of course I was making choices, every bit as much as the banker and the lawyer and the scientist. And of course those women were drifting, every bit as much as I was. Isn’t there a higher vantage point here? Some hilltop where we can see that the brooder and the seeker, we are all just doing what we do, and the best we can hope is that we’re brave enough to do our best? That’s the spiritual quest. To say women should heed one call versus another lest they lose out on biological matters is to lose touch with the Divine.

  One thing I know: I would have been a terrible mom back in my twenties and thirties, when I was all broody with my stories. It took me until I was thirty-nine to be ready, and by then my ovaries were having none of it. People are perhaps the only species with brains enough to find the idea of adoption somewhat suspect. When I look around our farm, at a goat raising a lamb, at a chicken perfectly willing to hatch a quail or an ostrich, I fall back at ease once again with the notion that a mom is a mom is a mom.

  The women in China who hatched Anna and Sasha weren’t ready to brood, or weren’t allowed to brood, or for some other reason the timing in those nests was off. Here is my nest. Here is my time. Here is all this love I’ve been storing up. Even the dumbest fat hen in the world sooner or later answers nature’s call to give.

  One of the things that happens when you let go and allow yourself to be a mom is you see your children from different angles and discover richness. This happened in our kiddie pool, where I spent a good part of the summer not writing and trying my best not to care about it. It was a pool big enough for three and deep enough for throwing. I would toss Sasha up in the air and listen to a whole new laugh as she splashed. She sounded like a little bell. We got a SpongeBob raft and Anna rode on it while I pushed, and I discovered that up close her head smells exactly like Tetley tea.

  In the end, Birthday never did grow out of her condition. The longer we waited, the more we came to conclude that she had a rare disease that would probably end her life prematurely but, for now, she was more or less thriving.

  We had bigger chicken worries. Shortly after our chicks differentiated without doubt into two roosters (Marie and Shintzee or Chauntee or Shancee) and two hens (Mary and Birthday), one of the roosters tore after Anna and started pecking her feet.

  This was a shame on so many levels. These were Anna’s first real babies. This was her first trial period at being a mom. And for a five-year-old with a crazy backwards-running chicken, she’d done an excellent job. These were the creatures she had nursed along into adulthood, or at least adolescence. I guess it would be like any parent with a teenager who goes off and turns into a neo-Nazi. Because this rooster, which for the sake of ease we will just once and for all call Shintzee, was not simply having a bad afternoon. Nor could the pecking be written off as a mistake. That rooster darted after Anna as she approached the maple tree in her usual way until pretty soon she was way up at the dahlia bed screaming, “Ack! Ack! Ack! He’s pecking! He’s Bad! BAD BAD BAD BAD!” And when I finally kicked the rooster away and brought Anna into my arms, I could see little red dots on her feet.

  It was a hard one to spin. Anna’s such a fearful child. And here was a trusted friend turning on her. Would her relationship to chickens be forever severed?

  “It’s okay, sweetie, I have you,” I said. “I have you. That rooster is cranky!”

  “Why is he cranky?” she asked, sobbing. “Why? Why? Why?”

  Um. I knew nothing of chicken moods. “Everyone gets cranky,” I said. “But that’s never a reason to hurt someone. That rooster was wrong.”

  It seemed like a good enough time to reinforce the lesson of not hitting or pinching just because one happens to feel like it.

  But I had more work to do. The last thing I wanted was for her to lose chickens from her life, or for her to have her summer of chicken love end like this. So I convinced her. I convinced her this was surely a one-time thing, that she should go on back down to the maple tree the next day and pay that rooster no mind.

  She believed me. The next morning she went down to say good morning to the chickens. I stayed up at the house, hoping not to make a big deal of any of this. Next thing I hear: “Ack! Ack! Ack! He’s Bad! BAD BAD BAD BAD!” And there was Anna up by the dahlia bed again, in tears.

  This was a shame on so very many levels.

  I called Gretta. “Our rooster has started pecking my children,” I told her.

  “Oh,” she said. “Well, you have to get rid of it.”

  Just like that?

  “Some of them have it in them. Once they peck, they’ll always ways peck. It only happens with the males. You have to get rid of it.”

  For an instant I feared that Gretta was going to advise shooting the rooster, perhaps even boiling it for dinner.

  “I’ll take him,” she said. She had six other roosters. “Once he gets here, my boys will show him how to act.”

  She offered to give us three hens in exchange. She said she was needing to let go of her hens anyway. Her husband is allergic to eggs. No one else lives at their house. “I can’t eat all these eggs.”

  And so one morning I put Shintzee very caref
ully in an empty case of Amstel Light and we met Gretta up at the church with the big green roof where Sasha gets her speech therapy, a convenient halfway point between my farm and Gretta’s. Sasha was in there trying to say words that end in “n.” Moon. Tune. Loon. Phone. Bone. Stone. And all of them came out ending in a “d” sound, mood, tude, lood, phode, bode, stode, while Anna and I waited in the parking lot for Gretta. We said our goodbyes to Shintzee and talked about forgiveness. Anna did not seem upset to lose the rooster.

  “He’s a pecky one, Mommy,” she said, disapprovingly. “A pecky one.”

  “Yes, he is, sweetie.” It seemed, at that moment, to be the girls against the boys, and we girls had that boy trapped in a cardboard beer box.

  Yay, us. It’s funny to look at how often the battles at the farm play out this way. Living on a farm proves all the worst things about men. The fact of the matter is that most males of most farm animals are either slaughtered or neutered. This is no accident. Look at sheep. All those sheep you see dotting all those hills? Ewes. Farmers keep the ewes because they have babies, increasing the flock, and because they are docile and never ever give anyone a single problem. A ram is something you keep somewhere else, off in another pasture with, perhaps, a male of another species to keep it company, and a very, very strong fence. That male will do whatever it can to get to those ewes, which is nothing compared to what a jackass, or male donkey, will do to get to a jenny, its female counterpart. I once visited a farm with a jackass and the poor crazed creature was like a bad actor playing a most unconvincing jailed convict. Surely no creature snorts this violently, this continuously, this crazily, for this long. Hee haw hee haw hee haw! Then: bam!—the sound of the animal throwing itself against the barn stall, which had been reinforced with iron rods. It seems to me that any time I have ever visited any farm and been introduced to the male of any species—“and this is our bull,” “and this is our buck,” “and this is our ram”—I am also introduced to a fantastic construction project to keep that animal contained.

  One day at a llama farm I saw Bruno, the sire, get so upset by the sight of a skunk about to enter his girl-llama’s pasture that he tore after it and in one swift motion stomped it to death.

  For the record, like a lot of women I don’t have a husband who snorts or head-butts or stomps skunks or behaves in ways instantly recognizable in the ram or the buck or the bull or the sire. My husband makes his living as a very calm, compassionate psychotherapist. But in the gender as a whole, and certainly in the NFL, the snorting farm animal can be readily seen.

  One more disclaimer: horses. Females are known to be difficult, nervous, “spooky,” temperamental, whereas geldings are easygoing and relatively calm. It is important to note, though, that a gelding is a neutered male; this seems to be the key to everything.

  So Shintzee the pecky rooster waited in the beer box and Anna and I stood by as Gretta drove up. She got out and opened her hatchback and inside there were the three hens in a cage. A tan one, black one, and a speckled gray one. In short order Anna named them Penelope, Magenta, and Hollyhock.

  Then, right there in Gretta’s hatchback, Penelope laid an egg.

  It was our first official egg.

  I was appalled. An egg? Really? I felt embarrassed for Penelope. Wasn’t this something a hen did in … private? Expelling items from one’s body seemed to me as if it should be a behind-the-scenes thing.

  “An egg!” I said to Gretta.

  She picked it up, handed it to Anna, who offered her scared smile, a downward twist of the lips.

  “Aigg! Aigg! Aigg!” Sasha said when she came out with Sandy, the speech therapist, who was trying to figure out what was going on.

  We said goodbye to our pecky rooster and never looked back.

  So now I’m supposed to come to the happily-ever-after part of the story of Birthday, the chicken that ran backwards in circles. But of course these sorts of stories never end that way. My only consoling point is that it wasn’t Marley who did the deed, but rather one of his visiting friends, a mutt we’ll call Sam. (In her shame, Sam’s owner has refused to allow her or her dog’s identity to be revealed.) We were all watching. We always watch whenever there’s a visiting dog. So who knows how it happened. We were out in the garden. How long had we turned our backs?

  I saw chicken feathers up by the dahlia bed. A lot of them. Then I saw Sam nosing her kill.

  I hated her.

  I hated myself. I should have known that poor spastic chicken was an easy catch. I should have taken special measures to protect our special-needs chicken. The others had scurried under the fence, out of harm’s way. I can only imagine what the sight of a dog’s teeth would have done to Birthday’s nervous constitution.

  I felt responsible in everyway, as mothers are prone to. And so goes the history of the world. You can be the kind of mother who surprises her child with the gift of baby chicks, who puts up with chickens in the kitchen and in the living room, who devotes herself to teaching all the lessons a pecky rooster might have to teach, who in fact provides burial services for all dead pets, and you’ll stand therewith that dead pet thinking of none of this. Instead you will drown in your failed responsibility. It will be your fault that the crazy chicken got crazy in the first place; you probably permitted too rigorous handling in the dollhouse; you should have put more stringent rules up on the fridge, JUST DON’T TOUCH THE DARN CHICKENS! Then the chicken wouldn’t have gotten the nervous condition and wouldn’t have gone into those spasms and when the dog came she would have had a running start. You! You. You call yourself a mother.

  But, exactly.

  Alex and I put Birthday’s remains in a shoe box and then we got a shovel and we told Anna and Sasha it was time once again to go to the magic tree, a large apple tree on our hill that has become our little pet cemetery. The girls know the drill. They are so good with death.

  Anna wanted to open the box so that she could say goodbye to Birthday.

  She opened it and did not flinch. “Well, goodbye,” she said. “I love you. You were a great chicken. I’m sorry if I didn’t protect you but I meant to.”

  I stepped forward as if to stop her from going where she was going, headlong into guilt and responsibility, but Alex stopped me. He said let her speak. She again apologized to the chicken and then she asked the chicken to check on Buddy, our dead goat, and all of our dead fish and three dead cats and then we walked back down the hill.

  It was hot, or maybe my head was just getting hot with the thought of what was next and what just happened. I was wiping my eyes, trying to get a grip. A friend of a friend of Alex’s was coming over to clean out our basement of baby gear and baby toys we no longer needed. She was about to become a mom and I was already deep in the trenches. I was trying to figure out how to explain to this woman I hardly knew that I was crying over a dead chicken, but not exactly, and I thought about sitting her down and saying, “You have no idea what you’re getting into.”

  up for grabs

  A father, a daughter, a balloon. They are just now heading toward the car, hand in hand, toddling down the driveway. It is the same way every week. They’re going to the grocery store. They’ll get a free sample of cheese, they’ll get a free cookie, she’ll ride in the cart awhile, then get down and push. He’ll say, “Whose little girl are you?” She’ll say, “Daddy’s!”

  It is the same way every single week. Except there isn’t always a balloon.

  Alex is an older dad, well into his fifties. Before Anna arrived, he wondered if he could do it. He wondered if he’d have what it takes.

  On this day she’s barely three. She knows she has an older dad. “I think,” she’ll say, “he might be twelve.”

  The balloon is two days old, practically ancient in the life of a standard-issue balloon. It is red. It’s tied to the end of a purple ribbon. It has fewer thoughts than a household pet, and yet, to a three-year-old, it is in every way a pet. You have to take care of it, and it won’t last forever. But for the time bein
g it is all yours.

  The center of everything.

  “Would you like me to tie the balloon around your wrist?” Alex is saying, already knowing the answer.

  “I would like to hold it,” Anna answers. “I would like to hold my balloon in my hand.”

  “Okay, sweetie,” he says. “Well, hold on tight.”

  The balloon has lost a good bit of its helium, and there is no wind, and so the balloon appears to be walking one step behind her, at just her height. A pal if ever there was one.

  He is boosting her up into the car seat, they are fumbling with sleeves, straps, buckles. It’s hard to tell how it happens. A slow-motion replay probably could not verify the sequence of events. But the balloon! The balloon gets loose. The balloon is floating in the air, just above the father’s head. “Oh, no!” she is saying. “Oh … no!” He reaches into the air, tries to pluck it from the sky, but the balloon at that moment catches an up-draft and lifts higher, just beyond his grasp.

  “Daddy!” she is saying. “Oh, no!”

  He tries again; this time he leaps. But the balloon soars a foot higher, hangs there stupidly.

  “My balloon,” she cries, craning her neck so as to make a more direct appeal. “Please, balloon! Please, Daddy! Oh, my balloon…”

  Another father might say, “I told you, honey, I told you to hold on tight!” Another might think, We have to hurry, we have a long list of groceries. Another might think, We can just buy another balloon at the store.

  “That’s my balloon!” she is saying, looking into the sky with longing. “That is my best balloon….”

  This is one way a father, old or young, finds out who he is, with no time to decide which one he should be, which one he wants to be, which one might, perhaps, look better. When a balloon is loose, there is no time. You either charge after it, or you don’t.