Growing Girls (2 page)

Sasha, who is three, was fourteen months old when we got her on a sweltering June morning in an office building in Guangzhou. She had on a one-piece playsuit with Mickey Mouse on it and she had the skinniest arms. We never got to see where Sasha was found. We just know she was in a paper box on the steps of a pharmacy. I was already used to blocking out the ghost-women of China, so I put Sasha’s birth-mother in
that convenient vacuum. Anna and Sasha are strikingly pretty girls, and when they ride together in the supermarket cart, people often comment on this, and then they say, “Are they
real
sisters?” Some adoptive parents get angry with such invasive questions, and some even have curt replies at the ready, but I just say, “Yes,” and move on to find the bananas.

Sasha is hardly talking at all yet and a few weeks ago she was diagnosed with verbal apraxia, a neurological disorder that might be the result of minor brain damage in the womb or during infancy, or might be just a dumb coincidence; no one knows.

It was fun visiting Marie at the beach. She and I were best friends in college and she used to sleep at the bottom of my bed like a pet. We love telling this story. “Do you know how many times you’ve told me that story?” my husband, Alex, will say. Marie got married right out of college and got her MBA and then her PhD while also having her three babies. Her oldest son, Packy, is about to enter his senior year of high school and he’s a lifeguard on the beach. He’s tan and smart and charming and he plans to go to Harvard or Yale or Penn. In one day Marie’s youngest son, ten-year-old Daniel, had a sailing lesson at the yacht club followed by a tennis lesson and then nine holes of golf.

When I told Marie about the chickens in our kitchen, that was when I felt the divide most acutely.

I didn’t get married until I was thirty-nine, when everything about my life turned good. We moved to the farm and adopted the girls and gradually our farm in Scenery Hill, Pennsylvania, started filling up with animals. This is a childhood dream I forgot about for half my life. Then Alex entered the picture and I
got back to it. Sometimes I worry that he and I are living just
my
dream, and not his. When I get like this I end up surprising him with large motorized vehicles, usually all-wheel-drive. For Father’s Day this year I got him one of those motorcycles on four wheels that you can drive up hills and into ditches and get mud splattered all up and down your leg. As I was working out the financing, the guys at the Honda dealership gathered round to see what a woman surprising her husband with an ATV actually … looked like. I felt I should have dressed better.

Now it’s 3:30 a.m. and I’m no closer to sleep. This has been going on for months now. I’m starting to drink a lot of wine. After I get the girls in bed I have Pinot Grigio and I watch reality TV. Tonight, on the season finale of
For Love or Money
, Preston picked PJ to love, the innocent young thing aching for it. She needed it so bad she decided to pick Preston over a check for a million dollars, which was offered to her if she would just dump Preston. There was so much honor in all of this and so much stupidity. The show gets me very worked up, and I can’t sleep.

I don’t understand why I’m so lonely. I tell Alex and I can sense he thinks it’s some reflection on him, or my love for him, or some lack of love for him, which is completely off base, so I don’t even bother telling him anymore.

I wish Gretta lived closer. It takes me forty-five minutes to drive to her house. Out here, that’s considered a neighbor. She and I are buddies despite the distance and despite our political divide. Everyone around here is a flag-waving Republican. A lot of people have flag decals on the back windows of their pickups. If you were to say publicly at a bar or at the county fair that you don’t think this war we’re in is a valid one, you would be accused
of not supporting our troops. I don’t understand how hoping that pimply young men and beautiful young women don’t die in the line of enemy fire has anything whatsoever to do with political views. I support our troops in that I just want them all to come home to their moms and have pie.

Politically, I tried for years to be “Independent,” to lean neither all the way left nor right. But like everyone else, I seem to be getting narrow and cranky and one-sided. The part that enrages me most is all the yanking in the name of God. The God I know is exhausted, sick in bed with an ice bag on His head. The God I know isn’t some authoritarian dictator with a rule book written in especially cryptic prose able to be deciphered by only one chosen group. The God I know is creative and hilarious and humble and constantly revising. Right about now He’s wishing America would pipe down and bow off the world stage for a while and get a good nap and then, with a fresh head, reconsider just about everything.

I think about this business a lot when I watch our goats and our little donkey try to share a feed bowl. Just because the goats are the aggressive eaters and bully their way in doesn’t mean someone shouldn’t pull the timid donkey aside and make sure she gets lunch. The God I know finds these matters of utmost importance.

You talk like that at a bar or at the county fair and at best someone is going to smile at you like you’re a child, but most likely just interrupt you and remind you that, hey, God says gay people shouldn’t get married.

The last time I was visiting my family in Philadelphia, all of whom have swung in the opposite direction of me politically, I
said I was starting a new party called the Hypocrites, a group that believed in telling the truth only when it would offer immediate personal gain. “I’m a Hypocrite!” I said. “I think it can really catch on.”

My mother is so feeble now. She’s eighty-two and I don’t think there is anyway she can come visit me here at the farm. If the six-hour drive doesn’t do her in, the rough terrain will. She’s “recovered” from the strange paralyzing disease she contracted over five years ago, but she’s not the same. She came to Claire’s house for lunch, and just watching the kids bounce around exhausted her. Then she tripped over a throw rug. I heard the thud and I ran in and Alex ran after me and between the two of us we got my mother upright in no time. But we promised not to tell my father. To her credit, my mother blamed the throw rug.

I’m writing these thoughts on the back of drawings my girls did earlier today while I was cooking corn. They ran in with scribbles, performances they wanted me to hang up. Eventually they decided to leave me out of the equation and they just went ahead and grabbed the tape. The walls of this house are now covered with my daughters’ drawings.

I don’t think Claire had a single drawing on her walls. Her house is so much neater than mine. I think it’s because she has a utility room. Claire is two years older than me. She’s a pediatrician and she tells me not to be overly concerned about Sasha’s speech, but I can see the worry in her eyes. When she redid her kitchen last year she got refrigerator doors that match her cabinets. Meaning: wood. Meaning: nothing to hang stuff on with magnets. I don’t fully understand this decision.

My girls hang ponies on our refrigerator. Ponies are the
biggest thing going. My Little Pony, a Hasbro toy. They’re kind of like the Barbie dolls of the animal world. They come in pink and purple and yellow and blue and white with hair that is long and sparkly and sometimes rainbow. They all have big blue eyes and identical expressions and one hoof that is secretly a magnet. The magnet is responsible for all the magic. Wave the pony over the door of her magic dressing room and a song plays and lights flash. That’s fun. But my girls figured out that the magnet also means the ponies will hang on the refrigerator. We now have ponies hanging all over ours, sticking out, perpendicular, hair blowing in the air conditioner breeze.

Naturally, when Sasha ran to Claire’s refrigerator and stuck her pony on it, it fell with a thud to the floor. “Hey!” my daughter said, angrily.
“Hey!”

Right now I’m in Anna’s bed, in her room, because it’s cool and she isn’t here to kick me in the head or in the liver. She got out of her bed and came to mine and Alex’s because of a bad dream. We have a king-sized bed for expressly this purpose, a place for kids to crawl in if need be. But Anna kicks, so usually I leave.

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.