Sand in My Eyes (35 page)

“There’s no such thing,” I said right away, “There’s no such thing as a mother giving her children ‘too beautiful a world.’”

“I don’t know about that,” she said. “My daughter never said ‘no.’ Children today want for nothing—at least my grandchildren wanted for nothing.
They were playing two and three sports at a time, taking piano and golf, getting whatever they asked for at the store, video games galore, then going off on elaborate spring-break vacations with their friends, driving new cars, and having thousand-dollar birthday parties. Where did my daughter learn to be this type of a mother? It’s like she’s Santa Claus. She didn’t learn it from me, Anna. My children each got a cake and two presents for their birthdays.”

“Yeah, but every mother wants life to be better, more beautiful for her children than it was for her.”

“But where do we get this notion that giving our children everything they want means giving them a beautiful life? Maybe this is why there are so many eighteen-year-olds like my grandson unable to get by in the world, and why grown-up kids are moving back home to live with mommy and daddy. Back in my day, eighteen was a full-fledged adult. There was no question. I don’t mean to go off like I am,” she said. “I just think life is too easy for these kids today, and then, once they leave home, everything is too hard for them.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. I could feel my body tightening, my defenses rising. “It’s a big, bad world out there. They’re going to find out sooner or later what life is really like, so why not give them a perfect childhood? Give them whatever you can?”

“It’s a matter of opinion, I guess, but what I think parents ought to give their kids—what kids want more than anything—is to grow up in a house where their mother and father get along. But it’s hard nowadays because these children are ruling the homes. Fathers are not allowed to raise their voices, and spankings are unheard of. I told my daughter for years, every time she called me up after a fight with her husband—and their fights were always pertaining to the children—I told her it’s okay for them to hear the word ‘no.’ The word ‘no’ is not going to hurt them. But let me tell you, Anna, my son-in-law slept on the couch for years, and those kids slept with her in the bed. And sometimes, she would go into their rooms and sleep with them. They couldn’t sleep without her.”

I nodded. “Yeah,” I said. “Mine sleep with me, too.”

She hesitated, and then said, “Now where does that leave the husband?
My Oscar wouldn’t have allowed that. The children slept in their beds, and we together in ours.”

“Maybe it’s a generational thing,” I said. “I don’t know, but I never thought, before having children, that I’d let them sleep in bed with me. But then, after carrying each one nine months, it didn’t feel right to be putting them in a room down the hall, in a crib. It happened naturally and now, well, all three of them fall asleep with me, but lately I carry the twins into their own room once they’re asleep. I feel I’m raising more affectionate kids this way, and I researched it. This was the norm for centuries. In fact, entire families slept together in one room, one bed. It’s all they had and they never questioned it.”

“If you really want to know what I think,” she went on, “it didn’t surprise me at all when my daughter told me her husband was divorcing her. My son-in-law, Anna, he was a neglected man—I witnessed it with my own eyes. And now he’s gone and the children are coming back—expecting her to give them everything, even an apartment of their own so they can move out again. She did everything for those children and never had an ounce of energy left for him. I used to tell her, when they were younger, go on date nights—you need to go on date nights, but would you believe she wouldn’t? She didn’t think it was right to get a babysitter, to leave her kids for a single night.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “It’s been awhile since I’ve gone on any date night,” I told her. “Why should we hire babysitters when everyone is a pedophile?”

“Oh, Anna, you don’t believe that, do you?”

“I do,” I said. “It’s what we’re told. It’s what mothers today are told.”

“I feel bad for you mothers today,” she told me. “I truly do. You have things to worry about that we never thought of in our day.”

“It’s a scary world,” I said.

“I guess it is,” she said. “But despite all of that, I think it’s sad—sad that women are treating their children like royalty and their husbands like servants.”

I laughed and laughed and couldn’t stop.

“What’s so funny?” she asked me, but I would never tell her that my
own children were at a higher point in the hierarchy of love than my husband, and for no other reason than that they were cuter and easier to love. For I had loved them from the moment I learned I was pregnant, whereas my husband, well, I didn’t start liking him until the seventh date, and loving him until well after he proposed, and even then I questioned whether my love for him could last a lifetime. I’d throw myself into the mouth of a shark to save my children. I don’t know whether I would do that for my husband, or not.

“I don’t know why I’m laughing,” I told her. “None of this is funny to me.”

She walked over to a white lattice lying on the ground. “I don’t want to overstep boundaries,” she said then, “but I wonder, if wives today would put their husbands before their children, put them up on a pedestal, show them a little love and respect, well, I wonder if all these wilting marriages might stand a chance at reblooming.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “And let me tell you, I refuse to believe that anything I did or didn’t do would have prevented my husband from going astray.”

“I didn’t mean to upset you, Anna,” she said.

“I know you didn’t, but there are bad things that happen to us in life that we have no control over.”

“You’re right,” she said. “I can’t change the fact that the caterpillars ate away at my
Senna polyphylla
plant. And I can’t change my past, or how I ignored my symptoms for so long: the unusual thirst, the frequent desire to urinate, my blurred vision. But I try to focus on what I can do now! I stopped smoking a pack a day. I’m choosing healthier foods to put into my body, eating more fiber. I’m staying active and doing what I love—working in this garden every morning.”

“Good for you,” I told her. “But it’s hard when you can’t trust the man with whom you’ve had three children.”

“I do feel bad for you,” she said. “I’ve always believed there are two kinds of men in the world—those who cheat and those who don’t.”

“And luck, or lack of it, has me married to one who does.”

“Yes, and you’re miserable, aren’t you? I’ve seen it all along—the way
you hardly talk about him, or the faces you make when I mention him. I see you out my window, laughing with those kids of yours, but when he’s home you hardly crack a smile.”

“It hasn’t been fun,” I said. “And I don’t know what to do.”

“I’m thinking out loud, Anna,” she went on. “My plant, the one with the caterpillars, may still die. I don’t know, but I want to be sure I did absolutely everything possible to give it a fighting chance. I probably shouldn’t say this, but do you think you’re doing everything you can to save your marriage? Have you tried loving him more?”

I never hit an old lady, never hit anyone in all my life but for the single spanking—a light one, more of a love tap—I gave my son, so soft, but hard enough that it made me cry more than him the day he said what he said to me, but as my neighbor bent over, legs locked, buttocks in the air, trying to lift the lattice, I felt more offended and disrespected than I had the day Thomas called me “dummy Mamma.”

I wanted to tell her she should keep her opinions to herself, and that she knew nothing about my husband or my marriage except for the quarreling from our windows, my snide remarks here and there, and the look of misery found on my face. She had no right telling me in her roundabout way that I was responsible for my marriage going dry, and that if only I cared for him more, loved him more, things would be different. I wanted to give her a piece of my mind, but then I saw her face turning red, like the red of a red-breasted robin, and her throat was turning red, too, which is never good, and her legs were starting to wobble. It was hard seeing a woman her age turning red and wobbling, as it was hard to accept my marriage turning sour and toppling.

“You should bend at the knees,” I told her. “Like this.” I took hold of one end of the wooden lattice and, together, we lifted. “Where do you want it?”

“Over there, against that tree,” she said with a nod of her head. “It’s for the butterfly garden I was telling you about. Once I add those posts over there, it’s going to be the trellis I plant my passion vines on.”

“I hope it works,” I said. “I hope you attract lots of butterflies into your yard.”

I stared at her, wondering whether I should get hold of her daughters and report the overexertion of labor and opinions I was noticing of her in the garden, or her symptoms of loneliness, like her butting in to things that were none of her business. Had I a good marriage, I would have brushed most of what she said off as nothing more than senior nutty nonsense—old ladies say nutty things—but since my marriage was bad, and I lived next door, kept my windows open and fought with my husband nightly, I was taking everything she said personally.

“Anna, would the children like some lemonade? I’ve got lemonade upstairs.”

“No,” I said, and could feel my bottom lip snap shut. “I’ve got housework to do. We’ve got to go.”

If she had asked why my lip snapped shut, I would have told her that, like the snapdragon flower, it snapped because I felt threatened, and didn’t like what she had said to me. I rounded up the kids and left her yard without looking back. Once inside my house, I started to boil water for the children’s lunch. But as I waited for the noodles to cook, I couldn’t help myself. I flipped open the book she had lent me and read a quick letter from Cora.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

My Dear Daughter
,

Have you ever wondered how sunflowers can grow tall and stand upright with all those heavy petals
?
I was sitting in the park thinking about this today and realized that flowers in general can only stand because of their stems. I don’t think mothering, work, relationships, and so forth can stand without a stem and, to me, that stem is spirituality. And if one of the petals, say “work,” doesn’t pan out, the petal falls off but the stem—God—is still there
.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

IN THE DAYS FOLLOWING
I stepped not a foot into my neighbor’s yard, but could see from afar her chrysanthemums no longer mingling with the iris but having words with the gladioli, her birds of paradise telling secrets and the colors of the hibiscus intensifying, and the narcissi with their toxic sap threatening all the other flowers. Even the hydrangeas, I decided in early June as I quickly packed the children into the car and pulled out of my driveway, had heartless, boastful looks. And when I returned hours later, I couldn’t help but notice her gardenias in a pot, and how resentful they looked.

It was hard forgetting about all my neighbor had said to me, how in a roundabout way she implied that this is the house that Anna built. This is the marriage that exists in the house that Anna built. This is the frazzled grump that destroyed the marriage that lives in the house that Anna built. But as I labored up the stairs to my house, bags of groceries hanging from my wrists, crying children on my hips, I couldn’t help but think of what Cora had written—about spirituality being the stem that holds it all up—and for the first time in a long time I cried out for the Spirit of God to relieve my exhaustion as I put the groceries away, cooked dinner for, bathed, washed and dried the heads of, brushed the teeth, and dressed in pajamas three finicky bodies, all the while praying for the strength I needed to make it through these after-dinner hours—the witching hours leading to bedtime. When they were fast asleep, I started on all those other nonglamorous,
non-selfish, non-genius, menial tasks—like washing dirty dishes and folding clothes—plowing full force ahead like a farmer with a day’s worth of work to do out in the field, only the sun had gone down. As I picked up wet towels from the bathroom floor, I asked for the spirit of God to breathe life and energy into me. The very next morning, I thought of Cora, waking an hour earlier to grow those flowers, and I introduced into my life a new petal—writing consistently, rain or shine, clean house or messy, tired or rested. I had written the week my children were gone but not at all since they returned.