Growing Girls

Growing Girls

Bad Mother

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

Steve, one of my cats, stopped eating at some point during our time away. We went east for ten days, visiting my friend Marie at her bright white seashore place in Avalon, then my sister, Claire, in Cherry Hill. At the beach you have that grid pattern of perfectly paved roads, and weed-free lawns made of pebbles, and at Claire's there's a public pool right down the street, a playground across the way, and a cul-de-sac perfect for riding bikes around. I don't think all of New Jersey is this way, but I have to say it was fun being in places where life is so organized and intentional. Out here where we live, on a farm on the side of a Pennsylvania hill, everything is haphazard and shifting. Recently the ground in front of our barn cracked open, revealing a fresh-water spring. This was entirely unprovoked. It was as if the earth just needed a little stretch. Maggie, our mare with bad feet, stood in the cool mud for days and afterwards walked without limping, a miracle.

You would have to see how skinny Steve is to believe it. A bundle of bones beneath his sleek coat of gray and brown. His eyes are a healthy clear green, though. And he started eating again almost as soon as we walked in the door. Now he's lying with me here on the bed, drinking up the companionship. It's sad to think of a cat starving himself with loneliness. It's 3 a.m. and I can't sleep so I decided to just get up and make sense of everything once and for all.

I wrote two books about my life without ever once mentioning Steve because each time I tried to factor him in, his presence made the plot too laborious. Now that is terrible. The idea of just editing one of your cats out of the story of your life. That's terrible!

Lately, whenever I think about myself, it always comes back to this: bad mother.

A good mother would have included Steve. A good mother would have bought a house in Cherry Hill with a cul-de-sac for her kids to ride bikes around instead of a place in the middle of nowhere with a rooster.

The rooster was a surprise. Apparently, while we were away, one of our four young so-called hens started to crow. For the record, it sounds nothing like "cockle doodle doo." It's more of an "arrg, arr, arr" that peters out into a kind of cough. The chickens were two days old when we got them. For six weeks they lived in a box in our kitchen, and then we hired Mike, a handsome young carpenter, to build us a chicken coop. One of the things I learned from Mike is that he, too, might be in a feud with George, our neighbor. We only found out that we might be in a feud with George when Gretta, the woman who got us the chickens, intimated as much.

So much goes on here.

Gretta thought the idea of a feud with George was interesting. Gretta grew up in the suburbs, as did I, so she has some distance on the culture I'm just now getting used to. She's years ahead of me on the conversion to country-person, so I regard her as an expert and a model. She's the one who got us our goats, too. Our dogs, Betty and Marley, stay at her place whenever we go away.

Betty is a mutt, or at least she was when I got her over a decade ago. Nowadays you're supposed to say "mix." It's funny to think of politically correct language hitting the dog pound circuit. Marley is a black standard poodle, considerably shaggy thanks to a rough-and-tumble life not suited to his pedigree.

When I went to pick up Betty and Marley at Gretta's house this morning, Betty came charging out and she had an unusually desperate look in her canine eye. Gretta informed me that Betty had had an anxiety attack while we were gone. There was a thunderstorm in the middle of the night; Betty has never been good with storms. I'm usually there to hold her while she shivers. But I wasn't there. Betty dug her way out of the dog room--through wallboard--and got into the garage and dug holes into bottles of the anti-goose chemical Gretta uses in her goose-control business. Three gallons spilled out, at a hundred dollars a gallon, but it was nontoxic so Betty didn't get poisoned.

Even so, when I got home, I felt like a bad mother with a skinny cat and a dog I wasn't there for during her extreme hour of need. Bad mother.

Claire's daughter, Elizabeth, is five, just like my daughter Anna, and she has one of those new Razor scooters with rollerblade wheels on it. She rode this with abandon up and over the Cherry Hill sidewalks and down to the cul-de-sac to visit her neighborhood friends. My girls had never even seen a Razor scooter before, let alone a neighborhood friend, and I had to teach them to stay on the white (the sidewalk) and never go on the black (the road) unless a grown-up was present. We live on a dirt road and so we have to drive a ways to even get to asphalt.

Anna was adopted from an orphanage in China. She was eleven months old when we got her on a clear February afternoon in a hotel lobby in Nanjing. She was wrapped in a fluffy orange snowsuit decorated with little white cats. I stopped thinking about her birth-mother the same day they drove us by the spot on the street in Kunshan where Anna was found when she was just a few days old. I just couldn't bear to think about that ghost-woman anymore. What good would it do to keep worrying about her and hating her for what she did? "I was born in China," Anna will say. "And then you came to get me." That's right. That's the story. I don't know when to fill in the details.

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 any way 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.