Here is you. When you want something, or want to be carried in a certain direction, you point with your index finger, your arm straight, and say “Noinoinoinoinoi.” When you’re holding something–a cup, a fork, a plastic drumstick, and someone (like your mother or father, who don’t want you to hurt yourself or pour water into your lap) tries to take it from you, you look up and say “Aaaaaaaaaa” very gruffly–almost like a growl. Whenever you see me or your father or your brother, you raise your eyebrows and open your mouth and smile and show your four teeth, and sometimes you get so excited to see us that you bounce or kick your legs. You are a diver. When someone holds you, she has to be told to pay attention because you could dive forward any second in an attempt to ask to be put on the ground. You dislike lying on the changing table and cry and fuss mildly whenever I change your diaper, but if you sit on the changing table you get on your knees and pound gently on the window with your hands. You finally no longer bite me when you nurse (about damn time–sorry about all the tugs on your hair–what else was I to do?). You love melon. You will not tolerate being fed by other people, which makes yogurt or ice cream the Biggest Mess in the Universe. You have short, thin hair which I am afraid you might always be dissatisfied with if it doesn’t at least become curly, or a little bit fuller. You are turning, sometimes in a whole circle, while in a sitting position on the floor. You are not yet crawling, but you are leaning forward in About to Crawl position, and you attempt to crawl by rolling around or squirming; when you get tired, you simply rest on your belly for a second with your cheek on the bed or the ground, wherever you happen to be. Like this.

Taking a breather.

You also clap. You rattle the bars of your crib cage. You are full of energy and love and determination. You strike me as a girl who will take no shit. I feel that you might redefine good-natured as someone who takes no shit. I am so proud and so in love, I could cry. We all could. We all do. (Not really. Just me sometimes, and you, if you’re thirsty and no one understands this.)

Here you are again, preparing for another roll.

I am actually an ass-kicker.

I love you.

Mommy

Mommy: Someone I’ve always wanted to be like.

Adele: I like you.

Mommy: I’m your mommy. You don’t have a choice, especially while you’re nursing. Of course you like me. You won’t like me when you’re a teenager and I tell you you’re pretty. You’ll probably say, You’re my mother. Of course you think I’m pretty. You can’t take me to the fucking prom. That’s how I was.

Adele: I wouldn’t be so mean.

Mommy: Oh, I don’t know. Mean isn’t always a bad thing. Take O’Connor. She wasn’t mean, from what I gather. But she was biting. She bit people with her words. She said what she thought with figures of speech and euphemisms and self-deprecation. You had to figure her out, she was so smart. You had to catch up to her. She left the rest of us behind because she was so… I think… comfortable with herself and her work and her life. She’s this example, to me, of confidence.

Adele: I like to feed myself. I know how, too.

Mommy: Yes, honey. You’re confident, too, I think. I hope you’re more like her than like me. Damn. I’m reading this biography of her right now by Brad Gooch (Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor), and I’m in constant awe of her tenacity, her steady and tempered and wise irreverence.

Adele: Irreverence.

Mommy: So often, we’re irreverent without being intelligent or informed. She wasn’t like that. I admire her. And I’m convinced she possessed those characteristics because her family supported her and adored her and nurtured her intelligence. Hers was also a family of means, so she attended excellent, marvelous schools all her life.

Adele: I think she was just plain smart. That’s all.

Mommy: You’re a baby, Petunia, so it makes sense to me that you’d speak like a Republican. It’s okay. I understand.

Adele: What’s a Republican?

Mommy: Someone who thinks that gender, class, race, means, and the like don’t have much to do with who we become. Like John Roberts, say, or Clarence Thomas. If you can’t reach your bootstraps to pull yourself up, they say, then fuck you. We’ll let you fall.

Adele: I bet Flannery was a Republican.

Mommy: You know, she might have been. I don’t really know. I haven’t finished the book yet. She sure was Catholic, and we know what that’s likely to mean. I think she was a writer, mostly. I think she spent her time and energy on that, on making it beautiful, on making it speak to people, on making it reflect emotion and experience. Before I even knew what writing meant, I read “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” and that was it. I was wrenched, puddle of feeling, of understanding, of empathy. Her abilities were astonishing. I read her biography, and I’m wrenched again. Not with the same kinds of feelings–with loss. I wish I could have had the support from my family that she did. I wish all of us could have. I wish every child could have schools like hers. It’s just not fair.

Adele: I’ll be saying that soon.

Mommy: Yes, you will. And you’ll be right.

Mommy: A term I introduced to my African American Studies class last year, Petunia.  Basically, it means “mainstream media” coverage of just about everything, every story.

Adele: My favorite is about the hippo and her belly button.  No one ever writes about that.

Mommy: The example I used for my class was that Supreme Court case about whether lethal injection was cruel and unusual punishment.  The case they should have been arguing was how racism and classism shape and drive the prison system in the country (as does cruel and unusual punishment).  Everybody knows our penal system is racist.  Everybody.  From ordinary people like me to legal experts to prisoners to Corrections Officers.  Death row is a Black male death row, for the most part.  It can take anyone with a brain about 10 minutes to learn that this is true.  And yet we’re in the Supreme Court arguing about lethal injection?  Seems like the Wrong Conversation to me.

Adele: I’ve never seen a Black man.

Mommy: You’ve probably seen some, Adele, in the park or downtown or at the store or what have you, but no, we’re white folks, you and me and your daddy and your brother.  And alomst all of our friends are white, especially the ones we see often.   So you haven’t really spent any time with Black people in your 11 months of life.  Your brother hasn’t either.

Adele: Shouldn’t we be talking about that, then?

Mommy: Ha!  What a smart girl you are, Petunia!  Wrong Converstaion, eh?  Maybe we should be.  Hmmm.  I was hoping we could talk about other examples of Wrong Conversation, like how we’re talking about restraint holds for Special Ed students that killed them rather than about the fact that Special Ed is so incredibly under-funded and supported and what this might have had to do with those horrible deaths.  Take NPR, for instance (an allegedly liberal media outlet that I think resembles more and more each day mainstream, stupid news).  Today I kept waiting for some caller to tell the removed host about how the ratio was crappy or how the training was rushed and the pay was shit and the stress was astronomical, and about how this is an institutional problem having to do with the lack of value and care we have for children–especially abused ones, neglected ones, disabled ones–in this country.  I mean, really.  But no.  Not even NPR gets to the meat of it.

Adele: I want my education to be special.

Mommy: It will be, Petunia.  It will be special because I’ll help you unlearn everything.  All those tests you’ll have to take?  That I hope your school won’t prep you for?  That’s Wrong Conversation, too.  What we should be talking about is learning, not test scores.  They’re two different things.  What we should be talking about isn’t Michelle Obama’s organic vegetable garden, it’s the fact that many pesticides cause cancer (again, a no brainer).  And on and on and on.

Adele: You make me tired, Mommy.

Mommy: I make myself tired, Petunia.  That’s why I take Prozac.  And we live in California, which is the most fucked up state in the universe.  Wrong Conversation Syndrome might have been born here.

Adele: I was born here.  That was a hard day.

Mommy: Maybe you can change things, Petunia, since you’re right in Wrong Conversation Heartland.  Maybe we can get people talking about rairness, love, equality, helping others.  What the problems really are.

Adele: You should let me pinch you.

Mommy: It hurts Mommy when you pinch me.

Adele: But I love to just squeeze squeeze squeeze!

Mommy: It’s not fair to pinch Mommy.  It’s not loving.

Adele: It’s like a little wormy.

Mommy: You need to exercise self control, awareness of the feelings of others.

Adele: What’s that?

Mommy: Subjects of conversation that too few of us have had.

I am in a slump.  A plateau of lowness that won’t let up.  I can’t think of anything witty to do for a Q & A.  I’m exhausted and sleepless.  I want to try new medication, but you’re breast feeding–and you LOVE breastfeeding, my god–so I don’t want to switch.  I also don’t want to switch because I DON’T WANT TO BE DEPRESSED ANYMORE, OKAY?  I’ve been on and off medication since forever, and I don’t understand people who don’t need medication to get themselves living their lives, who don’t need a few glasses of wine to take the edge off, who don’t have anxiety attacks in the middle of the night, who don’t get hyper upset over being unable to find a jewelry store to replace a battery in a digital watch.  If you’re one of those people who do not get hyper upset about the lack of a place to fix a digital watch, or the loss of your keys, or the fact that it takes you three months to merely schedule a dentist’s appointment, if you’re one of those people who do get upset about such things but do not feel like such things bring into question the purpose of your life and mean that everything is going to shit everywhere… well, I’d like you to please go away. 

I was talking with a dear friend of mine this week; I said I was struggling, started crying, sucked it up, apologized for unloading.  Of course she said what any friend–myself included–would say: that I was welcome to unload.  Then she said that she wished she could help, that I was intelligent and beautiful and talented and wonderful, and that she wished I could internalize all that and be happy.

Sounds kind of yucky, doesn’t it, Adele?  Your mother, an aging tween with self esteem problems.  But I’ve always been this way, this entity of trying.  Trying to feel good.  Trying to become instead an entity of coherence, with my feelings matching my external circumstances instead of countering them so profoundly.  I think this is the state, Adele, that a lot of depressed people are in, either most of the time, all the time, some of the time, or a little of the time.  And this place is a tremendously powerless place to be.

I suppose it’s brain chemistry, Adele.  You might have these kinds of troubles, too, and when I think about this possibility I remember that psychiatrist I eventually dropped.  She said the following, more or less: that I should think long and hard about having a second child because I had a depressive condition and things would be hard.  I dropped her–not because she warned me, which seemed appropriate, but because when she learned I was pregnant with you, she was an unsupportive, mean bitch.  But you know what?  Things are hard.  She was a lame psychiatrist and she lacked warmth, but she was right.  (This is how those of us with character reflect on people, Adele: we take note of someone who sucks but then acknowledge their strengths, too.  This is the way the world should work, the way we should think about one another and the way we should love those whom we do not like.)

Adele, I wonder what you might  be thinking?  That your mother has passed down her defective genes to you?  Yes.  I have.  And although we have diluted my genes with those of your even-tempered, positive, happy father, the fact that I have worries me.  A few comments on my Brain, Child article expressed dismay and impatience and anger with the fact that I had chosen to get pregnant.  Well, I published an article.  This is something that’s damned hard for me to do, and I’m glad to have published something, and I think that everyone who reads it absolutely has the right to voice their opinion about it.  But those comments were a bit hard to read because Adele, it did not occur to me one time to NOT have a child because of my history.  Not once, not even when Psychiatrist of Suck warned me.  The only time it occurred to me was after you were here, when I read those comments, and I have thought hard about them since, because in my case those comments are fair.  And my answer is this: I think denial of my condition kept me from considering the option of no more children.  Denial of my condition still keeps me from taking care of myself as well as I should (because fuck this, I need to get it together, not take more drugs, right? isn’t that how the mind works?).

However, I wanted your wonderful brother to have a sibling, Adele.  I wanted to have a fuller family, one that is happy (despite me, we are) and active and fully engaged in family life and family love and family rituals and familyness.  And Adele, once you arrived, I realized it wasn’t just a fourth I wanted: it was you as that fourth.  You and your brother adore one another.  You adore everything, everywhere (except the moment when as you nurse I remove your hand from my larynx–it isn’t a knob, Petunia, and my upper chest is not a drum, and my nipple is not a teething ring).  You love to swing.  You love to point.  You love vegetarian chili and macaroni and cheese and you love to mush them into your hair.  You love it when I whisper rapidly into your ear, you love it when you pull yourself to a standing position in your crib and bounce.

So what can I say?  Did I make a mistake?  This is the wrong way to think about having children.  I made my life harder–MY life in particular, the one that I suppose is characterized by depression (it’s who I am, Adele; I often greet it, say hello there, sadness and longing and despair, welcome back, because dammit, I love you, too), this life I so often seem to feel like I have yet to begin.  I suppose you are a beginning for me, Adele–despite the grotesque cliche, you are.  And your beginning is something you can share with me.  I am so, so glad to have it.

I love you.

Mommy

For Easter, you and your brother Ian each got a present from your Aunt Dottie: a white stuffed lamb and a big gray bunny. You were indifferent to both. Your brother, though, loved the bunny. The morning after Easter, he had folded it into his collection of stuffed animals and determined its place around his pillow. He also wanted to adopt the lamb, but we explained that it belonged to you, that you’d share it with him in the future.

The days since Easter have been passing fast–good thing, as I am so damned tired all the time from working and raising you that I have actually taken naps on my office floor. When you become as tired as I am, as your father is, you cry hard and loud and insist on being put to bed. The rest of us should follow your lead. Parents in this country work way too hard because we sort of have to. And so I’ve been tired with anger about this, too, in some way, all the time.

But then I sit with you on the bed while you hold your little starfish and your little fishy and then hand each one to me, fascinated by the process of giving something to someone, of the power in your fingers to hold something and then release it. Back and forth, we pass the toy. Back and forth. You laugh and smile. Back and forth. While we play, Ian takes his giant afternoon nap (thank you god). And I kiss you constantly and can’t wait for Ian to wake up so we can all play together. 

Your father does the same things.   He holds you and your brother, loves you, kisses you, holds your hands, reads to you, spends lots of time with you.  He nurtures you.  Your father is a contented man, Adele, generally–contented and rational (why he married me I don’t know).  But ever since we had children, he has become even more contented.  I can feel his sense of fulfillment all the time; he doesn’t hide it or mask it.  It makes him, in my eyes, more of a man.

A few days ago, Ian lost his gray bunny. You were asleep, taking your very short morning nap, and your brother and I were playing in his room so we wouldn’t wake you up. I tiptoed into the kitchen and found his bunny on the filthy kitchen floor, which is always filthy (oh well–good parents don’t always have clean homes), brushed it off, and took it to him.

“Oh, my bunny! My bunny!” he said, holding the it to his cheek, hugging it. “I missed my bunny so much!”

I sat down in the recliner we keep at the window in Ian’s room–a Designated Reading Chair. Ian sat on the floor by his bed and sat the bunny against the wall. “I love my bunny! Mommy, mommy, look! My bunny!”

“Yes, Ian, I see! I’m so glad we found it.”

“I love my bunny,” said Ian, holding it again, cradling it.  “I’m a daddy.”

“What did you say, Ian?”

“I’m a daddy.  I’m a daddy.”

And this is how it should be, Adele.  Little boys should hold things and love things and call themselves daddies.  Parenting is not female territory.  And your wonderful, affectionate, loving father, because he is affectionate and loving, has taught Ian what a daddy is and what a daddy should be.  I have never in my life seen a little boy  hold anything and call himself a daddy–not in our world of Doll versus Baseball Glove.

Do you know what this means, Adele?  It means that love can transcend bullshit.  Really.  I was so proud of your brother and your father that I nearly wept.  So these are the males you’ll be growing up with.  They love you, and each other.  They will teach us all.

I love you.

Mommy

Mommy: Palpapble and mute, as a globed fruit.

Adele: I don’t like fruit. Just banana.

Mommy: Just kidding, Petunia. I don’t write poetry, so I don’t have the means to explain it very well. But a poem is an expression that takes the form of writing that most children love. Lots of poems rhyme, and children love that, and lots of poems become songs, and children love that. Poetry is actually everywhere. It’s how we think and feel and are, made into words.

Adele: Like feed me please, feed me peas?

Mommy: Yes, like that. It doesn’t have to rhyme, you know.

Adele.: Nurse me now, Mommy-Cow? 

Mommy: I wrote a poem for your brother once. I thought it was lovely. I don’t think anyone else would think so. That’s what happens when you get older, Petunia. You become more self-conscious. About everything. And I think materialistic cultures like ours take self-consciousness to new levels. When I was a little girl, I wrote a lot of poems. I read them to other people and to my family. Now I would never do that. Part of it is because I think the way we value poetry is incredibly contradictory.

Adele: Want to eat, need your teat.

Mommy: Hardly any poet in the world, for instance, can make a living writing poetry, but we teach it in our schools and encourage children to write it and love it and understand it and explore it. We test them on it. Why do we do that, if so many poets aren’t given a chance to really be poets? What do we think poetry is for? So who knows what children think of writing and poetry, really, the way we present it to them. And yet so many of my university students write poetry, just to write poetry, because they like it. They know intuitively that poetry is meaningful. Songwriters are poets.

Adele: I want to write a song! How about this: Hit my head on the base of the bed. Turned red. Tried to crawl to the wall. Bawled instead.

Mommy: That was beautiful, Honey Bear.

Adele: Pooped in my dipe. Now you wipe.

Mommy: Your brother Ian might be a poet.

Adele: He’s so funny!

Mommy: He’s a brilliant little boy. While you were eating in your high chair the other day, he walked into the kitchen with a piece of paper in one hand and a pencil in the other and announced, “I’m going to write a poem.” “What’s it going to be about,” we asked. “Birds,” he said. “It’s going to be about birds.”

Adele: Want my brother. Not any other.

Mommy: He came back a few minutes later. “I wrote a poem!” he said. “What does your poem say, Ian?” we asked. He looked at the paper, full of pencil scribbles, then looked up at us. “It says, The birds were mean to us.”

Adele: Birds rock. Must eat my sock.

Mommy: Beautiful. Children are beautiful.

Your brother is nearly 3 1/2 years old and he does not use the potty. I am a loving and patient mother, Adele, most of the time, even and especially with potty training. But changing the diaper of a toddler is nasty.  (I apologize to EVERYONE who changes the diapers of older children and adults–obviously, I am weak in many ways.  Please know that I know this.)  Changing the diaper of a larger person is just plain nasty. As a dear friend recently said about something else entirely–holy fucking ick.

Your father and I have been asking Ian about the potty fairly consistently, doing what we can but trying to be mostly hands off. And we’ve gotten no meaningful response. By meaningful response, I mean that your brother does not use the potty. The other day, he carried his little plastic potty around the house on his head, a clear indicator that a) he has never used it, and b) he has no plan to use it anytime soon. We might have to resort to bribery or a disturbingly controlling act this summer, though, as most preschools around here require children to be potty trained, and your brother will start preschool this fall.

But for now, there is no movement. Not in any literal or figurative receptacle.

So. I’m changing Ian’s diaper last night before I read to him and tuck him in. We’re on the floor of his bedroom, where he prefers to be changed (yes, he gets to “prefer” where he would like to be changed–Adele, this will cause me to be annoyed with you, but I will suppress it, and then I will tell you about how I have suffered when you’re a teenager). I’m wiping his booty, putting the ointment on, understanding that when you do this for an infant, it is an act of loving nurturance, but when you do it for a toddler it totally sucks.

“Mommy,” he says, “I think we should change your diaper!”  He laughs.

I laugh, too.  “I don’t use a diaper, honey. I use the POTTY. When you use the POTTY, you won’t use a diaper anymore!”

He looks at me.

“And you get to wear cool UNDERWEAR.”

He looks at me. “No, Mommy. I pee and poop in my diaper, and then you come.”

Please read the previous sentence again. Slowly.

I gaze at my son, my beautiful, sweet son who needs me so much that I cannot believe how any child survives neglectful parents.  I feel for them all.  Deeply.

Then I say, “Ian, you think I won’t come anymore if you use the potty?”

“Let’s read some books, Mommy.”

“Ian, I’m always going to come if you need me.”

My heart is racing, Adele, because not only do I realize that I have to address this issue (this is what it’s like with children, in my experience anyway–I am frequently hovering around a line, trying to keep from crossing it by making a little thing, a small source of conflict, into A THING, A LARGE SOURCE OF CONFLICT), but I also want to hold Ian in my arms for the next four hours or four years, until he is paralyzed there with me for the rest of his life, and tell him over and over and over again that I will always be here for him, that his growing up will never, ever, keep me from coming to him.

Instead, I help Ian into his pajamas and we read three books.  I kiss his cheeks and rest my chin on his head as he reads some, too.

Then he climbs into his bed and situates his Winnie the Pooh and his Rabbit just the way he wants them, and I kneel by his bed and rest my chin on my hand and look at him. This is a deviation from the usual routine.  I smile at him.  He smiles back, his blue eyes like warm in the cold, like a sunny place on the floor in the middle of a winter day where the cat might sleep.  Or like an infant against your skin.

“Ian,” I say. “Do you know that I will always, always come if you need me?”

He smiles, still. “Yes.”

“Good,” I say. “I love you.”

“I love you too, Mommy.”

Adele, even if I’m wiping your booty when you’re big enough to skydive, I look forward to moments like these with all my mind and heart and soul.

I love you.

Mommy

Mommy: Scientific studies that confirm our culture’s gender stereotypes. They hardly ever do, really, but it becomes Barbie Science when we say they do, like when people say that it’s natural for boys to shoot pretend guns with their fingers or for girls to prefer dolls over all other toys or for boys to be better with protractors or girls to be better with nurturing.

Adele: Guns are fun!

Mommy: You don’t know what a gun is yet, Petunia. Or a doll, really.

Adele: Can a doll have a gun?

Mommy: Only boy dolls in army or superhero or hunter clothes have guns. Girl dolls have shoes and little ponies and dogs with tiny combs to keep them groomed and nice. Girls like to groom. It’s just in them.

Adele: I want a doll that shoots people.

Mommy: I’m sure you do, Petunia. I’m sure a lot of girls do, but so many of us think–so many of us are SURE–that girls don’t want to shoot anyone or pretend to be soldiers because of Barbie Science and because we ignore the way socialization can make your choices for you. Your father sent me this “article” the other day about how girl brains and boy brains are different. What a bunch of shit. I mean, all our brains are different from one another’s. And sure, there might be some generalized differences between boy brains and girl brains, but there’s also the tremendously middle class and white and hetero-normative angle of all these boy-brain, girl-brain studies and stereotypes. Can you say, “socialization,” Petunia? Try it. Go on.

Adele: I don’t want to be social. I want a doll that shoots people and I want her to lift weights. Big booming barbells.

Mommy: Of course, in that “article” there was this test (I won’t provide a link because it’s just too stupid, like Gilligan’s Island was really too stupid to watch), and I took the test, and I had to say yes or no to questions like “I get lost when I use maps,” or “When I was a child, I hated to lose,” or “When someone insults me, I prefer knocking the shit out of them to crying.” Are you kidding me? This is being passed off as science?

Adele: Did you hate to lose?

Mommy: I don’t remember. I was busy trying to get through all that therapy. By college, though, when I played things I wanted to play, like cards and darts, I was fiercely competitive.

Adele: Me too! I hate losing!

Mommy: Who the hell doesn’t, really? If you care about what you’re playing, I’d guess that either gender would dislike losing. Think about it. Did I care that my team lost softball in P.E. when I was in 8th grade, menstruating into a pad I was afraid would leak, wondering why my boyfriend hadn’t called the night before? No. I can safely say that I did not care if I lost any game in any Physical Education class I ever had. But what if I’d been a softball player, on a team and into it? I’d have cared a lot. It’s that kind of specificity that’s missing from all these “articles.” Bitch Magazine has a great article about this. Thank god for that publication. Could we get smarter, people? Start questioning these concepts we have of girls-are-this-way and boys-are-this-way? Start thinking about our culture? For god’s sake.

Adele: My doll will shoot them all and laugh at all the blood! And she’s going to weigh 275 pounds, all muscle, and she’s going to have short red hair and a black girlfriend, and everyone will think my doll is beautiful. She’s going to like pink, though. I think she’ll wear pink dresses and Keds.

Mommy: Will she make eye contact? Boys don’t like to make eye contact, you know. That was proven on 20/20 a decade ago. I bought every word of it, too. Yuck.

Adele: No eye contact! Except with her black girlfriend and every stupid person she shoots. She won’t kill them or anything. She’ll just teach them a lesson. But she’ll be honorable. She’ll meet them in the eye.

Mommy: Like a real man?

Adele: Like a woman, Mommy. Like a real woman.

We need to talk about your needs: They are multiple and constant and they wear my ass out. I put you in day care one extra day this week–one extra day!–because I was exhausted and had a ton of papers to grade and work to do, and the extra separation time really shows. You want to be held a lot, all the time, and this isn’t possible for me, what with your older brother running around and, you know, food to cook, urges to pee, hair to (at least) keep from being oily-looking, laundry to fold, writing to complete. I simply cannot meet your needs all the time, and I cannot meet your brother’s needs all the time, and when this truth takes the form of your crying, or his crying, or something not getting finished, there are days where I just exist as Pissed Off Mama, because I am unable to meet your needs. (Obviously, I don’t mean neglect. I mean, like, not being able to get your brother a glass of milk because we ran out, or having to leave you in your crib crying while I put the laundry away in order to prevent Laundry Jam. Laundry Jam is a damn serious matter. It can devastate a household. Really.)

And Adele, I hate not being able to meet your needs all the time. (“Hate,” Adele, is a bad word, unless you’re talking about Rush Limbaugh, unless you’re actually fantasizing about ways to… because he’s so… and people like this man? he is actually a powerful individual? god, could you vomit? So–take my use of the word “hate” at this moment as a reflection of how difficult this whole mother-thing can be, as a warning of what can happen if you’re too hard on yourself.)

So I took this concern to my therapist, and here’s what she said: In order to grow up and learn to take care of themselves, children need to do the reparative work of their parents not meeting their needs all the time.

Let’s sit with that one for a minute.

Oh… bullshit! You need to meet your children’s needs all the time, as much as possible, and if you don’t you suck, because your children will become needy and desperate and screwed up if you don’t meet all their needs. Everybody knows that, especially those of us who are unlucky enough to come from dysfunctional homes, like me and a lot of other people. But Adele, what I’m coming to realize is this: people like me might comprehend the concept of that reparative work, because we never had our basic emotional needs met in the first place.

So–another reason for me to be absurdly hard on myself now has the potential to be removed from my list. This is good, Adele, because I don’t want you to be absurdly hard on yourself all your life–it makes days that aren’t unpleasant at all quite unpleasant. It keeps you from enjoying your life and each moment in it. In fact, it might keep you from enjoying those wonderful moments when I can meet your needs…

Kissy, kissy.

You like that? Yes you do, yes you do!

I love you.

Mommy

My closet is full. It’s small but packed to busting with clothing of various colors and kinds and sizes–mostly cheap crap, like the stuff that so many Americans buy at Ross or TJ Maxx or whatever clearance rack we can find, if we can blast through all the other women, some of whom are like me–desperate to feel good about themselves by buying a pair of pants and a black tee shirt and then walking around in them. The ultimate self-esteem booster, Adele. Really. Going to the grocery store or to work in a new dress and some sandals will make you feel awesome–worthwhile, strong, pretty, capable. It doesn’t take work, or depth, or intelligence. Just throw on a silky skirt and your efforts will have come to fruition.

You should know that I even clean out my closet: A few times a year, I take things I no longer want to the Salvation Army or to the Cancer Society shop, but it doesn’t help. I excavate, but no one could tell (Adele, a metaphor is a figure of speech in which an implicit comparison is made); I clean things out, unpack them and unbury them and get rid of them (between two unlike things that actually have something important in common), but even I do not notice a difference.

And so I despise my closet. I dread opening its door. (Adele, I’m trying not to use the word “hate” because it’s unhealthy and hostile.) I search in the dark for things to wear (no light in the tiny closets of my old house) and I feel around in the dark for the piece of dirty clothing that I know has fallen out of my dirty clothes hamper because it’s so fucking full. And nothing changes.

My holding onto these clothes, Petunia, my closet torment, is not trivial. The way I persecute myself, feeling guilt and shame and remorse over my heavier-than-it-used-to-be body (which works just fine, by the way–it poops, it pees, it breathes, it is free of broken bones and paralyzed muscles), the way I’m forcing myself to live in this dysfunctional space, is not trivial at all. What you need to know is how I arrived at this problem, this problem which is not starvation, not poverty, not criminal, but torturous nonetheless. I arrived here because the clothes in my closet don’t fit me anymore, and I refuse to part with them for the following reasons: I have not enough money for new clothes; I refuse to buy more cheap crap made by someone in Indonesia who is aching for a break and a clean and safe home; and of course the most important reason–I desperately want to fit into my old clothes again. It comes down to this, Adele. To vanity. I am engaging in Wrong Conversation, like so many publications and shows do, when they discuss women in nearly every way–but when they discuss women who don’t get rid of clothes they’ve gained themselves out of, they say things like this: Accept yourself. If you haven’t worn it in a year, get rid of it. Go to the Container Store and organize, organize, organize.

And although I am aware of this and many other Internal Wrong Conversations, I am too conditioned to stop thinking about spring. I want to wear those tank tops that my arms can barely squish into, those blouses that my stil-nursing breasts will stretch to tearing. And I want to wear each of these items with jeans that I cannot pull up past my hips.

Ah, jeans. I have them stacked on a high shelf in my closet–each pair is between 5 and 15 years old. I do not part with them. Those are my Europe Jeans, I say, looking up into the dark, the jeans I wore every day for four months when I backpacked around in the mid-90s. The thing is, I don’t realize but realize at the same time, they are not my Europe Jeans anymore. They are my Closet Jeans. They sit on that shelf and tower into the darkness. I stare at them and then pull on a pair of banana yellow sweat pants that are stained with spit up.

The good news, though, Adele, is this: the spit up that stains my sweat pants is yours, there because I was nursing you, because your tiny digestive system regurgitated what it could not handle. Most all the stains that mar the few pieces of clothing I can still fit into are evidence of you and your brother, your presence, your bodies, your weight. And Adele, you win. I close my closet door. I put on a pair of socks to keep my feet warm–usually bright blue or green, because those are my warmest pairs–and then I put on a bra that smells like sweat because I haven’t had time to wash it, and then I put on a stained but clean pale orange tee shirt, and I nurse you, I play puppets with your brother, I take you to the park and forget about all the stains on my clothes and my heavy ass that makes me wonder if you came to term in there instead of in my belly. I traipse around the house and the yard, chasing after you and your brother, and in my head I have the Right Conversations. They go like this: Time to feed your daughter and then wipe the counter and fold her clothes and put them away. Isn’t Adele beautiful? Isn’t Ian generous and bright? When will he use the potty, oh when when when? I wonder what he will be like when he’s eight, nine, thirteen? And isn’t this a lovely

lovely

lovely

day?

I love you.

Mommy