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.