I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(9)

There’s not much I’d blame any parent for, honestly, now that I am one. Cruelty, neglect, abuse—absolutely—but word-drilling on the green sofa? No. We’re all a little weird thanks to our mothers. I’m carrying that tradition on with my own children.

What a job, to raise someone from birth to adulthood, bestowing upon them your knowledge and your values and, despite your best intentions, any number of traits you’ve inherited yourself. What a loaded task, to make every move, every day, in such a way that the impressionable larva-person in your home will see your example, process it into something within herself, and grow layers of muscle and soul over it until she is a fully developed human being. And all the while, the little person you’re nurturing is fighting you—spitting out the broccoli, not wearing the helmet, rolling her eyes at your carefully chosen words of advice—and you become constantly worn down even as you pour your energies into loving her.

My mom gave me all the tools she had, some of which I couldn’t use. She grew up to be a plant whisperer after helping her dad tend his garden in the wild green lot behind their little house outside Birmingham, Alabama, and she tried to teach me to be one, too. I used to follow her around our backyard, watching her reach into a mass of stems and leaves with her clippers and snip this bloom or that one to toss into her basket; then I’d sit mesmerized as she stuck them into vases and bowls, creating what looked like tabletop parade floats. She’d coach me to do the same—“Here, put some greenery in, make it look softer”—and I’d stab a branch into the bunch, ruining the loose beauty of her arrangement. You point to anything with roots, and she can name it, arrange it, and/or cook it, and I can’t keep a pot of basil alive for longer than a week. Why didn’t that stick?

What did stick—whether she intended to pass it along or not—was her sense of humor. When it came to academics, my mom may have been a warlord zipped into the body of Sally Field, but the rest of the time, she cracked us up. Whenever a Little Richard song came on the car radio, she would bust a move at the wheel like a one-woman episode of Dance Fever. She let me play beauty salon and make dozens of tiny pigtails all over her head with my colorful plastic barrettes. When I was bothered by the fact that none of my Barbies had underwear, she sewed a complete trousseau of tiny lingerie. Like her, I love little visual absurdities (ah, the inherent hilarity of a teeny-weeny doll bra), dry one-liners and well-timed cracks, and perfectly executed, utterly insane mishmashes of curse words. (My mom, upon walking into a messy room: “It looks like the ass end of destruction in here.” The ass end of destruction!)

When I was seventeen, I might have told you I was a neurotic student because my mom was so tough about grades. When I was twenty-five, I might have shrugged and said, eh, maybe it was my mom who made me a control freak or maybe I’m just me, who knows. By the time I reached my thirties and had my own children, I knew perfect parenting was a myth, and I understood that while she was responsible for making me, she couldn’t have known how I’d end up made. No one could have. That’s a little mystery we all unfurl on our own.





Lobsterman


Each time I wedge myself into a tiny chair at a lima bean–shaped table for another parent-teacher conference, I remind myself not to panic. Whatever the teacher reports my offspring have gotten up to lately, I probably did something similar as a kid, and I turned out okay.



* * *



In kindergarten, I got in trouble for scribbling little hatch marks on the sides of my worksheets—not once, not twice, but again and again. Whenever I completed my subtraction or my fill-in-the-blanks, I began graying in one corner of the paper with my pencil, methodically covering the page in lines until the whole thing was unreadable. The teacher brought my mom in and asked me in front of her, “Why, Mary Laura? Why won’t you stop?” To which I replied, “I don’t know.”

I was confused. Why did it matter? I’d done my worksheets. The answers were right. So I wanted to do some shading while I waited for everyone else—why the fuss?

She continued, “If you don’t stop, you’ll have to skip art.” I stopped for a day or two, then started again. It seemed so harmless. So I found myself sitting alone, banished to a little table where I would, supposedly, sit and think about curbing my scribbling habit. My friend Cynthia sneaked me balls of Play-Doh, and I mashed them against the underside of the table into blue and green and pink pancakes.

Once I was allowed back from exile, I quit scribbling on my papers, but I never did understand what the big deal was.



* * *



My third-grade teacher reprimanded me almost daily for writing in phrases instead of sentences. We had to read these little paragraphs—“Mike drives a bus in the morning. The bus is red. Children get on. Children get off.” And then we were expected to answer questions about them in complete sentences.

But tell me this: If someone asked you, “What does Mike drive?” would you say, Mike drives a red bus? Or would you say, A red bus? I bet you’d say, A red bus. Otherwise, you’re wasting words, right? No sense being redundant. Alas, my teacher did not agree. I got an F in writing, but I stand by those sentence fragments. Economy of words.

(You’d think an F would have really set me off. But unlike a B, which means you haven’t quite achieved an A, an F seemed like a crazy novelty, not even a real grade. “That woman’s an idiot,” my mom said.)