My Mama

She used to make us drink this nasty ass raw cow's milk that she would drive 10 miles to get from the local Mennonite dairy. When she got home it would still be warm and the cream would be on top, separate from the milk. It used to smell like a cow's ass and make me gag. All I wanted was the milk with Elsie the cow on the front because Elsie was so pretty for a cow and she was always smiling and she was on the TV and she had flowers wound around her horns, but mama said the Elsie milk was full of preservatives and wasn't good for us. She made us eat granola bars instead of Twinkies and I would go to sleep dreaming of that creamy white filling and that oily yellow sponge cake.

I spent an alarming amount of time during my childhood day (and night) dreaming of things we couldn't have...ravioli in a can, Lucky Charms, butter from a plastic bin (Elsie butter!) that left oil on the roof of your mouth and wouldn't really melt, cheese that came wrapped in plastic in perfect squares that made long strings when you melted it on your deliciously fluffy bright white Wonder Bread (bread that just the sight of those bright red and blue circles on the package would send mama into paroxysmal spasms of worry about our imminent deaths from eating bread that wasn't really even bread.) I'd salivate over Big Mac commercials and wanted one of those goddamn purple Grimace figurines from a Happy Meal so bad that I plotted the grisly deaths of kids that were allowed those luxuries.

So we ate the home cooked burgers and the fresh churned butter and the crumbly, stinky cheese she made and the heavy, brown, grainy bread with seeds and bits of hay and other unidentifiable things in it. And we bitched, and we moaned and we stuck out our tongues at her turned back and rolled our eyes and said "no, ma'am" when she said she had eyes in the back of her head and did we want our face to freeze with that ugly look on it. We gave our carob bars to the dogs and wheat germ to the chickens. Health food was her thing. We threw it in the garbage and we resisted her every effort to make us healthy. We all came out ok, regardless. Sometimes she would go to KFC in town by the Ben Franklin store and she would order herself a 2 piece and eat every single bit even though we were in the car and I hated her for that.

It was my mother that instilled in me my love of rainy days, fireplaces, summer rain steaming on a hot tin roof, thunderstorms, the smell of old books, creaky rocking chairs, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Loretta Lynn, Willie Nelson and Tammy Wynette, antique stores that smelled like old pee and 1000 year old mummies, dump diving and turning trash into treasure. She taught me how to sew with a needle and thread, how to cross stitch, how to latch hook a rug and how to make a flute out of a hollow stick but it never would play. She taught me how to pull out the middle of a honeysuckle blossom and get the nectar off the end and how to feed baby ducks and how to plant tulip bulbs. She taught me fear and faith, love and hate, and that sometimes even mamas don't know the right answer. Together we've watched an inchworm inching and a cicada shedding its skin and she'd pick it carefully off the bark and hitch it onto my shirt by its little spiky legs and I never knew whether I liked those ghostly shells or was afraid of them. We would walk on rutted dusty roads and pick up pretty rocks that she would put in her pockets for me to add to my rock collection when we got home.

We would sit like Indians on the floor in front of the stereo and she would put on her Willie Nelson 8-track tapes and cry when Willie got to the part about angels flying too close to the ground, and I would crawl into the triangle her legs made and push into her soft, comfy, familiar belly and pat her leg and feel stupid and ugly and worthless and small and helpless. I would sit on the bed and watch her get ready for the Kingdom Hall and I liked the way she had a pink plastic powder container with a white puffy puff inside and she would pat herself all over with Charlie scented powder that we weren't - on hreat of certain death - allowed to touch, much less open and use. The smell made her mysterious and pretty. I would open the powder when she wasn't around and run my finger through its silky fineness and imagine being grown and rich enough to have my own Charlie powder container with a puff inside. I would watch her get out her L'eggs pantyhose egg from the corner of her panty drawer and make that little shriveled brown stocking fit over her fat legs and I would run my hands up and down her legs that were now so smooth and shiny and she would spat my hands and tell me to stop before I put a runner in her hose and made her mad.

At night we would get out the Sears Catalog and look at toys and garden tools that we might buy when we were rich but I loved looking at the kid models with very white teeth and perfect white socks with shiny black shoes and imagining what their mansions must look like and when I'd go to bed I would play in my head like one of them was my friend and invited me to her mansion and her family loved me so much they wanted to adopt me. But then I would feel guilty about leaving mama for the rich family and it would ruin the fantasy. Some nights we looked at the Farmer's Almanac and found out when the next full moon was coming up or she would send me for the Little House book set and I would read to her the adventures of Laura and Nellie, and Mary and Carrie, and soon the words would begin to blend into the rhythm of the familiar clack-clack of her knitting needles and make me dozy and when I had nearly read myself to sleep, she would put down her knitting and tell me "get on to bed now, and get to sleep." If it was winter I'd jump between the freezing sheets and listen to her poking at the fire while she waited for a brick to get hot enough to wrap in a towel and slip into the bed to warm my feet. She'd cover me with a scratchy electric blanket and dial it to 5, not too hot and not too cold. If it was summer I would push the bed by the window and lay in my panties with a sheet over me in the stifling, still heat and let the crickets and bugs and frogs sing me to sleep.

Before I knew that having my own feelings was something I could actually do, I just loved what mama loved and hated what mama hated because loving what she loved meant that she would smile and say I was "a girl after her own heart." Agreeing meant love and peace and laughing and disagreement was always a risky business, one I was not interested in investing in. I learned very early that saying No depended on whether or not it would please the person I loved the most. Yes was easier, even though sometimes I actually hated the things she loved, like pulling weeds, milking a goat or picking beetles out from under the turnip greens. I hated hanging clothes on a line and failed to see what was so great about a sheet being "fresh and crisp from the sun". I wanted a dryer and Downy sheets like everyone else had and when Snuggle fabric softener came out in the late 80's I thought I would just about die if I couldn't have a towel as soft as the one the little bear jumped into on the commercial. I hated picking up eggs with chicken shit still stuck on them and reaching into the nesting boxes and finding a big old black chicken snake instead of an egg. I hated eating a chicken that I just fed the day before and having to warm my hands and feet by an old black, clunky and smoky wood-burning stove instead of having warm and scented (or so I imagined) air come through nifty slots in the floor like everyone in town had. I hated that I didn't have Strawberry Shortcake or Holly Hobby dolls like everyone else did but I would get some oddly shaped dog or mouse or carrot that mama sewed on the sewing machine from a pillow case and a Butterick pattern. They didn't smell like strawberries or candy, they smelled like the Goodwill bin the pillowcase came from.

When I hated something bad enough I would go into the closet and bite my arm as hard as I could so that the hate wouldn't show on my face, and so that she wouldn't know that sometimes I thought she was mean and sometimes I didn't like her very much and that sometimes I was afraid of her. Biting would remind me that hurting me was always better than hurting her. Even when I popped the skin it was ok. I was a master of disguise. I was the world's most perfect kid. I never once showed her that I hated some of the things she loved or that instead of spending every moment at her beck and call watching her face for signs of unhappiness or anger I would really have rather been watching the Smurfs or catching tadpoles or acting like a was an Indian squaw with a papoose in a cradle board or making labels for the empty Folger's cans I was planning to fill with change so I could buy me a horse. That's what I really wanted to do. But I had mama to take care of. I couldn't go too far, or waste too much time in Indian country, or go spy on the weirdo Mennonite neighbor kids from my place in the woods because she might need me at any time and I had to be there when she called. And who knew what she might need? She might need me to walk on her bad back, or to grab the scissors from her sewing kit, or to find her nose spray or help her chop tomatoes for salad. She might be sad and need me to tell her a joke or a fact from my favorite book ever, the Guinness Book of World Records, or to wind the yarn back up as she pulled out row after row of crochet stitches, or to rub her neck or to pick up my goddamn clothes off the bathroom floor and to go pick a switch after I was done because how many times did she have to tell me to pick up the goddamn clothes, or to just sit there with her and listen to what she was thinking of planting as soon as the weather warmed up.

Sometimes I hated our life, and I hated our country ways and I hated being poor and I hated my ugly clothes and our dumb old green station wagon. But I loved my mama. I loved the way she smelled and I loved that she was fat because she was soft and warm and snuggly and her arms were like pillows and I could hide in the safety of them, I could turn my shy face into her soft chest and smell the crisp summery sunny smell of the clothesline, and the fertilizer still on her hands and her Avon perfume and I could block out whoever was trying to talk to me. I could wrap myself up in the folds of her huge skirts and be a tree, or a totem pole and stand very, very still until whoever was outside of my skirt-world would go away. She was my friend. My teacher. My destruction. My enemy. My first love. My first hate. My partner in silliness. The coldest critic I ever knew. Loving. Hateful. Soft. Hard. Warm. Cold. Strong. Weak. My mama. I can't believe she's gone. Sleep in peace, mama, and I pray you are gardening to your country heart's content and already arguing with the good Lord about where to put the okra and how to keep the bugs off the tomatoes.