My childhood would have made a lot more sense if I had watched my little sister the Wee One produce her first child BEFORE I had to deal with my own mother. One day the Wee One was a pregnant woman expecting a normal baby: she gave birth, flapped her cape, and out jumped HyperMom. She had given birth to the Perfect Child and she was not worthy. Twinkies and their ilk—the mainstay of the Peck family diet—were banned on the spot: he was to dine solely on vegan fare. He would be touched only by those who had spent seventy-two days in a hermetically sealed antibiotic chamber. He could never wear yellow because it would adversely affect his emotional development, and he would never be spanked, paddled, scowled at, or otherwise physically abused. I once accidentally spoke loudly in a room where he was sleeping and she glared at me as if I had offered him a vial of heroin.
My mother was much like that when I was a child, but it never occurred to me that she might be temporarily insane, and of course it never occurs to a child that mothering is a learned art. She referred to me from time to time as her “practice piece,” causing me to retreat to the gravel pit and mutter about mothers who needed more practice—but I didn’t
get
it. I assumed, since I was the one getting yelled at, that it was somehow my
fault
the world was a dark and dangerous place. She presented such a confident and self-assured front, I just assumed there had always been rules.
I had all kinds of nonsensical rules to follow. I was told repeatedly not to get into cars with strangers—even when the strangers
insisted
I get in the car right now and be taken home. Even when I had miles to walk up and down snow-covered mountains in the dead of a Wyoming winter . . . I lived in Michigan and we had no mountains and I barely left the house in the dead of winter, but I tested all of the variables just the same. (“What if we’re in a plane crash in the Andes mountains and all of our legs and arms are broken and this man stops to offer us a ride . . . ?”) I was forbidden to take candy from strangers, as if hordes of candy-pushing strangers attacked me every day. (I never saw
one.
I was particularly fond of candy, so I was eager to have my mettle tested. I had a hard enough time getting my
friends
to offer me candy.) I had to watch out all of the time for people sneaking around behind me, jumping out of the bushes to give me compliments and trick me into getting the Big Head.
I remember once I asked her, “Mom—am I beautiful?” And she laughed and said, “God, no—whatever gave you
that
idea?” She died when I was twenty-seven, but I cleverly memorized all of those Mothertapes and I can play them back whenever they might be the most harmful to my emotional serenity. I have, over the course of my lifetime, completely revised my concept of the word “beautiful,” but if you told me today that I am a beautiful person I would say, “Yeah, right.” You can’t trick me.
My mother raised me to believe that I should go quietly through life, striving to do the best I could do while keeping a low profile. If I excelled at something, other people would notice. Other people would draw attention to my skills and abilities. Other people would reward me. I should incessantly strive to please every passing stranger on the street is the lesson I learned, but my mind has always run to the extremes. Other people would let me know when I had done well—there was no reason to wander around begging for compliments.
She also raised me to believe that I was, indeed, special. There were five of us, and we were all raised to believe we were special. We were Eloise’s children. We had the ability to be anything we wanted to be. We were destined for something wonderful.
We had no idea what that “something wonderful” might be and we couldn’t take compliments worth beans, but . . .
I don’t know how she did that. On my more bitter days, I profess not to know why a parent would raise their child to believe that drawing attention to her skills and abilities is a social crime. But I do. In my heart I am a Midwesterner, and my people live by three simple rules: work hard; wait for your turn; if you feel the need to talk about something, go plow a field until the need passes. And I don’t know how you stomp on a child’s ego on a regular basis and still teach that child to believe he/she has a special entitlement. Particularly when that child, as an adult, has no idea what that entitlement is, or what their “special” quality might have been.
My siblings and I have discussed this at great length during our lives. It is not something I imagined, because all three of us girls have found the same beast breathing hotly down our necks. We were supposed to have been Special. We should have accomplished Something. We should have done something Astonishing and Wonderful and something that had never been done before. I write to feed that beast. I have also failed spectacularly, challenging the outer limits of failure, just to get her off my back. All three of us have come to see Mother’s legacy as an amazing feat—and something of a family curse.
Proudly I can admit before you all that I have never suffered from the Big Head. In my fifties I have more or less conquered paralyzing attacks of worthlessness and self-doubt, but it is unlikely I will ever succumb to excessive ego. There have been times in my life when I knew, in my heart, that I was the one person in the room with the skills and talents to solve a particular problem. And I have waited patiently for the other people to recognize those skills and talents—knowing that they won’t. And I have allowed that opportunity to pass because My Mother Told Me not to praise myself. And I have kicked myself in the ass for doing it. And, knowing better—I have done it again.
Nor have I taken upon myself the burden of instructing the next generations. There is nothing like a small child, wallowing in the amazing global egocentrism they enjoy, to bring my mother running to the fore, her heel raised and poised for the delicate meat of the ego. “
It’s for her own good,”
she whispers insistently in my ear.
“Are you going to allow that child to wander free in this world that naked and unable to defend herself? Better you should crush her soul than let some total stranger do it later . . .”
I paint terrible images of my mother. We had a complex relationship, my mother and I, but I never doubted that she loved me, and I never doubted that whatever she did, she did with my best interests at heart. She was afraid. She had dared to dream for herself and that dream lay half-formed and stillborn in her heart, and she wanted that not to happen to her children. She may have read the manual on child-raising in something of a hurry, and she left—me, at least—with the lifelong message I carry in my own heart.
You’ll never amount to a hill of beans—but you’ll be a wonderful,
special
hill of beans.
I’ll be a hill of beans with a Big Head.
i’ve been thinking
about
sperm lately.
My Beloved was telling me about friends of hers—both women—who decided to have a baby and as a result, they “spent a small fortune on sperm.”
I always assumed it was free. Pretty much a by-product.
They obviously had never talked to my mother, who assured me with undaunted certainty that any man I would ever meet would willingly, happily, even eagerly give me all of the sperm I could ever hope for absolutely free of charge: that in fact most, if not all, men would
insist
on bestowing this gift. Further,
my
mother told me it was my duty to resist this generosity with every fiber of my being, which, being the good daughter that I am, I have done. I have led a nearly sperm-free life. My mother, on the other hand, presented me with four younger brothers and sisters, which suggest to me that she was made of much weaker fiber than I am.
I am assuming that all five withdrawals my mother made came from the same sperm bank. We share a number of characteristics, my siblings and I. None of us can breathe through our noses, although they appear perfectly normal on the outside (a lucky gene-stroke there: on the far side of our pool are beaks best suited for wading birds). We all have tiny little mouths full of crowded, semi-crooked teeth. We lean toward tall, and as we age, we spread out sideways. Often amply. We are not a small generation. If you were to talk to the friends of any of the five of us, it would not take long for the conversation to turn to our quirky sense of humor. So my people are tall, husky, tiny-mouthed, crooked-teethed mumblers with chronic sinus infections and a very droll way of looking at life.
But if she had
paid
for her sperm . . .
My mother liked pretty people. Thin, pretty people. Thin, pretty people with big, white, straight teeth. She yelled at me her entire life for mumbling, so I will assume she liked thin, pretty people with big, white, straight teeth and good diction. This would involve some alteration of the genetic Peck nose, which stuffs up far too often. So if she had paid for sperm, my mother would have made her withdrawals from the Aquiline Nordic Bank of Dental Excellence. Her daughters would all look like Brooke Shields. (Although none of them would ever have seen, much less starred in,
Pretty Baby.
) And, of course, we would have been brilliant. Intelligence was important to my mother. And obedience, so perhaps she would have used a German branch of the bank. Except Germans tend toward stoutness . . .
Obviously the purchase of sperm is not something to be taken lightly. Given freely is it robed and romanticized in the wanted/unwanted traits of one’s loved one; stripped naked and sold like a slave on the block, it becomes a whole other entity. A shopping bag of potential characteristics. If you were to have the Perfect Child (has anyone aimed for anything less?) exactly what characteristics would you stack in his/her deck? Curly hair? Straight teeth? A Mensa IQ? The ability to lie really,
really
well? A smattering of conscience, or a good-sized dollop? Greed seeps swiftly into play. How
many
really positive characteristics would you give this Perfect Child, if you had the power to do so? I have any number of friends who have more sperm than they know what to do with, but they also have more hair on their bellies than on their heads and one or two of them are night-blind. It’s possible someone even loves them, but if it were purely a matter of commerce . . .
Then there is that proprietary thing. When I was a child my uncle produced three children, divorced (intake breath sharply here) their mother, and was forced to move to the Badlands of Indiana to avoid having every cent he ever made sucked out of his pocket by the friend of the court. My grandmother (his mother) suffered endlessly over his exile, caused, she determined, in equal parts by his very poor choice in wives and his very poor taste in ex-wives. All through my childhood I guarded my pocketbook whenever That Woman came around, lest she go after my fortune as well, and year after year we enjoyed the seasonal suspense of Well Is He Coming Home for Christmas or Not? My mother was nowhere near as sympathetic. She called him cold, harsh things like “irresponsible.” She was certainly in the minority. In the wisdom of my youth I perceived her attitude to be that of a bitter youngest child, a phenomenon I was only too familiar with among my own lesser siblings. There was, as I recall, no strong sense that they were his children or that his responsibility to provide for them might outlive his fondness for their mother. Times have certainly changed. Men who follow their compass wherever it leads them, leaving a trail of unsupported offspring in their wake, have become “deadbeat dads,” and there is now a movement to support men in their endeavors to become permanently and irrevocably linked to whatever fruition their seeds may come to. Paternity has become fashionable.
So my assumption that the pot should cost considerably more than the seed to grow in it may no longer be accurate. Unencumbered seeds have become dear. Have a child, and you may have his father hanging around underfoot forever. (This also flies in the face of any advice provided by my mother. She harped heavily on some homily about giving away milk and then discovering you can’t sell the cow.) So it would appear that just about the time women have started making real progress figuring out ways to live without grown-up little boys, the little boys have decided to grow up and not be lived without.
Which is annoying for lesbian couples.
So my Beloved’s friends paid for sperm. Fatherless sperm. Clinically homeless sperm.
99.44% pure sperm.
I can hear my mother muttering.
i never had children.
I grew up on a steady litany of what the ever-growing collection of children complicating my parents’ marriage did to their budget, their plans for the future, and their peace of mind. What I learned from my mother is that children are expensive, ungrateful, and cut fierce holes in a toy budget. I myself could have had more and better toys had I had fewer siblings. I’m fairly sure that was not exactly what she told me (I suspect it was the perverse result of yet another pointless conversation about the “S” word) but it did nothing to inspire sisterly love. Nor did it endear the ever-arriving lesserlings to me any more than losing my room to one of them or my personal free time to another. Perhaps she was trying to build my character. But she did tell me, and it was a lesson I never forgot. Children = unappreciated sacrifice and fewer personal toys. Myself, I like toys.
Because I never had children, I have no idea how math is beaten into the skulls of inquiring young minds these days. My mother did it with a pencil, endless sheets of paper, and a stove timer.
I went to school to learn to read. I had wanted to be able to read for a long time. I spent hours on the couch in the living room with the unpictured pages of
Reader’s Digest
in my lap, practicing reading. I had no idea what the pages said so I made up the stories as I went along, but I felt very important sitting there, reading. My goal, from the day I entered school, was to read faster, better, and more accurately than anyone else in my class. I was driven to read.