The woman is there, as described, in an aqua-colored shirt.  She is older — in her early seventies, I suspect — and she looks stern.  Mary goes down the aisle peering behind boxes of cake mix and bottles of oil while Ren trails along behind, leery.

“You need to go find your mother,” the woman says — by her tone confirming that she is not happy they are back, unattended, in front of her.

From behind the tangelos, I peer at them and singsong, “You’re fine, girls!”

The woman’s glare pierces the flimsy wood crates, the sleek rinds and thick fruit, straight into me.

It is Larry the Lobster’s fault.  Trader Joe’s has started a game of having children find him — a gigantic, googly-eyed lobster — for a prize and the chance to be the next to hide him.  It has resulted in a chaos of rifled dry goods and children racing through the store.

The plus side is that I am actually finding it a little easier to shop, which I am sure was the idea.

Trader Joe’s is exactly four aisles long, with one main entrance.  It has been my policy for several months now to permit Mare (and Ren only if Mare is with her) to go alone to the galley kitchen for snacks, or to collect things we need, like milk, and bring them back to me.  The arrival of Larry means they wander more, and further — but I think that’s okay, because they are old enough now and have done well with the freedom.

 They have been stopped before, but Aqua Shirt is the most aggressive.

“If she works here, we have to listen,” I told Mary when she explained about the woman who told them both to go back to their mother.  “But if she does not work here, then she’s not in charge of you, so go do what you were doing and just be polite.”   Five minutes later they returned — scolded again by Aqua.  So I sent them down the aisle once more, while I observed from my hiding place.

After I call out, I see she is getting agitated and my presence is definitely required.

I flank her — ducking out from behind the tangelos, going up the long aisle parallel and appearing like a comical super-sleuth, right at their side, Eden on my hip loudly sucking her thumb.

“Any luck?” I ask the Bigs.  They stare, big-eyed and quiet and shake their heads.  “I’m sorry,” I say to the woman.  “Were my children rude to you?”

“No,” she says, “they were lovely.”

“Oh great,” I say.  “Let me know if they are rude or disrespectful.”

And otherwise, shut your big stupid —

“They’re not safe,” she says.

Instant, gut-sinking guilt, fear, anxiety, worry, shame, panic.  Someone thinks I am failing my children.  I face her, all bluster and no faith, but damned if my children will see me afraid.

“They’re fine,” I say.  “Go on, girls.  Try over by the chips, someone said he might be there.”  Mare and Ren clasp hands and take off in a grateful shot.

“They’re not fine,” Aqua says to me.  “I am a sexual assault counselor, and I know.  It only takes a second.”

Sexual assault OH GOD where are the kids?

“Thanks so much,” I smile cheerfully.  “Have a good one!”  She is still speaking, but I smile politely and wave like I don’t understand she’s not done.  

Am I a terrible mother?

“That woman was quite concerned.”  — The woman whispering behind her hand to me is the Trader Joe’s employee who often gives the girls cookies.

“Quite concerned”  is that code for “I’ve been wanting to say that to you for months?”

“Do you think my children should not be walking around alone?” I ask. 

She shrugs, and I feel sick.

Mare and Ren are still roaming, and now I am wondering — could I hear them if something went wrong?  Could I stop something?  I am paralyzed with self-doubt, panic.

“Hey, I overheard all that,” says a woman coming toward me.  She is tall in a smart-looking suit, in her late fifties.  She waves at Eden who smiles around her thumb.  “You’re awesome,” she says to me.

“I am?”  I say.

“Yep.  Your kids are fantastic people.  The store employee isn’t going to talk to you because she doesn’t want to get sued,” (– oh, right, dumbass, of COURSE she wasn’t going to answer that question.)  “That lady is just old and doesn’t like kids being unsupervised.  But you’re right — they’re totally fine.  It’s a small store, you’d hear anything that happened, but they feel independent so are learning to function in the world.  It’s okay to trust the world a little.”

I smile, but I hate that it means so much to me — the criticism of the first woman, the praise of the second.  I want to raise my children without input from others, but it’s impossible.  And, I constantly remind myself, not really desirable.  Feedback saves you from yourself.  It forces you to take stock.

“Mary, do you understand what that woman was concerned about?”  I ask in the car on the drive back.  We did not find Larry, but that has gotten lost in the drama of Aqua Shirt.

“She is afraid there might be someone bad in the store,” Mare answers.

“Yes,” I say.  “And do you understand that it is possible that there could be someone bad in the store?”

“Yes,” she says. 

“And do you understand that when you have Ren with you it is your job to keep her next to you and that you NEVER go with anyone, not for any reason no matter how nice they seem?”

“Of course, Momma,” she says.  “I would not go, and if anyone ever tried to take my sister I would pound him and scream.”

“I would kick him in da peenus,” Ren offers.

“Okay,” I say.  “Okay.”

It’s okay to trust the world a little. 

This phrase has stuck in my head.   I don’t want to teach them that the world is packed with hostile strangers they should fear.   Most of the people they will meet are not dangerous – after all, even Aqua Shirt was looking out for them.  They need to know how to defend themselves without believing the world is insurmountably scary.

But the world has never felt more insurmountably scary to me than when my children are wandering around freely in it.

I know that protecting them from physical danger is not as simple as just keeping them safely beside me.  If they don’t take some risks they will be in a different kind of danger — unprepared for life, perpetually afraid, unwilling to do the daring things that make life great.  I know I am right to send them off as I do, but it terrifies me.

I unload the groceries – still sick with guilt, dizzy with anger – and the only thing I am really sure of is that some days this job is just so much harder than anybody talks about.

No one greets me at the Briar Haven gate this time.

“I’m here to collect my daughter,” I say to one of four girls tinkering with some pup tents on the front lawn.

“She’s probably at activities,” they say, and then offer to holler her name for me.

I kind of hoped they were going to do that.

We count to three, and I join them in bellowing her name up the hillside.

A few seconds later, the faint echo of the return call:

“Cooooming!”

I look toward the sound. It has come from the water’s edge, where Mary sits with a cluster of girls on the teeter-totters; her head raised like a curious golden retriever, looking for me.

And then for the first time in three decades, my own name echoes on the hillside, a new name, a better name, an astonishing one.

“MOMMA!”

“BABY!!” I raise my arms and wave before I can stop myself, dorky and maternal and hopelessly excited.

She stands, starts toward me, and then shrieks and dives behind a tree.

It takes me a solid minute to cross the field. I had sort of pictured that at this moment we would be running into each other’s arms. Instead, I am talking to her through a Douglas Fir.

“I DON’T WANT TO GO!” she says. “I’m not ready!”

“Oh,” I say.

“Do you have your wallet?” she asks.

“What do you need?”

“Two more weeks,” she answers.

“Sounds like it went well,” I say.

“Momma, Briar Haven is THE BEST PLACE ON THE ENTIRE PLANET AND I AM NOT DONE YET.”

I laugh. Finally she comes out from behind the tree, hugs me, but only briefly, and then I ask her for a tour.

“But don’t you know Briar Haven?” she asks.

“This is your place now. I want you to show it to me.”

She walks me along the buildings of my childhood summers – the rickety steps to the dining hall with its long battered wood tables and little glasses of wildflowers. The assembly hall with the stone fireplace and the piano that’s probably the same one on which I learned to play “Chopsticks.”

Camp rosters going back 40 years are painted on the ceiling. I locate mine – 1982, ’83, ’84 – and point to my name. Mare is mildly impressed, but mostly she is looking longingly at the full-session girls, who are singing and making things and squealing the way only girls can.

This is Briar Haven – not the private place of my memories, where I have been taken over the years by the odd whisper of lake and pine, the place of sadness and misty shame. I am here in corporeal, my feet on the dock, admiring a wooden canoe that is “old-fashioned” but was new when I paddled it. I am here watching that brown-legged girl of mine smile and wave at friends and explain to me the procedure for signing in and out of boating.

Finally, we are in the office. Mare wants to look at the pictures of girls in bloomers. Many of them have been replaced by photographs that are more recent, although to Mare they still seem ancient. She peers at long columns of girls in unit portraits from the late 1970s and early ‘80s. I’m not helping her find mine. (I have a copy of it in the basement – I am the drawn-faced girl, standing apart, with eyes that echo darkness.)

Behind us, the desk where I called my mother 28 years ago.

I deserved better.

The thought explodes in a flash of sadness, and is quickly gone.

What better is there than Cute Husband and me, and our babies and the Tilty-Floored Farmhouse? If something died here, something powerful and good was born here, too. I love the woman that miserable little girl became, I love her nerve and her ferocity, her empathy and passion for the life she has built for herself.

This is who I was meant to be, and it is good.

“It’s time,” I say to Mare.

I load up the trunk and the duffle. Mare says her goodbyes. Amy Williams whispers in my ear, “She’s a really special girl.”

I drive away with my sobbing special girl, and now the old memories are no longer the only ones. I am a proud Havener Mother. The whole way home Mary tells me about campcraft, and canoeing and the ZIP WIRE! – Yes, she did it, and she didn’t even need a push and it was the most amazing thing ever.

I am grateful to – have come to love – the place that has cared for my daughter so well, and which in its own way protected me as best as was possible.

That night is the first in twelve that I sleep soundly. I have no idea where the phone is and there isn’t anything anybody has to say to me that can’t wait.

I get up early and make crêpes. Ren is still asleep, Eden is stomping around, and Mare is outside using her camp knife to make a fairy wand to surprise her sisters.

She comes in with blood running down her hand.

I grab the First Aid kit and execute a perfect, Briar Haven-trained pressure dressing. Cute Husband stays with the Littles and I put Mare in the car for the Emergency Room.

She sobs that she doesn’t want stitches. I tell her she can’t control whether or not she is getting stitches, so it’s best to stay calm and see what comes.

She is not calm. She is shrieking. She is Freaking Out.

“Hey, want to hear a funny story?” I ask her. “Your fifth night at camp, I lost my mind and called the director.”

“You did?” she asks, sniffling. “Why?”

“Because I missed my baybeee!!” I sing-song. She giggles. “They said you were picking blueberries, and I said, ‘Doesn’t she need her Mommy?’ and they said, ‘Um, no. Not really. Seems fine.’”

Mare laughs.

“It’s true, I didn’t need you,” she says smugly. “I didn’t miss you, once.” And for a few minutes she is quiet and happy … and then she’s bawling again, begging me to tell her she’s not going to have stitches.

The PA at the emergency room peels back the bloody gauze, looks up at me and nods.

“Do I need stitches?” Mare gulps.

“We’ll give her Tylenol and we can do a topical anesthetic cream,” he says. “Followed by an injection to numb the area and then we’ll do the procedure.”

“Okay,” I say.

Her eyes dart to me.

“AM I GETTING STITCHES?”

“You are, my love,” I answer.

“Nooooo!!!” – the shriek is consciousness-shattering.

“I’m wondering whether we could give her a little something else?” I ask.

“I don’t like to sedate them,” he answers, “if I don’t have to.”

His call of course, but I am curious as to what “have to” looks like.

He sets us up in a bed and assigns me the job of soothing her before he returns to suture. I do my very best, and she is calm when we are alone, but every time the PA walks back into the room she starts howling like a cornered rabid dog with an attitude problem.

Finally someone coughs up half an Ativan.

Twenty minutes later, she is singing Briar Haven songs and giggling. We pass a lovely spell going through all the old favorites, while I think, “Look! Here’s me, with my loopy cracked-up daughter singing ‘Down By the Riverside.’”

She tells me she’s sleepy, so I tuck her in and stroke her hair, and when the PA comes back into the room, Mare is scared, but not shrieking. I sit on the side opposite the injury and tell her to keep her eyes on me. A nurse is holding her arm. I glance just in time to see it: the needle filled with anesthetic, which the PA pushes deep into the flesh beside Mare’s wound. He moves it around, pressing down on the plunger. She squeals.

“You’re doing so well,” I say. “It’s hard work, to be brave. I know it hurts, but remember that it isn’t actually harming you. It’s just pain.”

The syringe is finally empty. He withdraws it from her hand and opens a package of long black thread.

“Is he going to do the stitches now?” she asks.

“You won’t feel the stitches,” I say. “Hardest part’s over.” I stroke her hair. She pulls my face down to hers, clutches me.

“I need you.”

“I’m here,” I say.

Suturing goes easily – no pain and it’s over quickly. Dr. Button can take the stitches out at his office in a week.

Soon Mare is giggling again and we are leaving the hospital, my hand on her elbow to steady her because she doesn’t know she can’t walk straight.

For the second time in 24 hours, I put her in the car for home. She buckles her seatbelt, asks if we can still go to the playground this afternoon, looks quietly out the window.

And then she says:

“I think I don’t need you because I know that if I did need you, you would be there.”

“Sounds just right to me,” I say.

And we sing “Down By the Riverside” all the way home.

We pour Mare a bowl of Shredded Spoonfuls and sit at the table with her.  She is wide-eyed and pale.  Cute Husband cracks jokes, which I am so grateful for.  The jokes center around monkey poop – somehow they always do – and Mare laughs.

We tell her to finish her cereal.  She asks what happens if she doesn’t and we say she can’t go if she doesn’t and she eats slowly.

But she finishes.

We go outside and I show her the trunk, already loaded into the back of the Loser Cruiser.   I stayed up last night watching West Wing and stenciling her name in clean white above my own faded one.   She is ecstatic, and poses for a picture with her Dad.

And then I say, “It’s time.” Her face falls. She puts her arms around him for a goodbye hug and I walk off to give them a minute.  I hear her choking into his shoulder, him patting her back and whispering in her ear.  

Then I hear, “Monkey poop,” and she laughs and gets into the car.

“You’re very brave,” he says to me through the open window.  Followed by, “No barfing until after you’ve dropped her off,” and then I am backing the Loser Cruiser out and Mary is bawling, waving, looking back at Clover Hill and the Tilty-Floored Farmhouse where her sisters are still sleeping. 

“This is so hard!” she wails.

“It is,” I say.  “All the great things are.”

There is, of course, no way I am doing this without very strong coffee.  By the time we hit the Starbucks drive-through a few miles down the road from home, Mare is breathing normally with only a few sniffles.  She asks for a lemon loaf and right away I think, “She’s much better off than I was.  I could never eat.”

Once we are back on the road, I ask Mare how she is feeling. I say her right hand is “nervousness” and her left hand is “excitement” and ask her to show me where they are relative to each other.  She holds her hands flat and raises nervousness just above excitement.

“But when we were leaving, Momma,” she says, “nervousness was up here.”  Her hand hits the roof.

“Well, baby that was the hardest part, and it was ten minutes ago and already things are leveling out, so you’re doing great.”

She really is doing great.

“I wanted to tell you to turn around and take me back,” she says.  “I didn’t want to go any more.”

“Yes.  That’s what happens when you feel that bad – you don’t think clearly.  It’s very important to have a plan for those times so you don’t rely on your thinking of the moment, but on what you figured out ahead of time.”

She nods, chewing.

“I thought about all the great things I would be passing up and how sorry I would be,”   she says.   “So I kept going.”

We are turning on to the highway, the same one we have turned on to at least once a day for the last three years.  It leads to school, and the mall and ballet class. 

This time, it will lead to Briar Haven.

I will never forget that this is where she said that.

“That is very adult thinking, Mare,” I say. 

“Are you sure I am ready?”

“Yes.  I really am.”

“I think this is how I will feel on the ropes course.  I will want to go down the zip line but I will be too terrified to go, but I’ll know if I don’t do it I’ll always wish I had.  Do you think someone would shove me off the platform?  I would want someone to shove me so I wouldn’t have to jump.”

“You can ask,” I answer.

And then we’re on the highway and I begin the long hours of saying the last things I will say to her before she goes.  Periodically, I ask her to show me her hands.  Nervous and excited change positions once or twice but remain close together.  Nervousness does not hit the roof again.

I find Briar Haven easily.  It is the same hand-carved wooden sign at the gate, topped off by the hanging basket of petunias that manage to be the exact shade of pink I remember.

We park, and the efficient Briar Haven staff whisks the trunk and duffle out of the back of the car and into a pickup.  We are approached by a young woman with long curly hair and a daisy behind her ear.  She is wearing camp shorts and flowered Wellie rain boots.   She is the head of boating, and she is adorable.

“Okay, Mare,” she says, putting an arm around my kid. “You excited?”

Mare nods, pale.

“Your counselor is Amy Williams.  She’s up in your cabin waiting for you.  We don’t have phones to let her know you’re here, so want to see what we do?”  She cups her mouth, inhales, and then shouts:

“Aaaaaaamy Wiiiiiiiiliams!”

A few yards down a counselor walking to Arts and Crafts repeats the call.  Campers passing her shout it, and more campers and counselors echo it further and further up the hillside until we hear a faint call back:

“Coooomming!”  – brought down the hillside on five more voices.

“WOW!” Mare says.

A minute later, a fit young woman is standing next to us.  Her long chestnut hair is gathered in a trim ponytail at the base of her neck.  She has perfect skin and a competent, serene smile.

Around her neck are three string necklaces, with little circles of birch wood hanging off them.  Mare’s name is written on one.  Amy takes it off and slips it over her head.

“WOW!” she beams.

My daughter is now a Havener.

Amy walks us up the hillside toward the cabins, and I am sick and fascinated.  I am seven years-old again, in the woods buzzing with girls, making our beds, walking to the wash house, playing cards while we wait for our morning activity period to begin.

It looks the same, I suppose, but I’m not sure I really remember it.

It seems overgrown. 

And then I realize that trees grow a lot in 28 years. 

“That was my cabin, Mare,” I say, pointing when I finally orient myself.

“WOW!!” she says.

Mare’s cabin is right next to the swings.  (“WOW!”) She is the first to arrive, so she gets her choice of bed.  I assume she will do what I did and go for the one along the window, with a view of the sky when you can’t sleep.  No, Mare picks the bed that is between the other two, “So I can talk to both of them!!” she squeals.

Her trunk is not there yet, so Amy suggests we all go to the infirmary to wait in line to file health forms.

Mare can’t stop talking.

“I am so glad you’re my counselor!” she says.  “I feel like we’re the same –  but we’re also different and I like different because the world would be so boring if everyone were the same and if we were all the same there would be no Olympics!”

Amy looks a little overwhelmed.  Mare looks like she holds a degree in history and has been a counselor here for two years.

And then the bugle sounds and it’s like a special little instruction straight to my stomach to deposit its contents on the infirmary  porch –  but I remember Cute Husband’s edict, and then imagine telling Karin later how I had to stop myself from executing a duck-and-cover and shouting “PTSD!  P-T-S-D!!” in front of all those poor innocent girls.

Mary is still talking.

“Where’s the ropes course?”  she demands.

“There,” Amy points.

“Can I go?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow.”

“How?”

“You sign up.”

“Where do I sign up?”

“At breakfast.”

“Is it scary?  Is the zip wire scary?  Will someone push me if I am too afraid to go?”

Mare is excited, I am nervous – it’s getting worse and I can’t be here any more.

We go back to the cabin, where we find her trunk and duffle, and I make her bed as I’d promised I would.

My mother used to make perfect hospital corners, tucking my wool camping blankets in around the thin striped mattress.  I never wanted to send my sheets to the laundry the first time because then she would be gone.

Mare’s not going to be here long enough to do laundry.

I take out and unroll the foam egg carton mattress pad.  I put it down and cover it with the fitted sheet.  Next, the long flat sheet. 

The steel frame of the bed is exactly the same one I remember, which means I know to stop the sheet at the curve of the bolt that holds the legs on.  This will give me enough to fold back over, nicely, to keep the scratchy blanket from irritating her chin.

I lay down the new purple fleece blanket.  Over it, the old red watch camping blanket, a real honest-to-God wool one.  It was Ducky’s.  Last: two pillows — fluffy pink ones.  

The bed is now unmistakably Mare’s. 

I send Mare outside to the swings and turn to Amy.

“What’s your procedure on homesickness?” I say.

“I stay up with them,” she answers.  “I help them make a plan for what they’re going to do the next day.  I don’t sleep until they do. – Are you okay?”

I am shaking.   My skin is cold and damp in the hot summer morning.

“A bad case of homesickness lasts two nights,” she tells me gently.  “I’ve never had one go longer.”

“And if it does?”

“We call you.”

“Okay,” I say.

I walk down the cabin steps and over to the swings, which Mare has climbed in order to improve her chances of scaling the tree behind them.  Amy is behind me, at a respectful distance.   She feels like the executioner, looming over my shoulder.

“It’s time,” I say.

“I don’t want you to go,” Mare’s blue eyes are huge.

I hug her, kiss her, turn away.

“Let’s go unpack,” Amy says.

I start down the hillside, listening for Mare to call me back, but what I hear is the sound of her feet going up the cabin steps.

There’s your shove, baby girl.  Momma loves you.

I find the Loser Cruiser, incongruous to me here at Briar Haven — like my cell phone, my wedding band, the stretch marks and crow’s feet and extra twenty pounds. 

I consider taking myself on a quick tour of the dining hall and the dock but then I hear:

“AAAAMY WILLIAMS!”

Mare will be coming down with Amy in a minute to collect her first bunkmate, and I must be gone. Her place is here and mine is back at the Tilty-Floored Farmhouse where life must go on for the next week with meals and swim lessons and trips to the market.

I start the car, roll along the gravel to the main entrance. If I take a right, back toward the highway, Mary will see me.  So instead I go left, and in no time at all I am bawling hysterically on some back country road with no idea where I am and no cell signal.  (Forget a road map – I haven’t seen one of those since the late ‘90s.)

I drive and cry and admire the countryside, which is familiar only because I am going in circles.

It is an hour before I sort myself out, find the highway, and gather speed away from Mary.

When I get home, Cute Husband and I take the Littles to Cambridge.  We feed them Nutella crepes and then go to our favorite bar where Cute Husband buys me a stiff drink.  My stomach won’t tolerate it so I have water instead and a few bites of fish taco.

When the sun sets, I lose all rationality.  I clutch my cell phone in the darkness of the bedroom and wait for it to ring.  I consider an e-mail to the camp director demanding that she tell me exactly what is going on with my daughter at that precise moment.   I fantasize about driving back just to sneak up the hillside and check on her.

I am convinced that I have broken my healthy daughter.  That she is breaking right now and it’s my fault and it’s too late to stop it.

I tell myself – over and over – that what I am thinking right now doesn’t count.  This plan looked right when I was rational, so it is right, and if I wait to feel better it will look right again.

 When a boat capsizes, the first step in the procedure is for the captain to call the names of each crew and passenger and say:

“Are you okay?”

Once all are accounted for, the captain has some choices to make – namely, whether to attempt to right the boat and head back to port, or whether to focus on getting help.

On Lake Riley, help is never far away.  In fact, the Briar Haven launch keeps the campers in view at all times, so that part is more of an exercise than a life-or-death decision.

If the boat is only half over – lying with the mast on the surface of the water – you can right it.  This is hard work.  One person – the heaviest, which can be a mortifying assessment – stands on the daggerboard – the long piece that sticks from the bottom of the boat into the water.  Everyone else gets on the other side – under the gunwales, the mast – and puts their hands up. 

The one on the daggerboard gives the count – she bears down with all her weight and rocks – One, two, three …. PUSH!

And everyone on the other side treads hard, breathes deep and shoves.

The boat is a little sunfish.  Most often it goes right over.  Sometimes, you do it so well, it actually swings past the midpoint, keeps going, and the mast splashes back down again on the other side.  When that happens, everyone has to switch places and start again.  That can go on all day.  Frustrating, sure, but you keep working the procedure until eventually it is righted.  You get in, you bail, and head for home.

At Briar Haven, there is a procedure for everything – from how to set the table to how to board a canoe.  No matter what happens you know what you’re supposed to do, because there is a plan.

A really good plan, I learned there, will survive a catastrophe. 

It will think for you when panic locks your brain.

  Briar Haven Part III — If We Were All The Same, There Would Be No Olympics

“What’s your favorite thing about Briar Haven?”  Mare asks me.  She is fresh from the shower, wrapped in a towel and burrowed into the kitchen couch, watching me fold laundry.

“The way the mist rises on the lake in the morning while you’re having breakfast,” I answer.  “And how every day you think it’s going to be cold, but by 10 a.m. the mist is gone and it’s hot out.”

“Do you think anyone there remembers you?”  Mare asks.

Ahahaha – yeah, about that.

It is entirely possible that someone there remembers me – Briar Haven tends to keep staff for decades.  So maybe I will encounter someone who knew me as that girl I was, and maybe it will hurt.

Or maybe they will just be shocked that I managed to produce the bright-eyed, well-adjusted, perfectly un-spooky girl standing beside me in her Briar Haven fleece.  God knows I am.

 “Not many people there will know me, Mare, it was many years ago.  And that’s good.  It’s your place now.  You’ll always be my kid, no matter where you go.  This is a chance to figure out who else you are.”

At the very beginning of the summer, Mare pulled my old trunk out of the basement, scrubbed it herself, laid it out in the sun on Clover Hill to remove the dingy smell.  She brought it into the kitchen and insisted that we start packing it, three weeks before she was to go.

The sight of it – my name still visible in faded stenciling on the front – is incongruous in the warm kitchen of the Tilty-Floored Farmhouse.   It occupies the periphery of my vision when I am cooking, or feeding Eden, or getting the girls loaded for a trip to the market.  

I have been slowly filling it with things off the equipment list – shorts and t-shirts and good walking shoes.  Camping blankets and a basket of toiletries to take to the wash house.  I have remembered things that aren’t on the list – a good mattress pad, itch cream, a tarp for her bed in case it rains.  We treated her to a great headlamp and I showed her how to read under the covers.

At first she was excited and fearless and every day demanded to know HOW MUCH LONGER UNTIL BRIAR HAVEN?  I was the best mother in the whole darn world.  My seven-year-old – SEVEN! the people marveled – wanted to go to overnight camp.

But then she started cramming the tray with little things she suddenly couldn’t stand to leave behind – the flowered diary with the tiny lock, her quill pen, Ren’s music box.   Every time she looks at the trunk now, she blanches.   She is starting to ask more questions,  and as she watches me do laundry, I know what’s coming.

 “I’m scared.  I think I don’t want to go.”

The hairs along my arms stand up.  I can’t settle my hands.  Can’t sit, can’t stand, can’t contain myself in my own skin.  I put down the little pink shorts I was folding and go to the fridge where I dig, find some onions, put them on the counter, and proceed to chop.   

“Baby, if you weren’t nervous, I’d be worried that you just didn’t get it,” I say, leveling those onions with vicious focus.  Chopitty-chop.

“Oh,” she nods.

Back to the fridge for a bottle of fizzy water.   I take a swig, swallow bile and carbon, pick up my knife again.  The trunk is there, small and dark in the corner.  I want to throw it out the window, watch it shatter glass, splinter on my lawn. 

This is too hard.

I have had too many children.  I was crazy even to have the one, I know it, but they were so cute I kept having them without thinking about the consequences – about the fact that one day they would be seven and it wouldn’t be enough just to be there.

“Let’s play ‘what if,’” I manage.  A big stupid tear falls on the cutting board, I sniffle hard and clear my throat.     “What if … your bunk mate has a GIGANTIC UGLY WART ON HER NOSE … and you even think it moves when you talk to her?”

Mare laughs.                                        

Oh-my-god-the-onion-is-done-now-what.

“Okay, first step – DON’T LOOK AT IT!”  I say, moving to the fridge and peering in.  “Whatever you do!

“Second step:” she chimes in with a giggle, “Say nothing.  Don’t laugh.  And later, in bed, laugh to myself all I want.”

“Exactly,” I say. “Okay.  Another one.  What if … you decide you hate it and you want to go home?” 

Ah, celery!   I take it to the cutting board.  Chopped celery in little tiny cubes.  In piles of cubes.  Next to the onion.

“Do you think that will happen?”

“Oh, yes!  Absolutely.  It’s part of the whole experience.  Everybody feels that way.  The key is to have a plan.  So what if?  What will you do?”

“I’ll call you.”

“You know, they don’t let campers call home.  It’s part of it.”  (Unless you are wailing hysterically that your mother promised you could go home – that works, I hear.)

“I’ll write you a letter,” Mare said.

“Right.  And if you send me a letter that says, ‘Momma, come get me,’ what do you think I’m going to do?”

“Get in the car.”

I will get in the car and I will pound the shit out of anyone who gets between me and you.

“Exactly.  So if you write that letter, I think you better not send it right away.   I think you better put it under your pillow.  Leave it there for a day.  Because, you know, wanting to go home is perfectly normal.  Everyone feels that way.  But it passes.  So put the letter under your pillow, and remind yourself that it passes.”

 On my countertop, a pile of chopped-up things.  A pan.  Soup.  I’m making soup.  It’s a hundred degrees out, let’s simmer.  Why-the-fuck-not.

I find the plastic container filled with thick strips of white-fleshed sea bass brought home from a colleague after a spectacular weekend catch.  I slice fish into chunks, feel for bones, slip stray scales away with my thumbs.

“Come outside with me,” I say, carrying the tray out to the grill.  I cook out there in the summer, because to cook in the kitchen would be unbearably hot.

Mare follows me, her long lean body wrapped in the towel, the edge of which she is chewing.  I sauté the chopped-up things and then add the lobster stock from last weekend’s shells.

“I’m half excited, half terrified,” she says. 

“Best things in life are like that,” I answer.  “Do you have any idea how utterly undone I was the night before I had you?”

She laughs, my daughter in the smoke and the summer woods and the coming twilight.

  The first time I stepped out on to this deck, adjoining the old screened porch with its view of the forest, I thought, “Wow.  This feels just like being at Briar Haven.”

My love of land and trees and earth was born in those long terrible weeks, in finding the goodness of what was around me, even as the darkness inside me deepened.

 “I would not send you to Briar Haven if I did not absolutely believe you will love it there,” I tell her. “I think it will be a very special, very beautiful week for you.  You’ll miss us, but it will be all right.”

***

Two nights later. A shrill electrical wail breaks through the silent bedroom, the thickness of sleep, the clatter of the window air conditioner.

Mare, I think, with a starburst of panic from my core out to my fingers and toes.  A squint at blue digital clock numbers: 4:02 a.m.

“Hello, is she okay?” I say into the cordless receiver.  She is not at camp yet, I struggle to remind myself.  She is at a sleepover at Ryan’s.

“She’s fine,” Ryan says.  “She’s having a hard night.”

“Okay, I’m on my way.”

Mary has been going on sleepovers for several years now and has never once called home.

I fumble for pants, keys, shoes.

A terrible hour.  Is it yesterday or tomorrow? 

Driving in the darkness, the familiar forms fade into each other and even the gentlest of roads feels menacing.

In later years my mother said she had not brought me home because a child psychologist told her it would be devastating to my self-esteem to be allowed to quit.  I don’t believe that story, but here in the twilight where I want to tell Mare it is all too much, camp is a huge mistake, she shouldn’t go — I wonder what it would do to her; to quit, to have me quit on her behalf, before she even starts.

What would it do to her to get there and discover she has made a terrible mistake and the world is just not as beautiful  and she is not as strong as she thought?

How did I ever allow this to get so far?

There is no repression in the pre-dawn, particularly when you are alone.  Each sleeping house seems safer and cozier than any I could ever make for my children.  Those people are asleep because they have not done this to their daughters – because they are not destined to be destructive parents.

And then my headlights are lighting the long driveway to Ryan’s house,  where two figures are sitting on the porch.  I park and cross the lawn toward them, gathering an inventory of the socially-appropriate vocabulary I will need to collect my daughter without revealing that what I really want to do is scale the pretty blue siding, scamper to the roof, and howl at the moon.

A blast of cold water flings into my face.

Automatic sprinklers.  Of course.

So I arrive at Ryan’s doorstep in my pj’s in that horrible predawn, water dripping from my chin and eyebrows. 

Mary is quiet and dry-eyed, her sleeping bag and pillow in her lap.  I am surprised there are no tears.

“You’re totally going to want to duck on the way out,” I say.

“She’s been talking a lot about camp,” Ryan says to me. 

“Thanks.”

Mary stands to go, and her calm intrigues me. 

 I tell her to get under the sleeping bag with me.  She does and we run through the sprinklers together and when we get to the car we are laughing. 

She piles in, I shut her door and then lean my back against it.  I look at the moon and make a checklist.

Really, sometimes, it’s just that simple. 

Sprinklers and checklists.

1)  Don’t tell her she doesn’t have to go.  Let her introduce that idea if she wants to, but don’t you do it.

2)  She doesn’t have to go.  You’re in charge, here, not some bullshit made-up psychiatrist from the 1980’s.  If it’s not right for Mare, you pull her, no regrets, no apologies.

3)  Remember that she is not you – you don’t know what she is actually feeling.  Let her talk first.

4)  Remember that she might be saying she feels a certain way to see what your reaction is.  Don’t give validity to irrationality – respect all of her reactions but set the example and don’t fuel  mindless panic.

“I was trying to sleep,” she says, as I back the car down the driveway.  “And then my foot itched.  And I think my nervousness about camp is what itched it, you know?”

“What a great way to describe it,” I smile.  “I’m sure that’s exactly what happened.”

“I’m nervous about camp,” she repeats.

“It’s just a feeling,” I say.  We ride in silence.  I wait for her to say more, but she doesn’t.

The Tilty-Floored Farmhouse is deliciously still when I open the front door.  Mare dumps her stuff next to the trunk and goes up to the tiny bedroom she shares with her sisters.  I see her peer into Eden’s crib, pat her back, then fall into her bed, asleep instantly.

I find my way to my own bed, pull up the afghan, and cry, drifting off just as sunlight is filling the corners of the room.

Briar Haven — A Sunfish on Lake Riley

I’m not much for anniversaries, so it surprised Cute Husband how excited I was for our sixth.

“Six, really?” he asked.  “Not five or ten … six?”

My parents divorced after their fifth, I reminded him.  Ah, he said.

You don’t want to live your life this way, looking over your shoulder to see if the bad thing is gaining on you.   Still, we are all a product of something,  and for me the marriage demon lived at six, and every subsequent anniversary has been something of a six-plus-howevermany celebration for me.   

In my motherhood, the demon lived at seven.

***

From the beginning it has startled me that my children like me, that they seek me out for affection, that I am the thing that makes them feel safest in the world.  When they are babies, I feel pretty good about my ability to fulfill that.  I breastfeed.  I coo, I rub and pat and I come every god-damned-time they call.  It’s a simple formula and it has brought me success.

But I’m always waiting for them to hate me.  Worse, I am waiting to find out they’re not okay, and it’s my fault.

Because I find it implausible that I am capable of raising healthy daughters.

Bad stuff happened before I was seven, and bad stuff happened after, but along the living breathing line of my life there is a dark scar in the summer of that year.  The course of my character was diverted and whoever I might have been without it, gone forever. 

And it happened because of camp.

She told me I would love it.  She told me I would have the time of my life.  But it was for two months, and I had never been away from home before.

She told me to think about it for a week and tell her next Tuesday what I had decided.  Tuesday came and went and she didn’t ask me and I was thrilled.  I was off the hook.

 Sometime in May she told me it was time to start packing my trunk for Briar Haven.  

I sobbed. 

“When you didn’t answer me, I assumed it was a yes,” she said.  “I’ve already paid the money, you have to go.”  Besides, she added, normally they didn’t take children as young as me, but they had made an exception when she told them how grown-up I was.

Thirty days past my seventh birthday, she dropped me off.  The only way she got me out of the car was by swearing that if I didn’t like it after one week she’d take me back.

Exactly one week later, in the room with oak walls covered with black and white pictures of girls in bloomers rowing canoes, I called my mother and invoked her promise to come get me.

I had entered the office believing I would be in my own bed the next night.  I left the office knowing my mother didn’t want me.

That night I vomited in my sleep for the first time.  My twenty year-old counselor struggled to clean me up in the darkness.  The other girls woke and made fun of me.  

Over the next two months, I became the sad girl, the odd one.  I was nauseated all the time, afraid of the dark, and sometimes I puked in my sleep.  People said I smelled funny.

That was the girl who returned to Boston at the end of the summer, who tried to rejoin her second-grade classmates and remember what she had been like before.   What the camp and my mother had called “homesickness” followed me as a dull roar of anxiety I started to feel all the time – and would struggle with the rest of my life.

I was sent to Briar Haven for two more summers, and then to other camps every summer after that until I was fourteen.  It never mattered that I didn’t want to go.

I became that unique beast of the dysfunctional WASPY American family – institutionalized.  I grew adept at eating in cafeterias and showering with strangers and navigating the social dramas of untended girls.  I devoured books and I scrawled diaries and I acquired whatever basic athletic, art, outdoors skills I needed to get by.

Although I have learned to manage it, I still dread socializing in groups.

And on some key matters, I struggle to know what normal is. 

***

“I want to go to CAMP!!” Mare said to me with a gigantic grin.

She was six. 

She read books about camp, asked older kids all about it, played “camp” with her sister.   Her Daring Book for Girls was dog-eared and beloved with little pieces of tissue marking the pages on how to use a jackknife, cook over an open fire, make a macramé bracelet.

“Why couldn’t it be horses or Disney-freaking-world?” I said.

But it couldn’t be because she was Mary, my fierce adventure-girl, my chatter-bug who wants to join the ecology club and unite kids to fight the oil spill.  Mare, who doesn’t just swing on the monkey bars, but climbs over the top of them as high as she can go, who builds a sister-swing to hang from a large oak tree — and it actually works.   Mare who could spend all afternoon trying to save a wounded earth worm, or constructing a wild-animal shelter in our back yard.

On a whim, I Googled Briar Haven.  They had introduced a special 10-day program for seven year-old girls.   I filled out the online form before I could come to my senses.  They sent a little introductory video on DVD and a map of the grounds.  Within days the map was tattered and I had to e-mail again for a new one she could hang on the wall.

She memorized the video.

“It’s perfect for her,” Cute Husband said.  “It’s exactly right.  And I think,” he added carefully, “that it would do you a lot of good, too.”

When we told her, she squealed and screeched and rolled around and said it was even better than Christmas.

Briar Haven, Part II:  In Which I Make Soup

It is summer now, the height of growing and heat and sun and the afternoon buzz of things that crawl in the grass and zip in the air around your head.  The Tilty-Floored Farmhouse is constructed of wood from this property, with an old stone foundation.  Our living space on the first floor is about 700 square feet, none of it air conditioned.  It holds the cool well, so once the night air has seeped into the tiny living room and high-ceilinged family room, it stays for a while.  It also holds the heat well, so by 4:00 in the afternoon,  if it is very hot outside, it is even hotter in the Tilty-Floored Farmhouse.  The floors are sticky with humidity and – by then – popscicle drips and smears of blackberry jam and mud generated by the garden hose for a mid-afternoon mud fight.

When you live this way, you cook for it, too.  In the winter I make soups and breads that keep the oven on low throughout the day and help keep the drafty kitchen warm.  By 5:00 p.m. it is utter darkness beyond my windows, and I cook to separate myself from the outside – the simmering and sizzling and scent push back the stark night.

But in July, 5:00 means air fragrant with cut grass, and barbecue smoke, coming rain, and honeysuckle.  The kitchen is thick with humidity and pollen and if you are in there long, sweat drips into your eyes and into that terrible little hollow in your back that you can’t reach.

If winter food separates me from outside, summer food drenches me in it.

By late June, I stop seeing much of the fluorescent grocery store.  Our local farmers’ markets are stuffed with tables full of vegetables warm from the ground.   It doesn’t matter what you buy, you just grab a bunch and cook it up.  Kohlrabi chopped with pattypan squash and garlic greens roasted over the gas grill on the deck.  (To turn the kitchen range on would be nuts.)  I buy dozens of local eggs for a couple of bucks and I cook them up, thick and yellow and buttery, on fresh local multigrain toast.

I can keep three girls entertained for thirty minutes with a large bowl of local fresh pea pods.  They shuck peas, having contests to see who can do the neatest job of opening the pod so all the peas are aligned.  And then they eat about half of them raw.  The rest I toast up quick with a little butter and salt and pepper and serve with jasmine rice, and a little chicken.

The chicken I grill, too.  In a tin foil pouch.  I slip fresh mushrooms and garlic and herbs under the skin, and lemon and herbs into the cavity.  I salt and pepper it, drizzle it with olive oil, add vermouth to the bottom and seal it.  It pops and cooks in the grill while I weed.  Even outside the sweat still pools in that terrible spot, of course, and yesterday I found myself scratching my back along the wood-shingled barn, just like a horse.  I can see why horses do it: very satisfying.

I am sure the original owners of this house slept on the screened porch in summer.  Our second storey is the size of most people’s master-bedrooms, airless, with dense walls.  It is oven-hot starting in early June and it never gets better.  We have to have window air conditioning units, and I hate them.  They plug the windows and the industrial noise slams out all hint of the world outside our bed room.  I get anxious when it’s on, wonder whether I can hear the baby or the smoke alarm, or the phone.  I like our bedroom best in spring, when the windows are open and the room is cool and fresh and saturated with sun.

We are into our second week since school let out, and Summer Life is becoming a comfortable cycle of wakings and sleepings with days full of whatever I can make happen in between.  Enrollment is down at The School and I did not get a summer teaching job, so the only formal activity the girls are getting is horseback riding once a week.

 I tell the girls that the idea of summer for children was not originally to have fun, but to work on the farm.  They are supposed to be outside, I say, out in the world sorting things out.  The Swing Set that Blocks Out the Sun – my craziest and most fortitious purchase –  features a club house at the top.  They are starting to decorate it, with pictures and secret codes and cheap pillows on the floor for long conversations.

They are truly a band of three now.  Eden follows them everywhere, and they can both carry her, which means I don’t expect her to walk until Ren goes to college.   They bring her into the club house, ask her opinion on things, and a simple “NAH!!” can be translated any number of convenient ways.

They have played with frogs, collected a slug garden, and identified and cleared out every wild raspberry bush around them.  They water the deck garden every afternoon, have eaten all the strawberries, and are waiting anxiously for the tomatoes to start in.  I have one large pot just for them – small cherry tomatoes they can eat from freely as soon as it’s ready.  The large slicing tomatoes they have to leave to me.  That is if they come in, I never know.  I’m not much of a gardener, really.  If I were rich I would pay people to put in a huge vegetable garden so I could shop in it without ever having to pull a weed or guess at a soil’s acidity. 

I am doing tons of yard work, though, for the first time since we bought this place.  The first summer I had Lyme disease and I was teaching, so there was no room for anything else.  The second summer, I had a sick newborn.  Now while the girls build fairy houses on Clover Hill I tackle the box hedge that somehow has grown up almost to the roof of the barn.  I wander the yard with a hedge trimmer and some clippers, no idea what I am doing, hacking away at growing things, yanking out stuff, waging a campaign against poison ivy that may end very badly for me.

I try to do one fun thing with them a day – a round of mini-golf, a play date with a friend, a trip to the pool.  I have discovered  Ikea — packed with Swedish furniture and also a little children’s play space.  A staffed children’s play space.  Air conditioned.  They can be in there for an hour while I browse furniture I can’t afford and then I take them to the cafeteria for meatballs and lingon berry juice, cheap.  Plus, the long ride to Ikea and back takes place in the air conditioned mini-van with a movie going.

  Okay, look, it’s not pretty, but it does the job and I am going to have to work hard not to do that more than once or twice this summer.

There are moments every day where I think we are in hell – boredom, heat, nothing but each other and long hours stretched ahead of us.  The girls are fighting more than they do when they’re in school.  They come to me to mediate who was rudest to whom and whose turn it really was to hold the hose.  I stay out of it as much as I can but there is always the three-way melt down – all of them screeching, complaining, asking for something, pleading their case against the others and I think HOLY GOD WHAT HAS BECOME OF ME?

But then I overhear them in the club house – whispering their special Sister Promises, or I watch them stopping carefully to pick up Eden to bring her with them back up to the raspberry patch, where they will carefully count out an equal share for her.   Or I see all three of them squealing in pursuit of a frog who can jump as high as their eyes and I think that they never would be able to appreciate that if we hadn’t been forced to slow down so much.

My work in the yard is showing – it is lovelier than it has been since we moved here.  Little annuals are tucked into pots around the place,  and my haphazard cutting has resulted in a certain wild trimness I like.  Cute Husband and I sit on the deck and glow over our land.  OUR LAND!  Our kids!  WOW!

And I think how life is like this:  blessings and curses are indistinguishable and each day is nothing but a day – nothing but everything there is.

Through the rattle of the window a/c in her room, and the one in ours, and the two shut doors and the fog of heavy sleep, I hear her.

Covers back — smooth so I can cover us in one motion when I have her with me. Feet on the floor. Pile of laundry, avoid, step on Cute Husband’s shoes — squint in at the clock, notice the time and instantly forget it — yank on a door, push on a door, trip on a doll, stumble through a discarded blanket … soft fuzzy head. She’s standing up.

“Did you have a bad dream? — Momma fix,” I say against her cheek, one palm against her soft curls, the other rubbing her back. Pad through the wadded blanket, the doll, the doors, the corner, the flip flops, the laundry. A leg over, then the other, bring the blanket smooth, tuck her in for a nurse.

“Momma fix,” I yawn. I squint hard at the blue digits that would tell me the time if I were not so near-sighted. Must be around three, I guess.

Eden drapes a bare arm over my shoulder and I stroke it.

Little arm in the moonlight. Little arm on the sonogram screen so long ago. Flesh, pale and contoured like drifted snow.

Every inch, every chub, every muscle and sinew, I built. I built it in this room, on this bed. I built it in the kitchen where I made her meals, and at the dining room table where I fed her and worked on my laptop to help earn the money that would help keep us stocked in whole grains and fresh veggies.

Eden finishes with a happy sigh. She sucks her thumb, burrows, and then that snow-drift arm squeezes me, once, like an earnest handshake.

When did she first know she loved me?

Was it when we met, when she was gray-eyed and confused, and I was thrilled and incapacitated on the operating table?

Did she love me after nursing took hold or after some number of times I reliably showed up when she was hungry and wet in the darkness?

Eden does not yet know that I am expert at Skeeball, that I will allow her a far more creative wardrobe than most of her peers will be permitted to wear in public, that I will throw her birthday parties of unparalleled enthusiasm.

The Tilty-Floored Farmhouse she has lived in her whole life is relatively new to me. She has never been to Florida or Mexico, like I have, and she has never sat in circle time or waited nervously at recess to see if anyone would play with her.

This is Eden’s whole world, a full belly, her mother’s warm body, her father’s breathing with his strong back against her. This little gesture of hers, this squeeze of my shoulder, this thank you –

it is perhaps the purest expression I have ever known.

Sunbeam and I swung by the school, sprang the girls and loaded them into the Loser Cruiser before shooting over to the office to collect Cute Husband, and hitting the highway for Westport.

Connecticut.  (Oh how I loathe thee.)

It is the home of my cousin, Luke, who was graduating from eighth grade that night.

Westport is a commuter town — for New York City.  It’s about three hours away from Boston.  You know, if there’s no traffic, which, like, how much could there be between NYC and Boston?  Am I right?

Did I mention it was a school night?  Of the last week of schoool?

Sunbeam sat in the back with the kids, watching A Little Princess and listening to Mary read aloud and Ren describe her dream in great detail.  Schmoopy — The Baby Who Will Not Sleep in a Car — screeched at Sunbeam to entertain her which she did, for about three hours.

We arrived at the  graduation dinner party just in time, admired the boy in his new suit, kissed the relatives, let the children run outside with their cousins.

Because of the limited number of seats for the graduation, our kids couldn’t go.  So after the party,  we threw them back in the car and ran them to the home of Luke’s mother, my aunt Emily.  There they jumped on the trampoline and watched movies, and The Baby Who Will Not Sleep In a Strange Crib shrieked.  Sunbeam supervised — making popcorn and finding the DVD player and the blankets and pillows.

Cute Husband and I went on to the graduation in the country school gymnasium, discretely playing hangman on the back of a program, applauding wildly when our boy made his speech.  The boy!  The one born the year we started dating, the one who wore Cute Husband’s uniform hat throughout our wedding reception, whose favorite toy was the Elmo train.

At 9 p.m, I texted Sunbeam.  “Inbound.  If you can figure out Emily’s coffee machine, please make a pot.  Find her crappiest mug for me to borrow. xoxox”

We kissed the boy, posed for pictures, told him how very proud we were, kissed his mother, got in the car, and went to collect our babies.

“Momma, this was crazy!”  Mare said as we buckled her in. 

“Time to sleep, babies.  Everyone has school tomorrow.”

“Wha!” Eden said.

Sunbeam handed me the coffee — in a battered plastic mug, strong, with just enough milk.  The smell of it filled the car as I took hot gulps and made for the highway.

“Are you really still going to Maine tomorrow?”  I asked Sunbeam.

“Yeah, Tango Foxtrot can drive,” she answered.

“Do you want me to write you a check, or would you rather have cash for your trip?” I asked.  She smiled a little and I laughed.

 ”Cute Husband will drive you home,” I said.  “I’ll leave your cash at the House in an envelope in the door.  Come get it any time.”  She nodded and soon was asleep with the rest of my family and I was alone at the wheel with my coffee, the iPhone in my lap crooning Dylan and tracking our progress toward home.

I thought about the strangers traveling with us along the stripes of red and white,  encased in steel, just inches off the pavement, feet away from each other.  I thought about how they had their own stories and reasons for being on this road and how we would never meet but here we were, sharing the hours and miles.

Around midnight, finally, we crossed back into Massachusetts and soon were on the Pike. 

“You made great time,” Cute Husband said, coming to beside me.  He stretched and shook himself like a puppy, and then looked out the window.

We arrived at the office at quarter of one.  He and Sunbeam piled into the Crappy Honda and I left them and followed the familiar roads back to the Tilty Floored Farmhouse.  On the way I stopped at the drive-through ATM, withdrawing Sunbeam’s fee, placing it carefully in an envelope I marked with tons of x’s and o’s.

The Tilty-Floored Farmhouse was quiet in the black early morning.  I ferried my babies in, one at a time.  Each one nuzzled my shoulder when I carried her, cooed, turned to her side when I placed her on her mattress.  Each one smiled in her sleep as she pulled her blanket up over her shoulder. 

I locked the front door, tucked Sunbeam’s envelope behind the screen. I brushed my teeth, carried a cold fizzy water up to bed.  I dozed until I finally heard the Crappy Honda squeaking down the street.  I fell asleep when the car door opened, just barely waking when I felt my husband’s back settle against mine.

The birds started shortly after that, and the sky began to emerge in the darkness of our windows.  Cars were passing  with increasing frequency, and then one stopped. The door opened and someone skipped happily up to our front step.

The screen door banged.

“SWEET!!” she said, and with a slam of a car door and a peal of rubber she was gone.

“Maine and glory,” I laughed.  We dozed again for a bit, and then the sounds of children waking were undeniable.

“I’ve got it,” Cute Husband said.

I turned on to my side, raised my blanket.  My last thought as the children scampered down the stairs, placing their cereal orders and planning their outfits, was that none of them yet existed the first time I locked eyes with him, and how grateful I was to have him to travel the road with.

“What?”

I look down and on Eden’s smiling face there is a puddle of foamy white.

“What is that?”  I ask Ren. 

“I don’t know!” she says.

“Don’t lie to me,” I say.

“I don’t know what it is, Momma!!” she says, her voice tinged with hurt.

“Do not lie to me, Karenna.”

“Okay, I spit on her.”

Damn – this is the stuff.  The bad part, the tender spot I ignore until she hits it and then I am crippled and unprepared.

 I don’t want to punish her for telling the truth, I don’t want to be a scary, out-of-control mother.  I want to land on her for spitting – SPITTING – on Baby Sissy and then having the nerve to brag about it.   

I don’t know what to do.

“Why would you do that to Baby Sissy?” I ask.  Ren has a giant shame button.  I only have to tap it.  Instantly, she pales and looks uncomfortable.  “Oh my goodness, Ren.  What a thing to do to a baby.”  I wipe the spit off.  Ren is shifting and looking away from me.

“Momma, I think that I spit on Eden because I was feeling grouchy,” she says,  and I think, Ah, good.  Yelling isn’t the goal, getting her to stop is. 

“I’m glad you’re telling me that, Ren.  It’s much better for you to tell me the truth.  Plus, if you are feeling grouchy, we can talk and I can help you.  But if you hurt Baby Sissy, I don’t want to help you.  I’ll be so angry at you nothing else will matter.”

(But I didn’t actually get angry.  –That’s okay, this worked, I don’t need to get angry.)

“Hey,” I say to her, looking right in her eyes.  “It’s okay to be grouchy.  But NEVER,” and here I do my super-intense-I-mean-it Look.  “EVER spit on Sister, okay?”

She nods, and I back the Loser Cruiser out.

Less than five minutes later Ren spits on her sister again.

“I forgot!” she says.  “MOMMA I FORGOT I WASN’T SUPPOSED TO.”

And I actually think for one split second, Maybe she did forget.  She’s only four.

And then I know that I am kidding myself, and I am allowing my fear of the kind of mother I don’t want to be to get in the way of being the mother Ren needs.

“Karenna I am so angry at you I can’t even speak to you,” I say.  “Because I will yell and say things I will be sorry for, so we’re just not going to talk to each other.”

“But –“

“IF YOU SPEAK AGAIN I WILL YELL SO LOUDLY YOU’LL CRY FOR A WEEK DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?”

She bursts into tears but doesn’t speak.

Eden chirps inquisitively.

And here I employ my most devious trick as a mother.  Both children believe Eden speaks in complex sentences only I understand.

“No, Eden,” I say.  “Sissy is not a mean person, I don’t think.  But yes, you’re right she was very mean to you just now.”

A wail from Ren and another chirp.

“I know baby,” I soothe, “it does seem like Sister doesn’t like you.  I’m so sorry, I don’t know why she acts like that.  Maybe tomorrow if you’re not too sad you can talk to her about it.”

Ren bawls in earnest and opens her mouth to speak.

“NOT A WORD,” I tell her.   

We get home and I bark at Ren to go to her room.  She drags her feet, so I grab her by the elbow and haul.  She bawls, and I hate this so much, this angry, domineering mother dragging a weeping, begging child up the stairs.  But if I don’t man up and get on this kid I know she will be a disaster and it will be my fault so in I go: mean-faced, so she doesn’t know I’m dying inside.

“How dare you,” I hiss in her face.  “How dare you spit on my baby and lie to me about it.”

She howls and I go downstairs.  Mare is playing with Eden.

 “You were really scary,” she says.

“Good,” I say.  “That was the idea.”  Mare is silent.

“Am I scary right now?” I ask.

“No,” she says.  “You seem normal.”

“That’s important.  You need to know that I am in control of what I am doing.  I am not acting in anger, and I am not fulfilling an urge to hurt my child.”  I am speaking to myself as much as to her.   “Every parent gets mad at her kids,” I say, “that’s normal.  The challenge as a parent is to distinguish between our anger – which is about ourselves – and our job to discipline, which is about doing what is right for the kid.  Being nice wasn’t working.  When it gets to that point it is my job to come down hard and do what has to be done.”

 “If you had talked to me like that,” she says, “I’d be devastated.”

“You’re different people,” I answer. 

“Why is she like this?”

“She’s a certain kind of smart that I think has to be a little scary.  She knows a lot about people and how they work and she knows how to get what she wants.  I think that’s frightening when you’re four.  She wants to know that I’m bigger than she is, and this is how she finds out.” 

 I assemble a plate for Ren’s dinner – cereal and fruit, which is all she eats these days.  While she chews, weeping, I change the sheets on her bed, turn on the air conditioning, set the pillows back the way she likes them.

“I am putting Eden down,” I say, “and you can’t be in here with her because you are not nice to her.  You sit on the kitchen floor and say nothing.”

Ren sits on the floor through the softening of the afternoon light as her sister finishes homework and I start dinner for the rest of us. She cries silently, sometimes not-so-silently, and is ignored.  She is not allowed to get up to greet her father when he comes home,  or to help Sister make her book poster.  Ren sits like Scrooge observing her life as it plays out before her in the sticky-thick evening air, oblivious to her presence.

I make steak salads (“STEAK??” Ren sobs.  “I LOVE steak!”) and Cute Husband invites Mare to visit him in the Lair in the cool basement to eat together.

“Hey, SPONGE BOB IS ON!” Cute Husband shouts up to me.  “It’s a GREAT episode!”  It’s a perfect shot – Ren wails in her damp pile of despair on the kitchen floor.

The kitchen is clean, everything is put away, and I turn finally to the Doodle, with her matted hair, streaked cheeks, sweat-peppered lip.

I put her over my shoulder, she nuzzles, I carry her to the shower.  I scrub her scalp with the strawberry shampoo, clean her ears, her elbows, her neck.  She sits, docile, turning her chin into me like a timid cat asking for a rub.

I turn off the water, grab a towel.

“Karenna, do you know what trust is?”  I ask.

“Yes,” she says.  “When you trust someone, you trust them.  And then when you don’t, you don’t.”

“Can you tell me someone you trust?” I ask.

“You and Daddy,” she says. 

“And who is someone you don’t trust?”

“Jared.  He always takes my crayons at the art table.”

I towel her hair and then squeeze lotion into my hands.  I smear it onto her back and shoulders.

“I love you as much today as I did the day you were born,” I say, tracing the line of her spine in peach-fuzz flesh.  “I will love you that much every single day of your life, forever.”

She smiles.

“Today you lied to me.  Twice.  Your father tells me that he told you not to spit on your sister this weekend.  So you broke promises to us both, which means we can’t trust you.  And baby, I love lots of people.  But there are very few people that I trust with you and your sisters.  I won’t leave a child with someone who is hurting her, I don’t care who it is.”

“Momma, I promise I’ll stop!”

“No.  Baby, that’s what you need to know.  Your promise doesn’t work.  You broke your word to your father and me.  You lied to us.  We don’t trust you.”

A single tear drops down her cheek.

“I feel like a bad kid,” she whispers.

“That is called shame,” I say.  “It is the feeling you have when you have done something wrong, that you are sorry for, wish you could take back.  It’s just a feeling.  It’s the thing that helps you not do bad stuff.  It’s a gift.  Remember that you feel this way, and that it is your good heart telling you not to do the wrong thing.”

“Will you still be mad tomorrow?”

“No,” I smile.  “You get to start again tomorrow.  But you will have to work to make Daddy and me trust you again.  That one you have to earn.  And you’ll have to talk to Sister, too, and work it out with her.”

“How do I make you trust me?”

“By being a person who does not lie and does not break her promise and does not hurt her sister.  Saying it doesn’t count, you have to do it.”

I pull the fresh nightgown over her head, fluff her hair, carry her up to her room.

“You said we could have ice cream and movie night,” she whimpers.

“I think you know that’s not coming.” I rub her back.

“Does Mary get to?”

“Of course,” I feel fresh sobs starting in her chest. “Don’t wake Baby Sissy,” I say, dropping her gently into bed.  She pulls the blanket up, big tears spilling on to her pillow.

“I love you Karenna,” I tell her.  “You’re my baby and I’ll love you with my whole heart forever.”

She sniffles and shakes and I leave her there in the darkness of fresh sheets and clean body, and snoozing sister and love and shame and regret.

And I think, Today I was a good mother.