Both
BY MEG THOMPSON
I helped my daughter adjust her helmet as the two of us got ready to go on a bike ride around the park. Kneeling in front of her, I followed her gaze to another woman on the other side of the playground, fussing over a toddler in a stroller.
“Mommy,” she began. “Is it hard having kids?”
This wasn’t the first time we discussed this. A few years ago, spring time in quarantine, she told me she didn’t want to have kids because it seemed really hard. In the moment, I felt something I didn’t expect: pride. Perhaps, I thought, I have actually taught my daughter something valuable, and am not continuing the myth that parenthood is just a repeating pattern of joy and bliss.
I clicked her helmet straps together.
“Yes,” I said, looking straight at her as I stood up. “It’s incredibly hard.”
*
In the memories I have of my mother, she often has her back to me. She is standing at the stovetop, and I am watching her drop chocolate chips into pancakes, making sure the same number is in each one so we don’t fight over them. I am in the backseat of our station wagon, and she is driving us to a store, a 4-H meeting, a friend’s house. She is hanging clothes on the line. She is staring at her field of sheep. In the memories where I can see her face, she is standing in her overalls in the entrance to the living room, arms crossed, as we watch television. If she ever sat down to watch with us, it was a matter of minutes before she would stand up and leave, announcing, “I’ve already seen this one.”
In the wild expanse of our free time, my mother was usually there, but so far off in the distance you had to squint to see her, at the edge of a field, somewhere along the tree line, driving fence posts into the ground. Meanwhile my sisters and I played a game where we taped couch cushions to our chests and used knitting needles to jab each other like we were jousting. We took the mattresses off our bunk beds and rode them down the stairs. We ran into the woods and stayed there for hours, playing in the mud. We jumped into the pen where we kept the bull and fed him corn from our hands. We rode our bikes barefoot down the middle of the road. We played hide-and-go seek in the barns, the hayloft, and the fields, at dusk. I don’t even have a guess as to how many times I ran full-force into an electric fence. I can still feel the way it would start to close around my waist, right where a belt would be cinched too tight, a white circle of light in my mind before I fell backwards.
On the weekends, I stayed up late playing video games. Sometimes, when my mother returned from the pizza shop where she worked nights, her face would appear in the door of the shadowed living room, but I didn’t look away from the screen. She would find me in the same place she left me: cross-legged on the floor, motionless except for my thumbs, the controller in my hands, glazed with sweat.
*
My sister-in-law was milling around a family reunion when an older, male relative came up to her and asked how she was faring as a new mother. She said she was managing to juggle the busy schedules of her three young daughters while also maintaining her full-time job.
“You aren’t home with your kids?” he asked.
“No.”
“That’s a shame,” he said, and walked away.
And yet, back in my other, childless life, the one where I was the breadwinner, young and oblivious, I sat on hiring committees at the universities where I taught English. I saw the resumes and I heard the questions from the colleagues who had been doing this far longer. I saw the way my colleagues looked at each other and rolled their eyes, especially during phone interviews when the candidate was just a voice coming from a speaker in the middle of a table. You might be able to persuade someone not to ask the parent what they were doing for those five, blank years on their curriculum vitae, but you can’t get them not to think about it. They can’t make a law about that.
When I try to imagine myself updating a current resume, what would I even write? That I can balance all of my son’s Paw Patrol characters on his Sea Patroller so that when I carry it outside for him to play with by the sandbox, it doesn’t tremble, not even a little, and no one falls off? That I have never run out of coffee or Easy Mac or almond butter or cinnamon graham crackers, not even once? That my daughter and I both won blue ribbons at the county fair in our respective age categories with our chocolate chip cookies that we made, side-by-side in the kitchen this summer? That I keep towels in the car for when we go to the park before the sun has dried the dew off the slides? That when I close my eyes, I can see the space behind the couch where the wheel broke off the monster truck and is hiding in a light coating of dust?
Once when I was in college, home during winter break, my mother told me to be a pharmacist, like my brother, because they get good mom hours.
“What?” I asked. “What…did you…say?”
I felt lightheaded, like I was in a family on a TV show, with a mother I had never met. A mother I hadn’t lived with, in the same house, for 20 years, watching me walk into my room every evening, alone, to write rhyming poetry down the center of a page. I was an English major, something my brother had told me, many times, would lead to little financial success. Later, talking to my dad about it, he shrugged, as was his habit. “Money won’t make you happy,” he said. My mother, on the other hand, had been worried ever since I dropped my clearly-defined journalism major. A journalism major, after all, becomes a journalist. I sensed the same panic in her years later when my sister dropped her focus in Education and just majored in fine arts.
“You’re going to want an employer that works with you,” she told me. “That way you can have a job and be home with your kids.”
*
As soon as I turn off the water for my shower, my son opens the door to the bathroom.
“Mommy?” he calls. “Are you ready to play Sneaky Sasquatch?”
In his defense, he did wait until I was done with my shower, as instructed.
Sneaky Sasquatch is a game I downloaded on my phone merely as another tool to have in my How To Survive Quarantine arsenal. The first time we played it, we stretched out on our king size bed, a child on either side of me. The lights were dim and the fan was on low in the corner. Each time we found a red chest of coins, we screamed like it was real money and my son jumped up and down on the bed.
Pretty soon we were playing Sasquatch in real life, which meant hiding an assortment of cheap, plastic food in the yard for the kids to find, stuff in their backpacks, and keep away from me, the park ranger, as they ran screaming to the safety of the tent we dug out of our shed and set up under a tree. The game deepened, eventually involving an old highway map that we shredded and hid, pretending it was pieces of a treasure map. When we were tired of running, we would go inside and play the game on the phone, stretched out on the bed, all of us together.
Months later, I found myself strategizing about the game on my own time. I played it sitting in the pick up line outside my daughter’s school, waiting for her to bounce into the car. I played it, silently, in each of my children’s beds after they had dozed off and I was still wedged between them and the wall. I played it when I took a break from grading papers. I even found myself comparing my own life to that of the Sasquatch in the game, telling myself it was okay to spend money, because we would make more. It would take time, I told myself, but we just had to work at it and build up our accounts, like Sasquatch did.
This became my self-care, my act of resistance. Sit down on the couch, I told myself, staring at the dishwasher, reaching for it. No, I thought. Sit. Down. On. The. Couch.
*
My mother used to tell me that when she was little, she dreamed of having a houseful of kids. Her mother, a Russian immigrant with limited education, was pushed into marriage. In 1940s America, she managed to get divorced and meet her next husband, a dairy farmer in his fifties, on a blind date. They had one child, my mother. A miracle.
My grandparents were from an old world, one where you referred to each other as mother and father, drank mugs of boiling water, and slowly went insane under the ceaseless demands of your own work ethic. My mother told me stories about how my grandpa, furious about the rising cost of running a dairy farm, emptied barrels of milk into the street in an act of protest. Decades after he died, she found a keg of whiskey he kept in the back of the machine shed.
I grew up watching my mother work the same way her parents did: Into a kind of forever-madness, a place where you are never finished working, and you wake up every day in the absurdist play of your life announcing the same list of tasks from the day before that you didn’t finish. After my daughter was born, but before I learned to stop probing for advice, I asked my mother if I should stay home or keep working. My mother, not looking up from the potato she was peeling, said, “Both.”
*
I got a job teaching online when I was pregnant with my son. I didn’t know it at the time, but it would be my last job with a university. My last regular paycheck. My last connection with the working world, but also the very beginning of me understanding I could not do what my mother did. With my hand on my growing stomach, I sat in front of my computer and interviewed with two other women in the English Department.
“How many classes would you want?” one of them asked.
“Three,” I said, without hesitation.
I caught a flicker of mild surprise on their faces.
During this time, my daughter napped every day from 12:30 to 3, as regimented as if she were in the military. The trick was I had to be home, rocking her in my arms, above her crib, at 12:29. If I wasn’t, nap time went up in smoke. If I went grocery shopping in the morning, I kept my eye on the clock as if every bill I would ever pay depended on it. As soon as she was asleep, I went upstairs to the office that would eventually turn into a nursery for our son and opened my computer. I did not think about how I would do this when I had another baby. I did not think about what would happen when my daughter outgrew her naps. I focused on the moment I was inside of, powering through my roster of students, refusing to be held back by anything, most certainly not the idea that I couldn’t do something as simple as raise my two children and also work a part-time job at the exact same time. Later, I would put a child’s desk in our home office and fill it with art supplies for my daughter. “Here,” I said. “Now you can do your work while I do mine.” She delighted in having her own space, and spent hours rearranging her colored pencils and paper. She kept herself still and straight, and except for the slightest tremor at her right shoulder, you would have no idea that she was even moving. Sometimes I just sat at my desk and looked at her back, willing her to turn around.
*
I stare out the window of our office at the deer in the yard of my neighbor, Gary. The deer learned how to eat from his bird feeder by knocking their heads against it until the corn spills out in the grass. I am not supposed to like deer. My parents, like most farmers, despise them, and talk about them in a way that is unnervingly xenophobic.
“You need to be careful,” my mother will say when I tell her about all of the deer, reminding me of a story she read about one that jumped through a glass door.
My parents hate deer because they ruin their fences, bed down in their corn, and exist. I love them because they are animals that wander silently around my town without any sense that a world of people is obsessed with butchering them. I love seeing them sprint through our yard to leap over the hammock we have strung between the black walnut trees. I love the fawn that will walk out from behind the shed while I am hanging clothes on the line, so small she can graze underneath the trampoline where the grass grows taller, just out of reach of the mower.
Sometimes, when I am outside sitting on our deck, Gary shuffles across his driveway to give me a blue Mason jar he found in his barn, complain about our neighbors, or provide a local update. He knows everything that is happening, even with the deer. “The one that got hit in the road,” he pauses, crossing his arms over his quilted flannel, “was that fawn’s mother.”
*
When I got my first job teaching full-time at a university in Missouri, I set up my semesters so I taught five in the fall and three in the spring. This was 14 years ago, before I had children. I had just met my husband, but I didn’t know that yet. I lived in a studio apartment without air conditioning, Internet, or a television. I woke up early on the weekends to drink coffee and write all day. Sometimes I drove to Kansas City with my friend Dana, who got hired with me at the same time. He had a pick-up truck and we would fill up the back with groceries from Whole Foods and then go home. It was a long drive, but I loved listening to his stories about his other lives. The ones I remember most were about his daughter, who grew up to be a photographer in Los Angeles, but in my mind I still see her being carried on Dana’s hip up the stairs, grasping his shirt, to his apartment in Iowa after he got home from his shift. “I can still feel it,” Dana told me, touching his neck where his collar would have stretched against it.
I called my mother in the spring and told her I only had to teach on Tuesday and Thursday. She was ecstatic, saying, “You could get another job.”
*
My mother’s sheep barn was built in the 1850s. The entrance is comprised of two sliding doors that, at one time, must have glided along the metal track mounted above them with ease. Now, though, in order to open them, you have to use the weight of your entire body to push the doors open. When I see people installing rustic, sliding barn doors in their HGTV-era homes, I see my mother. My mother, who once told me she “struggles” to keep her weight above 115, heaving each door to the side, the light pouring into her barn while all the sheep turn to stare.
When her father was still alive, my mother told him the doors were too heavy. My mother, that gave birth to five children without epidurals. My mother, that I have seen wrestle sheep to the ground. My mother, not one for sentimentality, who burned her own wedding dress, decades into marriage.My grandpa, who grew up on the farm he would hand down to her, his only child, looked at her and told her she wasn’t worth her salt. When she told me this story, I felt my love for her in waves. Each time one rushed in, I understood a memory of her in a new way: as a girl born in 1950 to a man that probably wished she was a boy.
My mother, like the millions that have gone before her, deserves galaxies named after her. She should have a parade every year in her honor. Her parents should rise from the dead and apologize, tell her she is good enough, that she always has been, and that they fucked up, like we all do, because their parents, like all the parents that came before them, were also fucked up, but they tried. They tried so hard, every day, searching in a vast, limitless ocean for all the things they never had growing up so that they could place them in her hand, hoping it made up for all the ways they were going to fail her.
*
One sunny morning I took the back roads home through Amish country, sipping coffee, listening to my audiobook. Harvest season, both kids dozed in their car seats after an especially raucous story time at the library. This sort of peaceful scene with kids is rare, but it is what makes people want to have kids, because when it happens, it is quite nearly too much. It’s too beautiful. It is almost too much for me to even think about. When I try to think of a time that my mother was with me when I was a girl, doing something soft, tender, I have to squint so hard because the memory is so far away, even farther than the tree line, past where our property ended, but I know we are there, somewhere, even if I can’t see it. She had to have been there, maybe before my memories began. There had to have been a time when she held me, and I clung to her, even if it was only in her womb.
I drove slowly, cautious of the Amish kids running on the side of the road. With my windows down, I could hear them call to each other, and I knew they were sisters. I could tell, looking at their faces, that they knew each other, loved each other, and spent all day together on their land. When I saw one of the farmers perched on a seat behind his team of horses, pulling a wagon of hay, I slowed even more, thinking he was about to cross in front of me, but he just waved, smiling. I caught a glimpse of one of his feet and noticed he wasn’t wearing any shoes.
If I told my parents that everyday I need to lie in a dark room for 10 minutes wearing a weighted sleep mask full of lavender and flax seeds listening to my meditation app, they would stare back at me, speechless.
“Why…” my dad would start, “Do you…need…to.”
I was not meant to be a farmer, I remember, touching the lacy scar from my melanoma in the foothills of my breast. I chose a home and a life indoors that is so much easier than that of my parents I have a hard time looking them in the eye sometimes when I talk to them. I get questions about when I will return to work, what I will do after my kids are in school, as if I haven’t been working myself to the bone since the day they pulled my first child out of a slit in my stomach.
I don’t have a retirement account, I will never be up for promotion, but I also never have to fill out a self-evaluation for the rest of my life. The part of me that longs to work on a farm wakes up every Thursday throughout the summer just long enough for me to mow my lawn that is barely a quarter of an acre. When my children were small, they used to run behind me while I mowed, as if I was literally cutting a path for them to follow. I could glance back at any point and they would be there. Both of them.