How did this happen to me? I wondered, blowing the dull, tangled hair out of my eyes and wiping the sweat from my grimy neck with a dish towel I wore on my shoulder for spills or baby puke.
During my fifth pregnancy I lost my sense of humor. My feral eyes stared desperately out at the hot and sticky Florida world swirling past me, a poet trapped in the body of a “brood mare”. How did this happen to me?
THE END OF AUGUST BY PG SMITH 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 85
It was the end of August, the sweltering and sticky armpit of summer in Florida, and all my children were dirty. I’d wash the first kid and then the second. By the time I got to the third the first was dirty and the fourth and fifth were still waiting in line.
My children could get dirty sitting completely still side by side on a white plastic couch in the middle of the living room. I knew this because I tried it on the advice of my next-door neighbor Wanda, the perfect homemaker. Her children were not dirty. She bathed them and put them on the sofa and made them stay there watching TV until their father got home. That’s how you handle it, Penny, she told me.
It was worth a try. But my children knew how to extract dirt from the air like salt from the sea. My kids had talent. They lost this ability with age and deny they ever had it. They laugh when I bring it up but at the time it was no laughing matter. It was a source of anguish and guilt, like everything.
During my fifth pregnancy I lost my sense of humor. My feral eyes stared desperately out at the hot and sticky Florida world swirling past me, a poet trapped in the body of a “brood mare”. How did this happen to me? I wondered, blowing the dull, tangled hair out of my eyes and wiping the sweat from my grimy neck with a dish towel I wore on my shoulder for spills or baby puke.
I might have been able to handle the dirty child problem if it weren’t for the sand. The famous Florida sand that tourists travel thousands of miles to squiggle their toes in? It was my task to remove it from the house. Nobody can get rid of Florida sand—well, except maybe wonderful Wanda. Sand didn’t stick to Wanda’s children.
I swept the grey linoleum floors of my little cinder block house constantly with no effect whatsoever. Grit, grit, grit, wherever you walked.
I proposed to my husband that we leave it there. We could let it pile up and pretend we lived on the beach. Maybe get a couple of tiki torches, a plastic flamingo. My husband didn’t go for it.
“Penny,” he said, grabbing the dish towel to flick my pudgy butt, “if you spent more time doing your work instead of dreaming up cockamamie schemes to get out of it, you wouldn’t have all these problems.”
Then there was the dish washing and the dirty diapers. Back in 1967 nothing was disposable. Every day I washed loads and loads of clothes and diapers. And while I washed them even more were getting dirty.
By August I was almost buried. The conveyor belt of life was whizzing past too swiftly for me to dispatch its contents in an orderly manner. I needed a supercharger. I needed a fast forward. I needed a shovel. And to make matters worse, I didn’t know what I was doing. How come Wanda knew everything and I didn’t?
I was 25, married six years to my high school sweetheart Jake, with whom I had little in common by then except five children under the age of six. That was the basic problem right there. Why did we do that to ourselves?
I could pretend I was Catholic. Back in the 60s if you had a big family everyone thought you were Catholic.
Going to the county clinic for my baby’s shots was an adventure, four toddlers and a baby on a bus. When we got to the clinic, the nurse, an elderly woman with snowy hair, looked up from her papers and smiled benignly. “Oh, are you Catholic, dear?”
I was young and immature, but the trouble with immaturity is that you grow out of it. You’re left with a big mess to clean up.
Even that I could have handled but the fear factor was doing me in. I’m pretty sure this is a universal characteristic of mothers. We’re programmed to fear the tragedy that could happen to the children.
Every day they alarmed me: “Oh no! Oh my gosh! Mom! Come quick!! Oh never mind.”
My fear wass not just paranoia. I was sure they’d figure out a way to harm themselves if I didn’t watch them every minute.
Every day I made my children take a nap not because they needed a nap but because I needed a nap. I slept on the couch so that if they woke up I would wake up too, that was the theory.
One day they woke up before I did and decided to make pancakes to surprise me. They got a large glass bowl from a high shelf above the kitchen counter. They mixed flour, sugar, and oil more or less on the living room rug (a little in the bowl) right in front of the couch where I was sleeping.
After that I was afraid to take a nap because what if they had dropped the glass bowl or fallen off the kitchen counter—or both? What if they had found something more lethal than flour and oil? I tried to make the house child-proof, but my kids were smart, resourceful, curious, good climbers, and worked as a team. So, I couldn’t take any more naps because obviously I was too tired to wake up.
We had a fenced-in back yard with a jungle gym, a playhouse, a picnic table, grass, and a sand box. No swing set, too dangerous. They played out there every day. What could go wrong?
One Sunday afternoon Jake was grilling burgers in the carport while I watched the kids in the back yard. My two little girls were playing with their dolls by the back fence. I turned around to change the baby on the picnic table. It might have taken two minutes. When I turned back around my girls were feeding something to their dolls—wait—were they feeding something to each other?
“Hey, are you eating dirt? Don’t eat dirt,” I yelled, “You know better than that.”
“No, Mommy,” said Mary. “We got beans.” She giggled happily.
“Beans!” I was running now. “Where did you find beans?”
“On the beanstalk.” They pointed at my neighbor’s bush up against the fence.
“Mrs Jones!” I yelled. I could see her looking out the kitchen window. “What kind of bush is this?” “Castor bean,” she said.
“Are those beans poisonous?”
“I’m afraid so, dear. Quite lethal,” she said cheerfully. “You wouldn’t want to grow that bush in your back yard.”
Oh, no. God, no. “Did you swallow those beans?” The girls solemnly shook their heads in the negative—of course. I grabbed one under each arm and ran for the house. “Jake,” I screamed. “Jake!”