by R C Barnes
“Shoot. It was such a good idea.”
“It IS a good idea. Find somebody else.”
She plopped back down on the couch next to me and picked up my cup of chai tea and helped herself. She wrinkled her nose in disapproval and did a mini gag.
“Don’t you sweeten this at all?” she asked.
“It’s my tea. I make it the way I like it.”
“We have honey in the cupboard. Why don’t you put honey in it?”
“I don’t want honey. I like it the way it is.”
She pouted like a two-year-old. “You don’t sweeten your drinks just to keep me from taking them.”
Wow, she figured it out.
But I said nothing. I was waiting to see if another ball was going to drop. But it appeared her angry emotional wave had crashed on the rocks, and the water was rescinding into the sands, vanishing from sight.
My mother was back to smiling, and she reached over to the coffee table and picked up her current crossword puzzle.
“Stay here,” she said. “I may need help with this one.”
I leaned back into the cushions of the couch and released the breath I had been holding. I had dodged a bullet with that one. The argument about sin could have blown into epic proportions. My mother could have decided to ban Joanie from the house just from the idea that someone else could possibly have a different viewpoint than hers.
It is astonishing to me a woman who has had multiple lovers and some of them married (yes, she has wrecked some homes) and two children out of wedlock, would still get riled up by the notion other people may view her lifestyle as sinful or even unsavory. I hated feeling like I had to defend my mother. It’s hard because I don’t agree with her half the time.
My mother has had a challenging life. If you understood her, you would see her pain is inked on her body for all to see.
“I need a three-letter word for a stress reliever.”
“Hug”
THE SPARROWS OF SORROW
There are five sparrows tattooed on my mother’s left forearm. They are sweet little dark birds with beautiful detail in their wings, and each has a tiny red heart sheltered underneath the span of their outstretched wings or carried within the clutch of their beak. The birds circle around my mother’s arm like an extended charm bracelet. The five little birds represent the five miscarriages my mother had in her life. Each one of these babies was a dagger to my mother’s soul, like a judgment held against her ability to become a mother. They were not early pregnancies, but second term. These were the ones she felt move within her. The ones that kicked and made her gasp as she envisioned a life and a future for them.
When my mother feels lost or sorrowful, she wraps her left arm across her chest, so the sparrow angels are near her heart. I don’t think she is even aware she does it.
Before I was born, there were two lost pregnancies. She named them. She names them all. I just don’t know the names of those two. However, I know their stories. I know the stories my mother shares. Because of the level of grief associated with these babies, I refuse to touch the sparrows. I am not a masochist, and I don’t need to experience that level of pain with my mother. It is enough I know they are there and what they are about.
The first one was when my mother was barely in her twenties. She was in love, or she thought she was. She had left the confines of my grandparent’s house and run off with this boy who blew into town. There were dreams of living on the whim and living off the land. They covered over 3,000 miles of amber waves of grain and purple mountains majesty. In Tennessee, she discovered she was pregnant. In Texas, they ran out of money and started heading back west. In Arizona, she lost the baby, a girl. She was six months along.
Thus, the first sparrow was commemorated on my mother’s wrist. It was personal. The boy had long gone. Not able to hang with this young woman who was grieving so heavily.
The second pregnancy came out of a loose relationship with a fellow tattoo artist she was living with as she was apprenticing with Kaya Marklund at Brown Sugar Tattoo. This relationship was comfortable and low key. Two people who were more like friends than lovers. Things ratcheted up into intense levels once my mother discovered she was pregnant. She kept it to herself for months, fearing she would miscarry. Finally, after four months went by, the guy noticed he wasn’t seeing my mother drink alcohol anymore, and she had stopped asking him to use condoms when they were having sex. He asked her flat out. She wanted to deny it, but she couldn’t - she was already beginning to show. The guy flipped out, yelling about trust issues and the lack thereof. He left. Six weeks later, she miscarried. The baby was a boy, and a second sparrow was inked on her wrist.
Then at the age of twenty-six, my mother had a wild weekend with a man she met at a friend’s Friday night dinner party. He was handsome, hot, and had a great smile she felt she could melt into. He was my father. He kissed her goodbye on Monday morning after two days of constant bliss. There was no promise of calling or hooking up later. He said his goodbye and then was gone for the sweet unknown. His name was Charles. Two months later, my mother realized she was pregnant. She told one person. A woman she had met while apprenticing at Brown Sugar, a fantastic artist who had a unique style all her own. She could work with male clients without flirting with them (A challenge my mother was never able to overcome). They talked about opening their own shop together in a few years. That was Dusty Lorazo.
My mother had moved back in with her parents. My grandparents were thrilled to have their spirited daughter in their home and asked no questions about the circumstances of her pregnancy. They must have seen the fear and caution in her face as they took care of all her health concerns while she was pregnant. When I was born, they said nothing about the brown nut tint to my skin or the massive dark curly hair. With the success of my birth, my mother was convinced money was the key factor. She had carried successfully to term because she had been diligent on the health care, had eaten properly, and taken all the megavitamins. Unfortunately, that assessment was false.
When I was two, my grandparents were both killed in a car accident. It happened fast, and they were gone.
My mother went into an emotional shock. Dusty says she didn’t smile or laugh for weeks and stopped dancing – even if Earth Wind and Fire were playing, she wouldn’t twitch a hip. She stayed engaged in life as she had a toddler and a new business to operate. My grandparents left her the house and enough money to open her own storefront, and with Dusty at her side, the business, Cosmic Hearts, took off. She was busy paying attention to her work and being the best mom she could be.
Besides, she was focused on me. I was the light of her life. I was her cosmic heart. She loved me so much, she wanted another one. She kept trying. Many times she lost the pregnancies in the early weeks. And the spiral of grief and despair started again. She realized her challenge in carrying babies to term wasn’t money and access to health care. She now had plenty of that. No, it was her. The problem must be her.
Then what happened was the “hot mess” phase as Dusty refers to it. My mother was like this glorious siren, radiating with unworldly beauty. She would lure men into these frenzied relationships, desperate to show she was both desirable and matrimonial. She would dress for the park in these super cute outfits and then have me attired like a little curly-haired doll. I was the bait. I was on display in the playground, at the supermarket, in coffee shops. She was working this image of the sexy mama and her adorable little girl. What man could resist that package? Sadly, they didn’t.
Many men fell into the web my mother spun. She was looking for a guy who could get her pregnant and then would stick around and be the family man. I was encouraged to call these men “Daddy” after a certain period. Then my mother would get pregnant, and there was euphoria in the home for a few weeks with the anticipation of joy and becoming a family unit.
Then came the inevitable smackdown nature can employ. The gut punch. The miscarriage would occur. Her uterus’ rejection of motherhood.
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Sparrow number four is for Simon. My mother had snared a guy named Peter, who was a grad student at UC Berkeley. He was an international exchange student from Denmark, and when my mother got pregnant, he began searching for grant funding, allowing him to continue his work in the United States. Peter was tall and thin like a stork. He would work on his English pronunciation while reading picture books to me. He was best at the ones that rhymed like ‘The Owl and the Pussycat”. However, when my mother lost the baby, Peter was not prepared for the emotional tsunami, surging from her body. Her enormous despair scared him back across the Atlantic.
Sparrow number five is for the sister I’ll never know. Her name was supposed to be Candace. With the addition of Candace, the sparrows have completed the bracelet of grief and have started another level, winding up her arm. I don’t remember very much about the man who fathered Candace. I was eight and had discovered the sanctuary of books. I was able to hide in my bedroom and read stacks of stories and transport myself far far away.
My mother gave me a baby doll she had commissioned to look like how she believed her new daughter would physically appear. Candace’s father was a redhead like my mother, so they both thought the baby would have red hair as well. Because of Candace, my mother gave me the only white baby doll I ever owned. The doll had bright shiny green eyes and a splash of freckles on the nose and cheeks. There was an abundance of copper hair on her head for me to brush.
Two weeks before the due date, Candace stopped moving. At the doctor’s office, they told my mother and Candace’s father Candace had died. There was no longer a heartbeat. My mother had to go to the hospital and have labor induced. Candace had been strangled by the umbilical cord. Her hair was brown.
At this point in my life, I began to hate the fact I was a survivor. I had emerged from the womb and taken a breath, but my existence wasn’t good enough for her. My mother kept putting herself up on the auction block for more maternal despair.
You may think I miscounted earlier, and I am off by a sparrow. Sparrow number three is on my foot. My mother had Dusty do it when I was a toddler. I don’t remember how I felt when it happened, but Dusty says I was very brave and sucked on an orange lollipop with tears streaming down my pudgy face. Why the foot and not a more fleshy place, like my hip or thigh? My mother (and this is her logic, her mind) didn’t want to interfere with my own desire to have my own tattoos designed for my body.
Plus, a tat is easy to hide when it’s on the foot.
Also, because I was a child, my mother didn’t want people condemning her for putting a tattoo on her kid. She made Dusty do it. This is where my mother’s twisted logic comes entirely into play. She doesn’t care about the morality of inviting all kinds of people into her home, but she is worried people will care that she, a tattoo artist mind you, commissioned to have a tiny tattoo of a bird done on the arch of her child’s foot.
Some people would see the tattoo as child abuse, but laws surrounding this can be murky because they focus on parental consent. Someone would have to file a complaint, and who was there to do that?
Sparrow number six is on Echo, who miraculously came into this world shortly after I turned ten years old. To this day, I believe she was a birthday present. Somehow the higher being that totally confuses me daily decided I had endured enough crazy grief from my mother, and this little incredibly pale baby girl would live and take a breath in our world. It’s also uncanny how much the doll that was supposed to represent Candace ended up being Echo.
For the first few months of Echo’s life, my mother kept waiting for her to die. In my mother’s own words, she did everything wrong. Echo’s conception came out of a casual dalliance, and my mother hardly bothered to attend her doctor appointments. She didn’t monitor her diet and instead ate whatever she wanted. My mother had lost her desire to invest in more heartbreak.
But Echo was determined to be born. She came prematurely and had to be with the other tiny babies for two months. And even after she came home, my mother was convinced she would succumb to crib death or some other illness that snatches an infant in the blink of an eye. Echo remained. And like me, she received her sparrow, which had become a warped sense of branding on my mother’s part when she was three. By then, my mother believed Echo was sticking around.
I never learned who performed the sparrow ink for the dead babies on my mother. I asked Dusty one time if she knew, and she shrugged her shoulders, shaking her head no.
Whoever the artist is, there would be one more request of their services as there are seven sparrows on my mother’s soul. Two are her surviving children and five on her arm for the pregnancies. These are the seven sparrows representing the fragile heart of Theresa Wynters. The seventh sparrow was the child of Luther’s. His name was Malcolm, and my mother carried him for six months. He came prematurely like Echo. But unlike Echo, Malcolm did not survive, and his time in the incubator was brief. My mother was deeply crushed as she believed this one had the odds going for him as he mimicked elements of her other two surviving babies. Luther was a strong black man, just as Charles had been, surely his seed would prevail. Scrawny little Echo had survived being premature; surely, Malcolm could do the same.
Luther consoled my mother and brought her all kinds of symbolic gifts to diminish her grief. He was grieving as well but buying the special cinnamon buns my mother loved and bringing her white daisies helped him tremendously. He assured my mother he didn’t need a child of his own; Echo and I were enough. She began to believe him. There was comfort in the notion the family was whole. We didn’t need anybody else. Unfortunately, Luther’s consoling words would be used against him later.
Luther would have Echo and I curl up on the couch with him and be his “baby blanket” while we watched television. He would sit on the couch propped up with the cushions and say in a baby bear type voice, “Where’s my kiddie blanket? I can’t find it.” Echo would come running into the room, giggling, and I would walk in rolling my eyes, pretending I was too old for this type of thing. Luther would put his bear arms around us, and we would snuggle in, our arms and limbs being the blanket he had requested.
One night we were watching some silly family comedy on the television. There was a baby on the show. It was bopping up and down the way toddlers do when they are trying to dance. I felt something warm splash down on my arm. I glanced up, and I saw Luther was silently crying. Large tears were rolling down his cheeks. He saw me looking at him with a worried expression. I had never seen a man weep. He gave me a little smile and pulled me into a squeeze so tight I lost my breath.
The days with Luther were the best in my life.
ANNIKA KANE
Much to my horror, Todd became a regular presence in the household. My snake venom was losing its bite as the smiling Ken doll came over to the house every single day. I behaved myself and watched my tongue. But. It. Was. Not. Easy.
I practically gagged on the number of times I swallowed my tongue and the venom that went with it. I swear there were times we would be in the same vicinity (a situation I tried to avoid as much as possible), and I felt Todd was baiting me. There was something about the guy that made me feel like he was trying to get me to unleash and lose my cool. And how screwed up is it when you have a grownup trying to egg on a 16-year-old girl? Because wouldn’t a grown man have better things to do?
Whenever I mentioned these thoughts to somebody else – people who were in my safe zone, I would get these comments, these looks of exasperation – all of which came down to “Get Over it, Bess.” I knew how it sounded. “He smiles too much. He’s too nice. He’s fake, I tell you. He’s fake.” It looks like I am the one with the problem.
Time and time again, I was told to deal with it. Handle it. Don’t let his presence get the best of you. This was the logical stance, the rational viewpoint, but as I said, there was something about him that rubbed me the wrong way.
Any time I tried to point out the weirdness to my mother, she would shut me out. My mother would side
with Todd, tell me to back down, and state I imagined things. It was enough to make a girl want to scream.
One of the reasons Todd felt he had a secure position is that he helped tremendously with the revenue at Cosmic Hearts. Todd exuded a certain amount of entitlement outside of being my mother’s boyfriend because he delivered Annika to Cosmic Hearts, and Annika was a big hit.
Not long after the dinner party at the house, I walked into the shop and saw this girl hanging around Todd and my mother and she was not a customer. “Who’s that?” I asked Dusty, pointing over at the tall thin girl. The girl was wearing skinny black jeans, clunky boots, and a long peasant blouse. Her hair was sheet straight with a blue/black dye job. My mother was going over items on the shelves in the back, and I could see the tattoo flash books were out on the display counter with Todd flipping through the pages. His expression was a mixture of boredom and feigned interest.
“Annie,” Todd called out. “I think this is something you could work off of.” He was pointing to a design on the page. Judging from where he was in the binder and he was flipping through binder number 3, I knew Todd was pointing to something falling into the dark faerie realm.
Annie came over and peeked. “That’s perfect,” she cried and gave Todd a quick peck. It was a friendly peck, not a lover peck, and just when I was starting to sort out what was happening here, my mother saw me. An enormous smile radiated from her face.
“Bess,” she beamed happily. “Meet Annika.”
Annika/Annie hopped over and put out her hand for a formal shake. Her face was long, and she wore makeup in the blue and purple category. Her sleek hair fell across her face in a practiced fashion. She smiled and took my hand.
