Small Animals

by Kim Brooks

  I looked at the clock. I looked back at my son. Then, for the next four or five seconds, I did what it sometimes seemed I’d been doing every minute of every day since having children, a never-ending, risk-benefit analysis. I noted the mild weather. I noted how close the parking spot was to the front door, and that there were a few other cars nearby. Mostly, though, I visualized how quick, unencumbered by a fussing four-year-old, I would be, running into the store, grabbing a pair of headphones, checking out, and coming back to the car. So I let him wait there. I told him I’d be right back. I opened the windows halfway to ventilate the car. I child-locked the doors and double-clicked my keys so that the car alarm was set.

  I went into the store to get the headphones.

  * * *

  The store I visited that day might have been newly constructed, along with all the other mega-chain big-box stores spurred by an influx of families and professionals to central Virginia, but the space itself, the place where I left him that day, was familiar. I’d grown up about two miles from where I stood. I knew the sky, the flat, hazy horizon, the local people, their accent, more twang than drawl. My parents still lived in the same subdivision down the road where we’d moved when I was one. They lived on the same street and in the same house where I grew up. How I hated Brandermill, that subdivision, when I left it at eighteen, that street, that house, its planned-development stupor, its inaccessibility to all things meaningful and cultural, its lack of sidewalks, its sprawling golf course, its painful faux pastoralness that had obliterated a genuine pastoralness for the purposes of God knows what, making nature seem less threatening, less necessary to explore (which was extra work), less unknowable.

  “Why did you move here?” I asked them at least once a month throughout my teen years. “Why would anyone choose to live here?”

  “Oh, come on, Kimmy,” my dad answered. “If you think this is the worst place, you haven’t seen much of the world.”

  Of course, in many ways, he was right. In this rural-suburban, 1980s, American subdivision, my childhood was largely free from the hardships children have faced throughout much of human history, and continue to face today in much of the world. There was no starvation, no lack of sanitation, no outbreaks of deadly, communicable diseases, no war or mass violence. Crime was low. Neighbors knew or at least recognized one another. My mother seldom locked our door.

  Occasionally, of course, even in such an idyllic setting, bad things happened to children. When I was twelve, a girl named Charity Powers, who lived in an adjacent county, disappeared outside a fast-food restaurant near a roller-skating rink late at night while waiting for her mother’s friend to pick her up. There was a massive search effort, her grainy, photographed face appearing on the six o’clock news. People in supermarket aisles wondered what a little girl was doing alone in a parking lot so late at night. Where was the mother? It was the mother’s boyfriend, some said. He never showed up. But these grumblings faded four months later when her body was found in a shallow grave on the property of a man who was later found guilty of capital murder. It really happened. She really died. But I remember it now, almost thirty years later, because it was so unusual, so exceptional in its horror.

  Still, there were other, awful things from time to time. A carful of teenagers crashed into a tree in our neighbor’s yard, killing three and maiming the fourth. A high school sophomore’s truck was struck head-on by a drunk driver. Another teen dove from a rocky ledge into a swimming hole and snapped his neck. But I remember these incidents precisely because they were anomalous. Bad things happened to children, even in Brandermill, but only on the rarest of occasions. And so when they happened, you remembered them. Surely similar tragedies struck other communities around the country, but when they did, with the exception of the rare, high-profile case, we didn’t hear about them. This was pre–internet age, pre–Amber Alert; we knew when terrible things happened within arm’s reach, but not beyond.

  Usually, life was peaceful. The days came and went with the easy stupor they were supposed to have. Safety, security, health, and prosperity were what we expected; we were white and middle-class. “I think it’s a fine place to live,” my father declared. As a teenager, and then a young adult, I would roll my eyes. I was too young to conceive of choosing a home for what it lacked. I hated it.

  “You’re out of your mind,” my mother would tell me. “I love it here. I loved it the moment I saw it—the trees, the quiet, the people—and I never want to live anyplace else. When I die, scatter my ashes on the back porch so I can stay here forever.”

  “You’re a Jew, Mom. Jews don’t do cremation.”

  “Then bury me beneath the trampoline out back. Or find a nice spot near the magnolia tree. Whatever’s easiest.”

  I gazed at her with that particular mixture of love, repulsion, amazement, and horror so many daughters reserve for their mothers. How was it possible that I was made from this person? “Who are you?” I would ask her. She would listen, smile, answer automatically.

  “You know who I am.”

  * * *

  That spring, when I visited my parents in Virginia, I knew them as well as I’d ever know them. I knew my children to an equal degree, having incorporated their every need into my muscle memory, my intuition. And yet somehow, as a thirty-three-year-old wife, writer, and mother of two, I didn’t really know myself. I didn’t know who I had been before children, much less who I had become, how I had changed. Worse still, I didn’t know how much I didn’t know. Only one thing was clear: My days of reflection and self-discovery were indefinitely on hold. That March, the spring that I returned to Virginia to visit my family, I was deep into the phase of life my therapist would later call the All-Hands-on-Deck, Every-Man-for-Himself, Just-Trying-to-Survive phase of parenting, the phase Judith Warner writes of in Perfect Madness, the phase when, if you are a college- or graduate-school-educated working woman in her late twenties to early forties, you realize that every skill you have learned and perfected over the previous one to two decades of your life is of little to no use to you now.

  To put it another way, before I had kids, my dream had been to become a mother and to write my first novel while the little ones napped. At the height of this All-Hands-on-Deck phase, my dream was to take a nap. I had a draft of a novel, but I wasn’t writing or revising much. Most days, I was barely reading. Felix had been sick on and off for the first three years of his life, moving from one respiratory infection to another, each one bringing with it a flare-up of asthma or an icky secondary infection. The ensuing marathon of antibiotics, nebulizer treatments, and oral steroids of those early years left me shell-shocked. And now, even as his health seemed to be improving, I found it hard to relax whenever he or his younger sister, Violet, had so much as a sniffle. With all the crud circulating in their preschools and playgroups, it sometimes seemed as though I was living out my life in the waiting rooms of doctors’ offices.

  When I wasn’t worrying about fevers and mucus, there were plenty of other uncertainties to keep the cortisol flowing. For every one of my children’s needs—food, sleep, affection, discipline, socialization, and education—there’d be at least a hundred different ways of responding, countless methods and approaches for nurturing these little people I loved so deeply. And for every choice that needed making, for every path not taken, I’d feel a tiny tinge of fear, a ripple of anxiety passing through me about the infinite ways it seemed possible to mess up. There were so many moments when I felt inept, when I felt like I should be fired, when I felt, though I loved my children, that motherhood, at least as it was practiced by those around me, was, as the career counselor or later employers would say when they wanted to communicate that you sucked at something, “not a good fit.” It required so many skills I never would have associated with parenthood, not just love and empathy and patience, but organization, discipline, foresight. The things that needed doing to be a good mother—there were too many of them, or too few of me, to do them. There were playdates to be schedu
led. Birthday parties to be planned. Preschool applications to be submitted. Appointments and enrichment programs to be prioritized. Being a mother, it seemed, was a lot like being a manager or a CEO of a small company, and there I was, a former English major who’d never learned to make a spreadsheet. So I did the only thing I could do. I winged my way through it. And even as I improvised this frantic state of being that has become synonymous with modern, middle-class parenthood, I puzzled over it. How could something as common as parenthood feel so complicated and so unnatural? Was I going about it the wrong way, trying to squeeze too much out of every hour, every minute, barreling through days and nights of child-rearing as though I were being chased?

  When I think back to that March, to my decision to take the two kids and spend a week with my parents in Virginia, I can see this uncertainty beneath the impulse. I wanted a break, a pause, a week or two out of time, free from the unsustainable pace I’d established at home and my chronic, gnawing anxiety about … I could hardly say what it was. It had started the morning Felix was born in the sunny hospital room, faded when they brought me my baby, rosy-cheeked and cleanly suctioned of all the meconium in his lungs. Over the next four years it resurfaced, again and again, a virus that went dormant but never died. I felt it every time I read an article about the significance of a particular developmental milestone my kids hadn’t yet achieved. I felt it when I’d stand at a birthday party with thirty other parents, watching for two hours as our children played, chiming in with encouragement and managing their every social interaction. I felt it at the beach one afternoon when a lifeguard told me I couldn’t let Violet (not yet two at the time) play topless in the sand because “any creep might snap a photo.” I’d felt it at the park the week before. Felix was playing, and just at the moment I took out a book to read, he stumbled, bumped his chin, and a woman began shouting across the play lot, “Where is this child’s mother? Is this child being supervised?” I’d felt it when my husband, Pete, and I spent every second of our time together debating preschools, or sleep-training, or airing resentments about who was slacking in which domestic duty.

  I wanted to get away from them, these voices, this chaos, all the incessant worry. I wanted to sleep and read and have conversations and let my kids play unsupervised in a big backyard or around the neighborhood the way my own parents had. I wanted a short break from watching and worrying and caring so intensely and being in charge of every detail of my children’s lives. It seemed to me that there was no better place for this than Virginia, the place I’d grown up.

  * * *

  Four days before I left Felix in the car in front of that Target, my children and I arrived at the Richmond airport, frayed and disheveled after the flight. “My babies, my babies,” my mother called when she spotted us making our weary way toward her. She’d parked the car in the hourly lot and came right up to the edge of airport security to meet us. She walked a little past the edge, actually, and a guard kept nudging her back. “Come to Grandma. Come here and let me kiss you a million times. Grandma is here, Grandma is here.”

  The children hesitated, then inched forward enough for her to scoop them up. Noisy smooches. Hugs and kisses and squeezes. Only after she’d gotten her fill did she glance up at me, her daughter, now more of a grandchild delivery device than a discrete individual. “You look exhausted,” she said.

  “I am exhausted,” I said.

  In reality, I was still a little high on lorazepam. I’d tried reading the reassuring statistics on air-travel safety. I’d tried knitting and meditation and counting my breaths, watching movies and listening to music. In the end, only a low-dose benzo was really able to convince me that the jet I was trapped inside was not, at any moment, going to plunge to the earth. This had been a short flight, so I was still swaying a little as I watched my mother squeeze my children as though she were wringing them dry. I was left lugging the kids’ jackets, the diaper bag, the in-flight electronics, the snacks and half-empty bottles. The security guard seemed relieved when we started walking. At the baggage claim belt, the suitcase came quickly, the car seats last. We loaded it all onto a cart and dragged it to the parking garage, and then my mother turned on some terrible kids’ music and began dispensing cellophane bags of graham crackers, freeze-dried apple snacks, and peanut butter cookies while I went about the business of installing both car seats into the back seat of her minivan. Fifteen minutes later, we were ready to leave.

  “Why are those things so hard to put in now?” my mother wondered as I dabbed the sweat off my brow with the bottom of my shirt. “When you were a baby, it was just a buckle and a snap. Now you might as well be launching the kid to the moon.”

  “Cars are dangerous,” I told her. “Kids are more likely to be killed in a moving vehicle than anyplace else.”

  “Are we going to be killed?” Felix asked.

  “No,” my mother said. “We’re going to Grandma’s house. I’ve set up a tent for you in the living room. I’ve bought a thousand new toys. You’re going to have the time of your lives. You done with your graham crackers already? Thirsty? Want a sip of Grandma’s Diet Coke?”

  He smiled as she handed him the can.

  I thought about protesting, then sighed instead.

  She started the car and pulled onto the highway, unwrapped a piece of gum, and put on a visor to keep the sun out of her face. I sank into the leather seat and closed my eyes. March in Virginia. Everything outside newly thawed. Winter there was just for fun. My mom smiled at me as she drove, patted my hand. “I’m so glad you came,” she said. “Every day I wish you and Pete would move to Virginia to be close to us. I don’t understand the draw of Chicago. I guess you like to freeze and to have no space.”

  “Maybe we will move here,” I said. “We could move back in with you and Dad. I could try to get a job at that Subway where I worked in high school.”

  “There are plenty of good jobs in Richmond. Capital One just came here. Couldn’t you get a job writing for Capital One?”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “It’s hard to live far away from family when your kids are little. I remember.”

  And yet that’s what we’re doing, I thought. My parents had tried, for eighteen years, to give me everything I needed in order to make me a successful human, and the mark of their achievement toward my success would be my not needing them anymore, not even now, with small children of my own to raise.

  Margaret Mead wrote, “A society that cuts off older people from meaningful contact with children, a society that segregates any group of men and women in such a way that they are prevented from having or caring for children, is greatly endangered.” Bullshit, I’d thought when I read this in college. If I ever have kids of my own, I’d sooner let a stranger on the street help me care for them than the lunatics who raised me. But the stranger on the street, it turns out, doesn’t want to help you. Only the lunatics want to help. And parenting without a full brigade of boots on the ground is lonely, grueling business.

  “We manage okay,” I replied.

  The highway opened up as the van gained speed. Four lanes and hardly that many cars in sight. I’d ridden down this road so many times in my life. I had a feel for every curve and turn, yet now it was new because I was new, no longer a kid, no longer a teenager or a student. I was a mother now. How could this place, which had made me, be exactly the same when I was so different? The landscape of wet trees, open sky, exit ramps, and nothingness slipped by, all of it both familiar and foreign.

  “Well,” my mother said, “this week will be a nice break for you. You look so tired. You don’t still take those drugs when you fly, do you?”

  “No,” I lied. “Not anymore.”

  “Why don’t you close your eyes now? Take a little rest.”

  * * *

  The kids loved being in Virginia. Felix loved the fact that he could play in the backyard without an adult hovering over him, that he could ride his scooter around the cul-de-sac without my yelling, “Car!” every te
n seconds. Violet liked that my mother spoiled her with dolls and stuffed animals, let her eat Froot Loops for breakfast and binge-watch whatever pseudo-educational abomination they were into at the moment. And though I quietly disapproved of all this, there was a part of me that loved it too; that felt relieved by this temporary retreat to the mind-set of my upbringing, a mind-set where everything you did with your kids or let them do didn’t matter so much. It was a mind-set Pete and I had consciously rejected as parents. Think of all the things we could have accomplished with the hours we each spent sitting around watching reruns of Full House and Diff’rent Strokes, or playing Nintendo, or walking around the mall, we’d mused in the early years of our marriage. We could have learned Mandarin or mastered the cello. We’d have done things differently from our parents. We’d be better. And yet, watching my own kids on my parents’ home turf was a little bit like watching myself back then, the kid I had been. It was a peculiar, but not an entirely unpleasant, déjà vu.

  The week passed quickly. By the last day, as I thought about going back home, I grew anxious and restless. My mother, trying to raise my spirits, invited some of her friends over for their social gathering of choice: an evening of bridge, gossip, heavy hors d’oeuvres, and goblets of Chablis. I’d never learned to play bridge myself, but I sat among them on a pleather barstool, sipping pink wine and listening to them discuss me as though I weren’t in the room.

  “Is it good to have Kimmy home?” one friend asked. “And the babies?”

  “Heaven,” my mother said. “Especially the babies. I can’t get enough of them. I wish I could keep them all to myself for a couple of weeks. She needs a rest. She’s so anxious,” my mother announced to the group as she dealt the first hand. “She worries constantly.”

  “Prozac,” suggested her friend Dana. “I couldn’t get out of bed without it. It’s a miracle drug.”

  My mother glanced at me, then back at her cards. “Are you kidding? She’s already on it. Aren’t you already on Prozac, Kimmy?”