Aspen wants peanut butter and jelly for lunch. She gives me
step-by-step instructions: “First, you spread the peanut butter on one side of
the bread, Memaw. Then you put the jelly on the other and smush it together.”
She demonstrates. I smush. Then I put the sandwich on a plate and cut it
diagonally in half at her command. She peels the two pieces of bread apart,
licks off the peanut butter and jelly, and leaves the bread.
Griffin, my youngest grandson, is napping. He won’t even
know he missed his parents’ brief visit home. Kashjen, the middle child, is
learning to stay in his seat during snack time at preschool. I will get to see
him for only a few minutes before I go home, but I will make the most of them.
I’ll read him a story; we’ll snuggle. He’ll tell me that nothing happened at
his school today.
My son finishes his microwaved burrito and steps out onto
the back porch to survey his domain: a fenced yard for the kids to play in, his
workshop once a garage, a chicken coop housing three laying hens, and an
assortment of plants native to the area: lavender, crocosmia, peonies. It’s too
early in the year for blooms, but they are coming! Beyond the fence is a
quarter acre of lawn surrounded by blackberry vines and climbing trees. A fire
pit for enjoying Smore’s and Storytime sits at the farthest point from the
house.
Aspen follows Justin out onto the porch as she always does.
But Bridget calls to Aspen: “Change out of your ballet shoes if you’re going
out into the yard. Let’s keep them clean!”
“I will, Mommy,” says Aspen.
Bridget waves to her husband and daughter, gives me a quick,
one-armed hug goodbye, and leaves through the front door. Justin, who has
crossed the backyard to examine the area around the chicken coop, calls to
Aspen: “Come, see the dead rat!” She doesn’t hesitate; she jumps off the porch
and into the grass. She’s still wearing her ballet shoes.
In that moment, I am slightly younger than my granddaughter,
bending over a just-my-size table and chairs on the concrete slab in my
family’s backyard. Grandma is coming to visit, and I am preparing to host a tea
party for her. The table is set. I just need something to serve.
“Can I fill my teapot with water, Mom?”
Her eyes widen, anxious, then turn squinty hard. “Why?” she
asks.
“So that Grandma and I can pretend it’s tea.”
“Since you’re pretending, just pretend there’s something in
the teapot. You don’t need to use water, Janet.”
I look inside the empty metal teapot and sigh. Pretending is
more fun with water than air. But Mommy said no.
Now Grandma is sitting at my table. I am preparing to pour
the tea when she looks toward the faucet on the side of the house. “Why don’t
you fill the teapot with water, Janet? Wouldn’t that be fun?”
I peer into the teapot and mumble, “Mommy said no.”
Grandma’s eyes open wide. “Why would your mommy say no? A
little water never hurt anything. Go ahead and get some for our tea.” She
doesn’t have to command me twice. I only spill a little water on the ground, a
little on the table.
Grandma and I are laughing together over something silly
when Mom joins us. She sees the spill. “Why are you using water, Janet? I said
no.” Grandma stays silent; she does not explain. She does not tell my mom that
she told me to get the water. I am in trouble. The tea party is over.
Watching Aspen caught by accident between two grown-ups, I
can’t remember what consequence I faced for my disobedience so long ago. I only
remember feeling that Mom had treated me unfairly and that Grandma, with her
silence, had betrayed me. She had let me take the blame and receive the
punishment instead of defending me. So now I feel protective of my
granddaughter. I cross the yard to be close to her. She’s studying the rat.
Justin has been setting snap traps since he discovered, a
month ago, that the rats were terrorizing the chickens, trying to steal their
food. This rat is the fourth he’s caught. Not sure that I want to see a dead
creature in a trap, I peek over Aspen’s shoulder. She is my shield. What I see
is not so bad, though: a glossy, black-furred rodent taking a nap — with a
metal bar clamped across his neck. I wrinkle my nose, then lean over to whisper
in Aspen’s ear, “Go change your shoes.”
Her eyes widen, and she scampers back into the house,
leaving the back door open. I glance back at the rat. Had he been bred for
such, he might have made a cute pet. Now Justin just needs to dispose of him
fast. I hear the backdoor slam and turn toward it as Aspen jumps off the porch
in sparkly pink and lavender swirled, knee-high rainboots, her ballet shoes
safely ensconced inside. She found a way to keep them on her feet. Clever girl.
You wouldn’t expect a tiny ballerina all pink and glitter to
be excited to see a dead rat, but Aspen is curious about everything life and
death and bodily function in between. She’s going to be a surgeon someday — and
a mommy. She told her daddy she has to hurry to grow up before the sick people
die. She told her mommy she prays every night that God will give her babies
when she grows up. Neither parent is eager for her to grow up fast. Neither am
I.
I wonder what I wanted to be when I grew up when I was her
age. I can only remember wanting to be a missionary, a writer, and a mommy.
There was also a world-class figure skater phase. Mom wouldn’t let me take
lessons, so the world missed out on what I had to offer there. God found a way
to let me enjoy all three of the other occupations, though. I wonder which of
Aspen’s dreams for adulthood will become reality someday.
I also wonder, for the first time, if my tragic tea party memory is as accurate as I have always believed. Just last year, I experienced the unreliability of memory while reminiscing with my younger brother on the phone. Our conversation went something like this:
“You’ll never believe this, Steve. A friend of mine has a
daughter who just lost her two front teeth the same way you did. Do you
remember that day?”
“You mean when your weight on the teeter-totter caused my
side of it to rise and hit me in the mouth?”
“I mean when you jumped off while I was still up in the air
and got yourself smacked in the face.” We laugh. We can do that now. “I
remember sitting in Grandma’s gold Chevy Impala, holding tissues from Grandma’s
purse against your mouth while Mom and Grandma tried to decide whether or not
to take you to the ER.”
Silence.
“Mom wasn’t there, Janet.”
More silence.
“Of course, she was. She and Grandma decided they couldn’t
wait for a dentist appointment and took you to the ER.” As I speak, I picture
the car pulling up to the curb. Two pillars hold up an extension of the roof
and frame the hospital entrance. I can’t see anyone getting out of the car to
go into the hospital, though. I just know it happened. I don’t remember anyone
moving the car to a parking space either. At this point, all I know is what I
believe must have happened: “I had to wait with . . . somebody . . . in the
Impala because children weren’t allowed inside of hospitals unless they were
patients.” I hesitate, twisting my mouth to the side while thinking. “I can’t
picture who waited with me. It must have been Grandma, though. Mom would have
taken you inside.”
“That’s not how I remember it, Sis. Our mom was not there.”
A phone call to my mom confirms the truth of this. She
didn’t learn about the accident until later. None of us knows who was with us
that day, whom Grandma would have been talking to. Perhaps it was her sister
Aunt Dorothy or her mom, my Nana North. I know that the discussion about taking
my brother to the hospital happened, but Grandma wasn’t talking to my mom.
My theory about this flawed memory is that the event was so
traumatic that I wanted my mom to be there. My little brother was hurt. My
seven-year-old self felt responsible. I needed my mom. My memory tells me she
was there, but she and my brother agree she was not.
So maybe my tea party memory is skewed a bit, too. What if I
only thought I mumbled to Grandma that Mommy said no? What if I only thought
those words? What if I only wondered why Mom would say no, instead of hearing
Grandma ask? I may have joyfully and without thought accepted Grandma’s
invitation to go ahead and get water just as Aspen accepted her daddy’s
invitation to go see the rat without first changing her shoes. How easy would
it have been for Aspen to grow up believing that her dad had betrayed her had
Bridget caught her outside in her ballet shoes? –had Justin raised his eyebrows
in surprise to learn of Aspen’s disobedience and kept quiet to support his
wife?
Or what if Grandma wasn’t even at my tea party? What if she
was my pretend guest? What if I only imagined her giving me permission to get
real water for tea? That would certainly explain her silence when Mom
confronted me. Will Aspen remember I corrected her, or will I even exist in her
mind’s account of the ballet shoe memory? Was a whisper in her ear enough to
keep me in the picture, or will she believe she just suddenly remembered that
she forgot to change her shoes? Will she remember the moment at all?
I will never know the answers to any of these questions. But
I know my family loved me just as Aspen’s parents and I love her. Sometimes
adults fail to communicate with each other. Sometimes children, on a whim, obey
the authority figure immediately in charge regardless of another’s
instructions. Sometimes kids get in trouble because they get confused. In both
my tea party memory and the current event, everyone was at fault, and no one
was at fault. It all just happened like gravity just happened when my brother
climbed off the teeter-totter too soon — but not in the same way that the rat
got his neck broken trying to steal chicken food. Gravity didn’t intend to
harm. But the rat with no sense of morality still did intend to steal.
We’ve all messed up, mismanaged, and misunderstood, and so, we all must forgive each other as God chooses to forgive us and keep on forgiving for life. That’s the gracious way we all get along. Without grace for each other, memories become accusations become rats stuck in traps in our minds. “That was unfair” becomes “You are unfair,” even if, maybe, you were not. Grace says, “You loved me and did your best to raise me right, and I like the way I turned out, so thank you. I forgive any mistakes you happened to make along the way.” Grace says, “Because I love you, because we’re both fallible, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.”
* * *
Photo of ballet shoes by Haley Parson on Unsplash
Photo of outdoor tea party generated by Gemini
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