Snow Angels

Today I told Dick: the thing I hated most about my childhood was having to be quiet when my dad needed to sleep.

It was selfish. My dad was in a Navy residency program back in the draconian doctor days, and he needed his sleep. I don’t even remember how often we had to be quiet, how often the need to be quiet impinged on what I wanted to do, or even being punished for being loud instead of being quiet. I just remember having to be quiet. I don’t know why I hated it, because my favorite thing to do as a child was to read, but my second favorite thing to do was a sedate sort of interaction with my brother and sister that led my parents to say “If you must kill each other, please, do it quietly.”

Today the snow was beautiful: thick flurries whitewashing the dead brown lawn stubbles, plastering over the evidence of a procrastinated autumn fertilization.

Dick needed us to be quiet today. All day, it seemed like. He recorded screencasts for his latest freelance work. He sat at the table in my kitchen, recording his work, letting the girls watch him through the camera viewfinder, more exponentially patient than my dad ever was, and I ever am. During one of his breaks, I made special brownies, two small pans, one for now and one to freeze for later next week when the friend who was best man at our wedding stays with us as he moves cross-country.

I am jealous of Dick’s new ventures. I hate that he schedules extra, complicated things for December, that he says he has to because we need the money, that he asked us to be quiet, on Saturday, when all of us are home and all I wanted was to bask in the coziness of home while the perfect snow falls to cover the hard ground.

I hate that he is learning new things and being rewarded for learning new things when I feel desperate to paint some fresh new snow over my just-scabbed frustration. I know I should have fertilized in the fall, but couldn’t God take my rage without my walking back and forth?

I cut into the pan of brownies that is for us today, and covered the other with clingwrap. The loud, rustling layer of tinfoil had to wait as Dick started another screencast. I went upstairs.

The snow really was beautiful. My thin crust of pure patience had seams of scratchy, too-long grass poking through, but I nursed my caffeine indulgence, cleaned the girls’ room, and filled bags with broken games, worn-out clothes, and ratty stuffed animals for disposal at the DI. There is nothing more cathartic than pruning the stuff that flourishes like morning glory in the corners of my house.

Back downstairs Dick agreed that the girls could have a brownie; Sally cut herself one from the today pan. Susan and Spot took the wrap off the next-week pan and dug into the middle.

Dick said the screaming and raw, impotent fury was a bit of an overreaction. But it’s never about the brownies. It’s about the seething bedrock of never having just one thing stay perfect, stay finished. I wash the laundry: they change clothes again. I run the dishwasher: they need a seventh glass of water. I feed them: they poop it all away.

I respond kindly to ear-grating whining and mind-shredding fighting five times, but the sixth time a clump of crab grass breaks through the frozen powder, and minutes later I wonder who is that awful woman who can’t seem to remember that she is a mother, not a monster? Why can’t this one day be perfect?

I am busy patching back together my snowy crust of calm and superficial serenity, of soft voices and sympathetic arms; if only I can paper over this seam, coax that anger back to hibernation.

I helped the girls get snow pants, coats, boots, hats, and gloves on, earlier, before the brownie violation occurred. They ruined the snowscape. They churned it up till the backyard was half dead, brown grass and half clean, white snow. I loved that they did that, so freely, so exuberantly. I thought: this is a great metaphor. I’ll say: you think you want pristine panoramas of perfection. You think you want order, and quiet, and sheets tucked tidily under mattresses.

You think you want a life where precocious children would never put a finger in the middle of a covered pan of brownies. But then you realize that you can’t make snow angels without disturbing the drifts. You can’t have joy without the mess.

I should have captured it right there. Preserved it, polished it, added it to the loop of stuff I tell myself when I wander in my thoughts at stoplights and while being quiet during screencasts.

Instead I constructed the other metaphor, of snow as bandaid, as wood filler for a rotten stump. It’s not as sweetly affirming as the other image. There’ll never be enough snow to cure the grass beneath. And even if it was never about the brownies, even if it was about something true and validly infuriating, it was never worth evoking fear and shame.

So it’s easy to think of giving up. Walking away. I am never going to be the mother these children deserve. I am never going to be deep down the mirror core of the patchwork covering of snow I mostly enough maintain on the outside.

But in the spring the snow will melt, both the brown snow sick with dirt and salt and the last baptizing whiteout of the winter. And it will be time to fertilize again, another chance to soak into the roots.

I was folding towels when Dick responded to Spot’s overtired hysteria past her bedtime. Sally was reading in her room and Susan had been allowed to fall asleep in our bed because Spot was so disruptive. I climbed the stairs and changed her back into her pajamas. Patience came from somewhere, and a promise to snuggle with her for awhile. My hand on her chest, I felt her heartbeat in my fingertips. She had forgotten, or forgiven, enough that my being there was calming. She rubbed her eyes vigorously, then turned her face away, as she always does to sleep, and sighed, long and low.