Another Birthday: Gratitude

For a Five-Year-Old

by Fleur Adcock

A snail is climbing up the window-sill
into your room, after a night of rain.
You call me in to see, and I explain
that it would be unkind to leave it there:
it might crawl to the floor; we must take care
that no one squashes it. You understand,
and carry it outside, with careful hand,
to eat a daffodil.

I see, then, that a kind of faith prevails:
your gentleness is moulded still by words
from me, who have trapped mice and shot wild birds,
from me, who drowned your kittens, who betrayed
your closest relatives, and who purveyed
the harshest kind of truth to many another.
But that is how things are: I am your mother
and we are kind to snails.

***

Mama never drowned my kittens, of course. That’s unthinkable.  She did, however, have a mother who grew up on a farm, so she learned to be a realist when it came to animals.  For instance, Gramma Rhetta kept rabbits in a cage in the back yard, and sometimes those rabbits would…disappear…and then something rather suspicious ended up on the dinner table.  Mama would always pick at her dinner on those nights, unwilling to complete the food chain.

Mama spent childhood summers on that same farm, and watched Mammy (her grandmother) stoically walk out to the chicken coop, grab an unsuspecting victim, and with one harsh flick of the wrist, render it limp. Then Mama got the tedious job of picking out the pinfeathers for Sunday lunch, which she somehow managed to gag down.

Thus, Mama had no trouble disposing of some of our childhood pets. In her defense, my sister and I tended to drag any moth-eaten, abandoned critter back to the house, and many of them were unsuitable for suburban life.

There was Tiny, the crawdad, who lived in a bucket on the porch for three weeks before he got alarmingly big and stinky, so we all got herded into the car and watched Mama hurl that sucker into a local lake.  She threw him out of that bucket with such force that Tiny got the ride of his life. I wonder if he ever recovered.

There were the two baby chicks, found abandoned in a cardboard box, who Mama inadvertently killed by keeping them in our cold basement at night.  I ran down to see them the next morning and came upstairs, informing Mama that the chicks were “still sleeping.”  Mama stopped flipping pancakes and turned around slowly. “Still sleeping?” she said, a small flicker crossing her face.

“Yup,” I said cheerfully and ate my breakfast. By the time I came home from playing hopscotch, the sleeping chicks were history.

And then there was the legendary and rather gruesome demise of “Happy,” the African clawed frog.  My sister was in a high school biology class and raised him from egg stage, to tadpole, and then to frog.  Experiment completed, she toted Happy back in a plastic bag filled with water one afternoon, much to my mother’s dismay.  Resigned, she cleaned out an old fishbowl we owned and in went Happy, but my mother warned my sister sternly that the feeding and cleaning of the fishbowl was solely my sister’s responsibility.

Of course, my sister agreed, and of course, she failed to keep her end of the bargain. This presented a bit of a dilemma for Mama, because after a few weeks of tending to Happy, she’d had enough. Without Mama’s intervention, Happy’s bowl became disgustingly septic and yet, the dude didn’t die. Alas, Mama couldn’t throw Happy into Tiny’s lake, nor could she simply flush him down the loo, because my sister’s teacher had warned the students that African clawed frogs should never be flushed or put in a river or lake; apparently, African clawed frogs are Hell on sewage systems.

What to do? Poor Mama. Finally, at wit’s end, she just fished him out of his filthy habitat, placed him in a Ziploc bag and stomped on the sucker.

“Happy” ending, ja?

Ah, Mama. How did you survive us, naughty and disobedient things that we were?

And yet you taught us manners (even if we didn’t always use them), and how to be gracious and civil, and that compassion is never wasted, and that it’s good to make your bed first thing in the morning, because it sets the tone for the day.  You excoriated us when we were unkind, taught us that homemade bread always tastes better, and assured us–always–that we had good brains and to use them.

Happy Birthday, Mama. I know it’s been a Helluva year, and I’m so happy to celebrate the day with you. You taught me to love fiercely, without restraint or shame. And I do.

Tagged as: lessons our mothers teach us, mothers and daughters