In college, I was asked to film a few spots for the local television station. Vortex, the Literary and Art Journal of the University of Central Arkansas, had just been released for 1998, and someone thought some of the pieces needed to be performed and filmed for a wider viewing audience. (Already, it seemed, people had stopped actually reading the printed word). I had been having some success with competitive forensics (speech and debate tournaments), so I got the invitation to record poetry by UCA’s Joy Berry-Parks.
Therein began my infamous run with oranges.
One of her poems, written while staying home with her toddler, is situated in the moment of eating oranges with her child. This is the end:
Thoroughly juiced, you sit cross-legged, Absorbed in your third orange. This is sweet! you say, overcome. I know, I know — I have tasted these years fully. *It aired over, and over, and over. From then on, a bunch of the sales guys I worked with at Acxiom would pass me in the hall and say, “Was it sweet, Kristi? Was it sweet?”
I was smiling about that today when I remembered another Berry-Parks poem, one I didn’t recite on camera but instead recited during a reception for the Vortex release. At the time, as a young twenty-one-year-old, I didn’t understand it, but now, here in the madness of mothering two daughters, it is making so much sense. It helps explain the turbulent turn my relationship with Emily has taken.
I think my small, sophisticated daughter lives in a maturity far beyond her six tiny years. She is sensing and observing me in ways I wouldn’t have expected from her for another decade. And I think the tension between us is simple: she is cut very differently than I am.
I am certainly no celebrity, but I’m still a very public figure. I blog about my family; I write in a local magazine – about my family. I tell our stories; my stories; her stories. I have an out-front, completely extroverted personality. And I make sure I’m heard. I’m not loud, but I am indeed forthright.
My little opposite cringes at all I embrace. She’s introverted; she prefers solitude and silence; she is not gregarious. The cloud of people I float within repels her. She is put off by the flash of my smile and the public embrace I am fully ready to offer. She wants her space, and she wants me to herself, in a quiet way that I don’t often manage.
My son adores sharing me with the world around us. He feeds off the energy in the very same way I do. Likewise, my baby girl Maggie is quick to point out people she thinks I might know in the grocery store so I can wave a friendly hello. But Emily, oh, not Emily. She’d far rather duck and hide behind the deli counter than make small talk with yet another person commenting on her long blonde hair or asking her about school.
And while most daughters will seek at some point to differentiate themselves from their mothers, Emily is already quite different. So I’m learning how to protect her from the clanging noise that surrounds me. It is my job to help her hold onto anonymity (which she prefers) while also gently teaching her how and when to step outside of her personal space. We’ll work these kinks out. I am just overjoyed to finally, maybe, understand the forces at work here. It would be so easy to write it off as insolence, to try to punish the occasional “bad” behavior. But I will not do that. I will work to understand this gorgeous gift of a girl, a girl turned so differently than I.
So, if you have a minute, read Joy Berry-Parks’ Armistice. I didn’t understand it fourteen years ago.
I understand it now.
Armistice We chose sides like enemies in gym class – Mother and I. She took for her own: the color red, Laughter, flash, hair rollers, Her beauty pageant ribbon and small-town-princess photos. All the shining things: Silver, chrome, and mirrors. Winter. Cleaning. The smell of bleach on hands; Floor wax, furniture polish, fingernail polish. I surveyed what was left: what was unimportant, Useless to her, I embraced: All the browns – books, bronze and copper, dust. Matte, not glossy, please. Dusk. Fires. Laziness. Speculation. Philosophy. Salinger, Updike, and Nabokav, And the time to enjoy them, while the laundry’s stains set. A friendly chaotic life, apropos of nothing. I stood in the shadows she threw; My life was the negative of her own, And I hated the glare she put off: Her laughter too loud in my ears, Too colorful, too bold, too much. She swept through her life like a storm cloud; I watched from my refuge for clearing skies. She raged, I waited. She has begun to fade now Like those wildflowers in hellacious shades That grew, and grew, along the roads she walked As a girl, attracting every male eye. Picked, and pressed, found by chance Years later, in all their muted glory. I have opened our life like a book And found her there, like that. She is letting her hair go gray That was buffeted weekly, it seemed, On the shores of approximate youth By the tides of Miss Clairol. It has been years, I realize, since I saw her in red – That flare, that stoplight, that she loved. She is stepping back, into my claimed shade. I see her raucous laughter differently In this light. I think she was as terrified of the power Of her beauty then as I was later on. I think she used what she had to get out. And I think she must have been puzzled, and a little afraid Of me – book lugging, tree climbing, insolence personified In a package that mocked hers at every turn. She got her bluff in early on me, though, And 23 years takes note of what ten could not. I am beginning to see the color red In power, and energy, and love, and will; And I am wearing her scent, Sometimes – and I am watching less, I am raging more… For her, for me, for the daughter I will be anathema to.*At Home, by Joy Berry-Parks, 1998
My daughters. May I never be an anathema to them.
The Myopic Life 