The Motherpeace Ruby Al-Qasem
The Motherpeace Ruby Al-Qasem
Editor-in-Chief
Leslie Jill Patterson Fiction Editor
Katie Cortese Senior Managing Editor
Meghan E. Giles Managing Editors
Nonfiction Trifecta 2020
Jennifer Buentello Jacob Hall Sara Ryan Valerie Wayson
Associate Editors TIMILEHIN ALAKE, EMMA AYLOR, CALEB BRAUN, EMMA BROUSSEAU, WILLIAM BROWN, JAY CULMONE, ANDREW GILLIS, ELIZABYTH HISCOX, MAEVE KIRK, EMERSON KURDI, MARCOS DAMIÁN, WILLIAM LITTLEJOHN-ORAM, COURTNEY LUDWICK, BROOK MCCLURG, ZACHARY OSTRAFF, CATHERINE RAGSDALE, VALERIE WAYSON, AND LAUREN WEST
Copyright © 2020 Iron Horse Literary Review. All rights reserved. Iron Horse Literary Review is a national journal of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. IHLR publishes three print issues and three electronic issues per year, at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas, through the support of the TTU President’s Office, Provost’s Office, Graduate College, College of Arts & Sciences, and English Department.
THE MOTHERPEACE
1. I have two sons; they’re seven and two years old. The five-year gap between them is the time it took for me to work up the courage to go through it again—not childbirth, but the experience afterward of being adrift on a monstrous sea, with no compass and no star chart to help me find my way. But loving one so much it hurts makes you wonder about having another; eventually, I leaped again.
Migrant Mother | Dorothea Lange, 1936
I’m thinking these days about how afraid my mom must have been. Maybe I mean: I’m wondering how afraid she must have been. (Because I can’t ask her; because, when I was fifteen years old, she suddenly died.) I am afraid most of the time—this is something I did not expect about motherhood. There is something about my performance of motherhood that always seems lacking, and I worry and wonder about all the things other mothers (other women?) seem to know and I do not. My ignorance is cast into stark relief by my mothering. I worry what damage it will do. Mom must have been terrified, but if she was, I never saw it. For chunks of my childhood, Dad was near death, in and out of hospitals for years. What must she have felt when she considered the prospect of parenting alone? And, did her anxieties about his health transfer over to ours—did she find herself enclosed within a loop of her own making, a noose, a coil of thoughts and fears about all there was to lose?
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My doctor recently told me that I definitely have anxiety. He said definitely because I had been trying to explain away my symptoms, as if to scoff at my own complaints, to show him that I was aware some of the things I had told him I’d been thinking and doing were ridiculous. My older son begins to have a series of headaches and then reports seeing large, unmoving, colorful spots most mornings after he wakes up, and I very nearly convince myself he has a brain tumor.
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2. Here’s something about me: sometimes I have predicted things that came true. I used to like to scare my sister Amanda on summer days when it was too hot to go outside so we hung out in our room playing Tetris on the Nintendo. The game’s music got old, so sometimes we’d mute the TV and play the radio instead, and I’d try to predict what song they were going to play next. I was right just often enough that Amanda would look at me with eyes like full moons, half in awe, half afraid. In high school, when we put on a Halloween carnival for the little kids, I didn’t want to man the fishing booth or the ring toss. I decided to create our first-ever fortune-telling booth. From somewhere, I acquired two giant pieces of cardboard—a refrigerator box, maybe—and spray-painted them black, then again with a dusting of silver glitter, then added pearlescent moons and golden stars. I had a “gypsy” costume; this was not considered racist back then in small-town Nowhere, Texas, though I cringe at it now. There was a long broom skirt and a red ruffled top that I wore, exposing both shoulders. Big hoop earrings. My mom rustled up a filmy flowered scarf from somewhere for my hair. I found a packing box and a globe light fixture; I cut a hole in the box the size of the globe’s base and painted the globe’s interior with a swirl of pastel watercolors. A flashlight went inside the box, underneath the globe, lighting it up. I had a shimmery black length of fabric to drape all around the box and the base of the globe. I
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made myself a sign, black, tracing my hands onto creamy manila paper, giving one index finger a jeweled ring and pasting the hands over a depiction of a glimmering fortune-teller’s ball. I named myself Madame Zoltara. (I think that was it.) I made dramatic letters from golden-yellow construction paper and arched them over the hands. The trick to making people (especially children) believe is to maintain the illusion, speak with confidence, and observe with care. I was good at all these things. That year, I used the announcer’s box in our school gym; kids had to climb up into the darkened space (my cardboard arranged overhead blocked out the gym lights and squeaking sneakers). I made a series of safe predictions based on what I knew of these kids and their families—it was a small town, after all. And it was enough to make them believe. Word spread. The line of kids wound across the gym. As a young adult, I worked for a company that moved its offices from North Dallas to downtown Dallas. One day, a few weeks after the move, I told my work friend Chris that I’d dreamed the night before that my car had gotten broken into. I didn’t like the lot we’d been parking in; in our old office, we’d had a garage. But I also had to admit I’d had no trouble in the new lot; there were attendants, and it was broad daylight. He and I laughed it off and turned back to our computers. That evening, we walked out together, and when we reached the lot, there sat my little red Honda Prelude, missing a window, the black driver’s seat and black asphalt around that side of the car glittering under a shower
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of smashed window glass, like a spray of stars across a night sky. It was almost pretty. I was dismayed, alarmed and shaken even, but Chris was stunned. He called me a witch. He asked if I’d been down there during the day. I just gave him a look. “I was right next to you all day, dude,” I reminded him. “You think I left my car sitting open like this just to play a joke on you?” In the moment, I felt some kind of weird glee—the vindication of being proven right. It felt like how people get excited when a big storm is headed their way, and they pretend they’re worried, but there’s a spring in their step as they clear the grocery shelves of bread and bottled water, isn’t there? It’s a childish feeling, something we don’t admit to. I think it has something to do with the inevitable: the adrenaline rush of succumbing, of accepting what’s to come. Battening down the hatches. And beneath the thrill of being right, beneath my delight at Chris’s funny look of shock, beneath the dismay and the inconvenience of the broken window, I also felt a little hunted. A little haunted. It’s not like I dreamed it the week before; it was the night before. And if this fear came true, what other fears might follow suit?
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Mary Battles Satan in the Book of Hours (The Taymouth Hours) | 1325-1350
3. Circular reasoning is a logical fallacy. The person doing the reasoning begins with what they are trying to end with, and so the argument appears true because it supposes premises and then sets out to prove a conclusion based on them. But that supposing is the problem. I’m still not totally convinced it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t told Chris. I realize this makes no sense. This means that if I write about my son having a brain tumor, he might get one. Or that it’s already there, like my broken car must have been, waiting to be stumbled upon now that I have called out its name. It didn’t take much to convince those children that I knew what I was doing, that they’d really had their fortunes foretold.� Maybe it didn’t take much for me to convince myself, as a child, that I had some kind of sixth sense.
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Later: mother’s intuition, a compounding agent. When the mother-fear comes for me, I can’t fight it with logic because I’m too worried the fear will come to pass. That’s not very likely, the sensible part of my mind argues, when I begin to worry one of the kids will fall over the back of the couch, onto the hard slate floor below, and break his neck. But odds mean nothing to a mother: the chances are slim, but the stakes are unimaginably high. I refuse to let a failure of imagination steal a child from me. I would prefer to be wrong about everything, forever, than to be right about any of this.
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4. Witches gather in circles called ritual or magic circles. These are thought to both contain energy and offer protection; the circle acts to shut out the world, silence distractions, and contain and concentrate the witches’ energy as it builds. These circles might be demarcated by something (like chalk, or an outline cut into the earth, or candles, shells, or stones), or they might be imagined or envisioned only. Typically, the witches take care to mark the four cardinal directions. Within the circle, the witches might join hands and repeat incantations, almost like mantras, or they might dance and chant. The idea is that the coven concentrates on a single point in the center of the circle, and this group concentration will focus energy, seemingly creating something from nothing: a cone of power, it’s called, with the circle at its base, rising into the air—a sort of tornado in reverse, sending their power, along with their shared intention, beyond the circle and into the world.
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5.
Hawaiian Mother and Child | Charles W. Bartlett, 1920
There’s a cliché about moms who read too much WebMD, and I am that cliché. If I mention research to doctors, I rush to explain to them that I hold a graduate degree in writing and English—that I am qualified to research, that I know how to conduct research, how to parse fact from fiction. Even so, in the dark of night in bed, my iPhone Safari windows have reached their limit (which is 500, I can say with authority). Some of the tabs are things I plan to read— news, recipes, creative work by peers or idols. And some of them belong to the National Institute of Health or the Mayo Clinic. My husband snoozes next to me while I set timers on my phone, every three hours, so that I can deliver Motrin and Tylenol in alternating little cups of pink or purple syrupy liquid, to control a fever I worry will keep rising if I don’t. He snoozes while I conduct my research. He sleeps the sleep of someone who has never had a loved one yanked away unexpectedly. And I stay wide awake, reading.
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Some of my internet tabs are news articles about kids succumbing to strange (or, worse, everyday) symptoms. Some children fall asleep after a long day swimming in the pool and die from secondary drowning—no one knew there was water in their lungs, which caused swelling, blocking their ability to move oxygen into their bloodstreams. (This can occur hours or even days after swimming.) The advice in this case is to watch for excessive sleepiness after swimming—clearly, whoever wrote this has no children. For every summer evening my kids splash in the pool with their dad, squealing in joy, I lose a night of sleep. I’ve bought a pulse oximeter so I can check their blood oxygenation levels. I clamp it onto their little index fingers as they sleep off the utter exhaustion of children who’ve been swimming in the sun, and wait to see a reassuring number. Other children get a sore throat and die from a basic strep infection. Others die of flu. The scariest stories are the ones in which the mom has tried to play it cool and her kid dies. (It’s almost always the moms, too—the dads don’t seem to have this compulsion to unpack their sudden and horrific loss, to find and assign blame. At least: they don’t do this publicly.) She tried to stay calm, to hold her peace and not haul her kid into the pediatrician for every cough or rash. She knows what the doctors and nurses must think about her. That she’s an alarmist. That she’s paranoid. That she needs a hobby. Then it’s too late—the benign thing takes her kid from her. About her child’s seemingly minor symptoms, “We didn’t think it was such
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a big deal,� this mom might sob to a reporter or recount on her blog, the one she started after the loss, the one where she uses words like talismans to channel her grief in some discernable direction, even if only top-to-bottom, left-to-right.
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6. I remember Mom reluctantly supplying Band-Aids for my dolls who’d been “hurt.” I remember a large clear plastic tub, lidded, full of medicines and a couple of ACE bandages, brought down from the top of her closet whenever someone was sick. I remember this tub always had a certain smell, which, I discovered when my son came along, was the smell of Desitin diaper rash cream. I remember, in the final weeks before her sudden death, Mom took two days off work to stay home and nurse me through a terrible bout of strep throat. I also know I am the kind of mom who often waves a dismissive hand and says, “You’re fine. Go play,” or, “That’s no big deal, it’s just a scrape, you’ll live,” or, “Are you sure your throat hurts? It doesn’t even look red.” And I know that Mom often did the same, because I learned it from her. But how did she find the balance? Wasn’t she ever worried she might guess wrong?
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7. The websites that list the symptoms for serious childhood illnesses or disorders always finish the same way: If your child has two or more of these symptoms, it’s best to see a doctor right away. And many of them add one more sentence. Here’s the version used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: As a parent, you know your child best. If your child is not meeting the milestones for his or her age, or if you think there could be a problem with the way your child plays, learns, speaks, acts, and moves, talk to your child's doctor and share your concerns. Don't wait. The CDC is referring specifically to development here. But lots of websites advise the same: Regardless of what you read here on our page, if you are concerned, call your child’s doctor. Trust your instinct.
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8.
The Mothers (woodcut) | Kathe Kollwitz, 1922
Before becoming an unsure mother, I was a sure student, because even as a child, I really hated being wrong about things. I pushed myself to know. Yet, it’s harder for me to remember, now, the things I knew or learned, and easier to recall the lessons I struggled with. Here’s a list: a. Labeling a map of the states with all fifty states and learning their capitals. My mom taught me some mnemonic devices for as many of them as she could, and those were the ones I could remember—the capitals I could tie to puns, the ones I could wrap up in language that meant something to me, like little incantations I said to myself during the quizzes, ways of knowing unknowable answers. This was in fifth grade, Mrs. Maynard’s class. b. Labeling the phases of the moon, eighth-grade Earth Science with dear Mr. Brown. The worksheets we used to do this arranged the phases in a circle, like the dial of a clock. I
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never could understand how to tell which gibbous was waxing, which was waning? Which crescent waxing, which waning? They were depicted identically, two pairs facing off across the diameter of the circle. Thinking on it now, it seems to me that the circular layout on the worksheets and quizzes was the problem. c. The formula or methodology for balancing chemical equations, tenth or eleventh grade Integrated Physics and Chemistry. I look it up now: the purpose of balancing a chemical equation is to ensure that it conforms to the Law of Conservation of Mass, which dictates that “in a closed or isolated system, matter cannot be created or destroyed. It can change forms but is conserved.” Balancing chemical equations means finding a balance of atoms on both sides of the equations—finding a balance of energy, basically, because mass and energy are relative to one another. Balancing chemical equations is a process of trial-and-error. This list is not conclusive. It does not include, for example, my failure to learn how to balance authenticity with enough performativity so that people will listen to my fears without dismissing them—without dismissing me. Because performance is exhausting, and a depleted and terrified mother cannot always find the energy for it.
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9. When my first son was a baby and I a brand-new mother, I distinctly remember being afraid of him. I was afraid for him, of course, all the time. I checked to make sure he was breathing a thousand times, licking my finger and holding it to his tiny nostrils in the dark or risking the shine of my phone’s light on him in the night to watch his narrow chest rise and fall. I insisted the doctors space out his vaccinations—he got them all, but I wasn’t going to let them give him eight things at once, even if it meant I went to the pediatrician for shots a lot more often. I read all about his gut microbiome and would not let my mother-in-law give him any solid food whatsoever until he was five months old—and only then because she pushed. She said my milk was giving him gas and making him so difficult. So I gave in. The difficulty stuck around though; it was who he was. A challenging child, seemingly immune to fear or caution. When he got older, I never took my eyes from him, acting as spotter as he climbed playground equipment, preventing too many catastrophes to count, even in our home. As a toddler, he grabbed a steak knife from the dishwasher basket as I rinsed ketchup off a plate and took off running with it. I was horrified, certain he would impale himself before I could bribe him to stop running and drop the knife. I taught myself safer ways of doing every single thing, I and wondered constantly: if Mom had lived, would she have taught me how to mother better than this? Because surely I was failing on a million levels.
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But I also remember being afraid of him. I remember trying to sneak up to his cradle to peek and see if he was asleep (or breathing) and him catching sight of me, and my heart absolutely seized in fear. There is nothing else to call it. Physically the sensation was terror. I wanted him not to notice me, not to begin crying and screaming for me, not to insist on another forty-five minutes of breastfeeding, not to keep me up all night because he’d slept poorly all day and kid-logic dictates too little sleep must compound to even less. Once he began crawling (at an extremely young age; both my children were early and dangerous movers), he followed me all over the house, room to room. I joked that I had a tail, but it certainly could become wearing, especially when I just needed to drop off some towels in the hallway bathroom or something. I’m coming right back, I’m coming right back, I’d chant near frantically as I jogged down the hall, but it was no use. He was already following me, squalling because I’d gotten too far away, rounded a corner out of sight. One day, feeling especially overwhelmed, lumpy and leaky and exhausted, I remember hiding in that same bathroom. I left the door slightly ajar but didn’t turn on the lights. I waited, my back pressed against the wall, barely breathing, honestly and irrationally hoping not to be found, as if there was an intruder in the house. I remember my heart hammering in my chest, my breath wanting to catch and gasp, a tingling in my toes and fingers. I could hear him scrambling on the carpet down the hall, and some part of my
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mind imagined a monster, even as I knew it was my own beautiful baby, perfectly formed in every way. By the time he found me, pushing the door open with one fat fist, I was in a near panic. Even as I saw him, all I felt was terrified. There was nowhere to run. That’s all I could think. No way to escape his inexhaustible needing.
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Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book | A. Hughes (illustrator), 1893
10. My youngest sister, Katie, who is twenty-four now, has a mandala tattoo on her upper right arm, near the curve of her shoulder. She got this tattoo after Dad died (fifteen years after Mom). She was twenty years old by that time. The initial of his first name, “M,” is nested in its very center, almost invisible. Mandala means “circle” in Sanskrit; it’s written like this: . Mandalas serve a number of purposes, which vary according to the religion of the practitioner employing them, but one use is to establish a sacred space in order to induce trances or aid in meditation. Often the practitioner will also chant or intone mantras in order to focus concentration. Mandalas are said to represent the whole of the universe, connecting humanity to the infinite and unknowable. They typically have a focused center point and branch out on all sides in a variety of shapes and patterns that balance each other across their countless diameters.
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11. Tarot cards have existed since the mid-15th century; the ďŹ rst games were played right around the time Michel de Montaigne penned his Essais. In the late 18th century, the cards became more than a game, began to be used in connection with the occult and divination practices. Some tarot decks use round cards, rather than rectangular. These decks have names: The Motherpeace, Daughters of the Moon, Songs for the Journey Home, Star That Never Walks Around, Circle of Life, and Cloisters. Practitioners who prefer round decks say they allow for more nuanced readings because they offer more orientations than a typical deck would. Some liken the round cards to the lunar phases, with a card in reverse representing the dark or new moon, and upright representing the full moon, and so on. The phases symbolized by the lay and placement of the card communicate information about energy: whether it’s waxing, waning, dormant. Tarot cards are not used to tell the future. Believers say that a tarot deck works like a mirror held up to the self: it reveals hidden inner truths that we may not have known were there. It’s a form of selfassessment, a search for wisdom, a hope to know and understand. The cards are said to help a person access their intuition and subconscious, as a step toward manifesting dreams for the future.
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12. The ranch where I spent my first eighteen years is called the Circle M Ranch: the M is for Mitchell, my dad’s first name and his father’s last name. Dad went by Mitch. As a little boy in big-city Houston, Dad wore fringed leather chaps with a white-and-red striped Tshirt and a cowboy hat. He dreamed of owning his own ranch, a dream his stepfather told him he was too stupid to achieve. Eventually though, with the help of his biological father—that other Mitchell—he manifested his dream into a tangible place of his own: real soil and stones beneath his feet, real sky and branches above. With Mom’s help, he changed that place from raw, wild land into something livable. He never wore chaps there in my memories, but cowboy hats were the norm before he made the switch to baseball caps. For eighteen years, I passed daily through the front gate, underneath an iron sigil: an M in a circle, painted red to stand out from the rest of the white- painted pipe gate. When I asked Katie about her tattoo recently, she told me she’d wanted to carry that symbol with her, but she didn’t want to be branded; the mandala was a way of making the mark her own. Who emerges from their childhood unmarked? I haven’t met them yet. I don’t have any tattoos on my skin—maybe I just wear mine on the inside. But I understand the urge to bring the inner to the outer, to bear the mark in plain sight.
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13.
A couple of years ago, my older son had a series of very high fevers. He was sick, off and on, for months and months. He was four years old, then five. He would wake me by standing next to my bed in the middle of the night. So often it happened when his dad was traveling for work, and I was alone and pregnant, or, later, alone with a newborn. I’d check him. When a kid’s fever gets to a certain level, they feel dry-hot, white-hot, like ovens with nothing inside, just burning away, sucking out all the water from the air. The thermometer would climb and climb. 104.5. 104.8. 105.1. 105.3. Anything over 104 and I forced him into the bathtub, even as he protested. I ran it lukewarm, not cold, because that’s what you’re supposed to do. It felt freezing to him; he’d shiver and chatter and whimper and cry. I’d apologize and apologize, dumping Motrin into a dosing cup, checking the measurement then ordering him to drink every drop, then searching for the Tylenol to give him that, too. (A lesson most people don’t know: you can stack them, if you need to. One is processed by the kidneys; the other, the liver.) After his pediatrician divined no answers for the fevers, even after many visits, I took him to an immunologist. They did allergy testing, pricking his back with long strips of plastic spikes, each daubed with a different allergen. He cried and itched, but wasn’t allowed to scratch as the tiny pricks bloomed into so many red aureoles beneath the wings of his young shoulder blades. They ran blood panel after blood panel. Thousands of dollars in blood work. On the nights between fevers, he’d wake up drenched in sweat or
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screaming with night terrors. During many of the days, he complained of leg pain. He limped often. I discussed it with his pediatrician and then took him for X-rays of his legs. Constantly I wondered whether his doctor was more worried than she was letting on, or was less worried but humoring me? I begged her to shoot straight with me—my dad’s phrase—and she promised me she was. I waited while the friendly young techs did scans of his legs, worrying there’d be round, ghostly tumors nestled along his straight and beautiful bones. There weren’t. Still, the limping. The sweating. The fevers. Once, he screamed for us at two in the morning and told us he couldn’t move his body, and indeed, it seemed he could not. Nothing I tried worked: tickling, cajoling, threatening. He must have been five when this happened. We took him to the emergency room, but by the time we arrived, he was normal again. Still, we waited, shaken, letting him play with his dad’s phone while I desperately shifted his fussy baby brother from my breast to the stroller, then back again, trying to shield him from a room full of germs. The doctors suggested growing pains might be the culprit. Aren’t those a myth? I asked. The doctors shrugged. Eventually an ENT figured out that he needed to have tubes in his ears. He had ongoing infections that weren’t clearing because the fluid couldn’t drain through the cone-shaped eustachian tubes, which in his case were chronically blocked. If we solved this problem, his immune system would recover. And it did. They pierced his eardrums and installed tiny tubes while he slumbered under the anesthesiologist’s drugs, and then we took him home. And that season of being terrified more nights than not passed behind us, and we were glad to see it go.
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The Scarlet Letter | Hugues Merle, 1861
14. Fairy circles are rings of fungus—typically mushrooms or toadstools of some kind. At one time, they were thought to circumscribe magical—even dangerous—places. Inside a fairy ring, the rules of logic cease to hold sway, and reality becomes slippery. A lot of myths insist that if you step into one, you’ll die young—or be transported to a realm of evil beings. Some legends claim the misstep will cause you to lose an eye. Still others say that a person who dares enter a fairy ring will be forced to dance within the ring, on and on, until she dies of exhaustion or is driven insane. I had a video game once in which I wandered my hero directly into a ring of mushrooms in the darkened forest, again and again, even though I knew he would die and I’d have to start back at the last checkpoint. The appearance of the fairies, the way they swirled around him in the game’s moonlight, his staggering dance becoming more and more frantic until he seized and crumpled to a heap on the ground, entranced me. The fairies were beautiful even as they killed him. (Even as I killed him.) I couldn’t stop looking.
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Fairy rings are also, not surprisingly, associated with witches; the sudden morning appearance of the rings in forest glens have historically seemed apt evidence of a witches’ gathering and dance the night before. They seemed, to those living in centuries past, a kind of naturalistic demarcation for the witches’ recent cone of power. We know now that fairy circles are a naturally occurring phenomenon: the root systems of the fungus form a ring beneath the soil, resulting in a circle of mushrooms above ground where we can see. There is a ring in Belfort, France, that is two thousand feet in diameter and seven hundred years old. I would like to come across one some gloomy evening and step into it, just for the thrill. Maybe I want to prove to myself that nothing comes of silly fears. My logical mind insists these fears are, indeed, silly, and of course nothing would happen. But the other part, the illogical hemisphere—that part can’t help but be a little bit afraid of the idea of standing within a fairy circle. And yet this same part—the part that believes the stories are real—also wants to give it a try. Like standing on a balcony and imagining the leap. Maybe I want to justify my fears while proving I’m still brave enough to face them. Or maybe I want to reinvent the kind of magic ascribed to these rings: if fairies are involved, and mushrooms, and forests, then why would they be places of evil and danger? Maybe I want to believe that safety is a thing that exists, even if all the narratives insist that it doesn’t.
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Still: if the scary stories exist, they must have come from somewhere. I realize I’m irrationally insisting on stories as evidence (which is to say: insisting on myths as truths. The words are not so far apart, after all).
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15. “Mommy,” my son says to me this morning, “my eyes are doing that thing again.” I’m immediately alarmed but try to play it casual. “Oh yeah? What do you see?” My tone is breezy. He stares across the room at the hardwood floor; his socks are slack in his hands. He has been getting dressed for school. “It’s pink,” he tells me. “Shaped like a foot.” “A pink footprint?” “It’s not really a footprint,” he clarifies. “Just shaped kinda like that.” He’s the biggest kid in his class, a whole head taller than everyone else, lean and strong. When he stands next to his younger brother, it’s easy to forget how little he is. How young. But sometimes his shoulders seem impossibly narrow, his hair impossibly tousled and childish. “What kind of pink?” I ask. And: “Is it floating around? Is it moving?” “Bright, like a highlighter.” He holds his hand up in front of his face. “Not moving,” he reports. “When I put my hand here, then it’s on my hand now.”
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So . . . not a floater, which I have already researched. Not anything that seems normal to me. Not anything I have been able to find a web page for, though it doesn’t stop me searching. After a moment, he tells me the shape has gone, and I usher him through teeth-brushing and take him to school, worrying all the way.
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Yashoda Suckling the Infant Krishna | Himachal Pradesh, 18th century
16. When I was a kid, my mom let me read almost anything I wanted. I loved horror from the start; in third grade, I became convinced that I wanted to read Stephen King’s Pet Sematary. Probably Mom had several King novels and this one—with its scary-looking cat on the cover—is the only one that looked intriguing to a nine-yearold. I begged; she relented. She thumbed through the book and used a couple paperclips to demarcate several pages here and there that she said I should not read. Probably I asked her if she’d marked off the good scary parts, and probably she told me no, that she’d marked off the grownup parts and she expected me to respect her rule. There were plenty of times in my teenage years when I read stuff I wasn’t supposed to, but I don’t remember breaking the rule with that book. I’m sure, now, that they were parts of the book that had sex or other adult material. Even so: can you imagine trusting a nine-year-old to read Pet Sematary? I wonder now how Mom could have been so brazen with her nights
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of sleep—wasn’t she worried I’d get too scared and wake her for weeks to come? I already, by that age, had a long history of nightmares. Maybe she needed me out of her hair; I don’t know what she may have been going through during that time in her life. Or maybe she did, indeed, trust me—I was fairly precocious, after all. Or maybe she thought there was no reason to shelter me—I might as well learn fortitude and become brave as soon as possible. In the school and city libraries, she allowed me to check out books on the occult, and I became an elementary scholar of séances, ghost lore, and the patterns of poltergeists. Eventually in high school speech class, I gave my informative speech on the Salem Witch Trials while everyone else taught the class about the Alamo or How to Take Care of Your New Puppy. The speech was a hit; I used it again in college years later. In it, I focused on how people’s perception and fear held so much power: whatever they believed became real to them and was channeled into violence. Quite simply, I loved anything magical—anything that bent the rules of reality. I learned just enough palmistry to impress my smalltown schoolmates and deliver my readings with enough authority that they giggled with the giddy elation of wanting to believe. After the huge success of my first turn as Madame Zoltara in the Halloween Carnival, I became our resident carnival fortune-teller. (Someone eventually took my place when I became a senior, and things began to unravel, and I forgot how to pretend I knew what was coming).
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It occurs to me now that what I was really drawn to then was possibility—the idea that anything could be true, if enough books existed about it, if enough people had claimed to experience it. The idea of all that possibility thrilled me. And now, it scares me.
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17. My older son is the thing I’m most afraid of now; it’s he who keeps me wakeful all night. It’s he who scrambled down the hallway searching for me as a chubby baby; he, years later, with the phantom fevers and unexplained paralysis. Lately, he has also begun to report seeing those colored shapes at school during class time, as well. Symptoms of childhood cancers include: Limping. Unexplained fever. Frequent headaches. Sudden eye or vision changes. The eyes are complex; one characteristic of the eye is the presence of cones, or cone cells. Named for their shape, these cells are responsible for color vision and are far outnumbered by their counterpart, rod cells. They are also much more powerful than the more ubiquitous rod cells, more impervious to light. And they’re the only ones that allow for color-sight. There are three kinds of cones in the human eye; each responds to a different curvature of light wavelength. This is why we have trichromatic vision; we see the colors (and all the variants) of green, red, and blue. Retinoblastoma is a rare cancer of the retina, related to cone cells; most cases of this disease occur during early childhood. My son does not exhibit any of the signs of retinoblastoma, but it is one of many kinds of cancer that can affect vision, and many of those are cancers of the brain, not the eye at all.
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My husband is smart and loving, but no help at all in these matters. His people are hale and hearty; he has no gravestones imprinted in his mind, no WebMD tabs open on his phone. He worries about the children if I tell him to worry; he is consoled if I say I think things are ďŹ ne. For some reason, he has put me in charge of their health. He trusts that I will always know what to do. The burden is truly terrifying. I will take my son to the ophthalmologist again soon. I hope it is just a weird kid being weird. I try for equilibrium when he complains of various ailments: if I give it too much attention, maybe he’ll play it up. Or, worse, he’ll become afraid if he sees me worried; my fears will pass down to him like my brown hair and long legs already have. On the other side of this coin is the worst fear: if I write him off, or pretend to do so in order to keep him from overdramatizing, maybe he will quit reporting something that could be really serious.
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Motherhood | Stanislaw Wyspianski, 1905
18. We played at being witches when we were girls—my sister Amanda and me. Katie wasn’t born yet, or was still a baby, or still a toddler. So Amanda and I played pretend all day—we called it “play like.” “Let’s play like we’re teachers!” or, “Let’s play like we’re surviving in the wilderness!” And so on. Play like became our very own invented verb phrase. And witches was our favorite thing to play like. Through the years, there were several rounds of homemade witch costumes at Halloween—a pair that Mom’s mother made us one year, the year the store ran out of green face paint so we wore blue; another pair Mom made. Once, Mom sewed me an Elvira costume from shiny black faux satin, with sleeves that trailed dramatically beneath my wrists. She used an eyebrow pencil to sketch cleavage onto my flat breastbone. We always drove to town for trick-or-treating because we lived so far out in the country, and I remember all the grownups handing out candy were completely delighted with my costume, after the parades of Ninja Turtles and Little Mermaids.
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When we played witches, we’d wander the woods north of our house, far away from any parents, and no one ever worried about us. We went out every day in shorts and T-shirts (no shoes), sometimes pulling a wagon full of empty jars in case we caught anything interesting. (We always caught something interesting.) Sometimes, we would come across a puffball mushroom, sitting on the ground like a little roundish loaf of bread. We’d fight over who got to do the honors: poke it with a stick so that its dry, papery exterior collapsed, releasing a yellow-orange cloud of spores into the air like a magic spell. We’d use leaves and lichen, pebbles and feathers, creating a brew so that we could cast ineffective spells (mostly on our dogs, who didn’t mind). We’d tangle our hair with twigs or be beautiful witches who walked on tiptoe and moved silently among the trees. We were always scheming, and we never went home until Mom hollered that lunch was ready or we felt hungry enough to run home for ham sandwiches and grape Kool-Aid. The best thing about being witches was always the power it afforded. We could predict the future or alter the fabric of the present. There was nothing to fear when we were witches. Mom caught a long green snake for us once and kept it until we could reach her across the pasture and take possession of it ourselves. She taught us how to identify all the venomous spiders. She saved all the pickle jars for us and never complained about our menagerie of insects and arachnids crowding the porch.
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She trusted us to be safe. Did she worry? Wasn’t she ever afraid? Maybe we were saner than my children are. My children, who seem always on the brink of putting themselves in mortal danger.
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19. Researchers have recently discovered that mushrooms multiply twice as fast during lightning storms, though Japanese mushroom farmers have known this for a long time. Their legends are finally confirmed by science. Scientists don’t understand, yet, the exact mechanism of this phenomenon, but what they do know is that quick bursts of electricity in just the right charge—such as occurs in lightning strikes—can double mushroom output. The actual fungus lives below ground; the mushrooms that we see above ground are their fruiting bodies, and this is the part that proliferates during storms. The current theory about how this happens has to do with the fungi’s reaction to the energy that the storm disperses into the soil. Julian Ryall writes about it for National Geographic News, citing Yuichi Sakamoto, chief researcher at the Iwate Biotechnology Research Center: “It’s possible the mushrooms are giving themselves a reproductive boost in response to danger. . . . ‘For mushrooms, a lightning strike could be a very serious threat that could easily kill them off,’ Sakamoto said. ‘I think they have the need to regenerate before they die, and when they sense lightning, they automatically accelerate their development.’” A direct hit of lightning—of so much voltage, so much condensed energy—would “fry” the mushrooms, the article points out. But energy that travels through the soil is somewhat dissipated and triggers the defensive mechanism of reproduction in the fungus. For a time from my middle childhood to early adulthood, Dad was able to mostly avoid hospital stays. And for part of that time, he
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was a single parent, so a long hospitalization would have been especially devastating. But when I was in my mid-twenties, his health problems compounded, and the hospitalizations resumed, though they were irregular. One of the times he’d taken a turn for the worse, before I had children, I confided to a friend that his weakening health made me feel like I ought to hurry up and get pregnant. I will never forget the comfort I found in her unexpected response: she completely understood this compulsion. I’m glad I didn’t wait too long. Dad got to know my older son, to be at his birth, to hold him, to take him fishing, to tickle him and teach him to swing a hammer. It occurs to me, now, that the year of my son’s mysterious illness(es) was the year following Dad’s death. My younger son will never know his grandfather.
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Boy Under His Mother’s Protective Coat | Sidonie Springer, 1923
20. Dad used to say he made the rounds and checked on each one of us (his pair of daughters, who then became a trio) every night before he slept. I thought it meant he loved us, and I’m sure it did, but now I’m also sure it was a symptom of his undiagnosed anxiety. (My mother’s mother called him high-strung, a nice word for “anxious as hell.”) Now, my children sleep in bed with me until they’re four—not only because I cannot seem to convince them to sleep away from me before that, but also because it makes me feel safe to have them at arm’s reach, the warmth of their heavy little bodies next to my shoulder, the soft smell of their tousled hair not far away, a spot of their drool on my pillow, the rhythm of their breathing like a lullaby; every breath is them telling me, I’m safe right now I’m safe right now I’m safe right now. When I became pregnant with my younger son, we decided it was time for our oldest to sleep in his own bed. At the time, we lived in a new house where all the secondary bedrooms were across the house and upstairs. The staircase was a gentle spiral; its steps, instead of predictably rectangular, were almost cone-shaped, like the spaces between the gills of a mushroom. He was a sleepwalker, and truly I worried he’d fall down the stairs and break his neck. We moved the mattress from his upper bunk to our bedroom floor, and that way, not only could we reach him quickly when he woke us screaming with night terrors or fumbling in sleep-walk, but also, I could squint at him in the murky nightlight glow and make sure he was breathing any time I woke up at night. That was also the year of the fevers,
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the year he complained of leg pain all the time, the year of him limping for no reason, the year of the paralysis one night. When our youngest was born we worried that the new baby’s crying and fussing throughout the night would keep him awake, but I couldn’t bear to move him across the house, so terrified was I that something awful was befalling him right under our noses. I insisted he would adjust to the baby’s crying, and he did. And this way, I could watch them both and never sleep at all. Now, in our new house, all the bedrooms are upstairs, but the one nearest ours (his) is still across two half-stories of stairs and a landing. When my anxiety is bad, I need to check on him two or three times before I feel like I can sleep. If, after checking, I make the mistake of reading an article before bed, or checking my email, then enough time has lapsed that I must check again. Back and forth I go.
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21. When I was a little girl, I had terrible nightmares. I dreamed that my dad would die. But the dreams were not decipherable to anyone but me. In these dreams, I was standing before a huge wall of cogs and wheels, all interconnected and slowly spinning. They looked just like the inner workings of an expensive clock. The pieces shone as they turned, some of them far above my head, too huge and heavy for me to interfere with or even reach. Next to the cogs, I was always tiny, like Alice after she has eaten from one side of the mushroom: shrunk down and powerless. And I wanted to interfere because I knew that they were counting down to something, somehow, and that something was my dad’s death, which was inevitable. I could do nothing but watch the turning of these wheels, listen to their whirring and clicking, metronomic and certain. I always woke sweaty and crying from these dreams, and walked in the dark to my parents’ bedroom, to Dad’s side of the bed, where I stood shivering and silent, trying to discern whether he was breathing. He slept on his side with his arms against his ribs, so sometimes it was hard to tell. If I couldn’t tell, I would put out a hand to touch him, terrified he’d be cold but finding warmth. I’d wake him, and he’d comfort me. Mom had no patience with us girls sleeping in their bed; she didn’t like us kicking her in the shins or stealing her covers, and often, she was the one who had to rise early the next day for work or to take us to school. But Dad was always patient. He let me climb into bed on his side; he’d scoot toward the middle to make room for me and fold his right hand under his head so that his right bicep stuck out,
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and I would make a pillow of that part of his arm and fall asleep feeling safe and feeling that he was safe, too, because I was near him and maybe as long as I kept a watchful eye, nothing bad would happen.
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hidden mother photograph | photographer unknown, date 1800s
22. I don’t know how to cast a spell to protect my children from all the things that could harm them. The only thing I know is to never stop imagining those things and to hope that the undiluted energy of my vigilance will be enough.
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23. I take my son to the ophthalmologist. The room we go into is pleasantly dim, but not dark. The nurse has instructed my son to sit in “the captain’s chair,” meaning the fancy exam chair, and my son grins, all crooked incoming teeth, freckles, dimples. The ophthalmologist is an older guy who is condescending from the moment he comes in the room. He calls me “Mom.” “Mom, we’re here for headaches today—that’s your main concern?” he asks, as soon as he sits on his swivel stool, just after he’s asked my seven-year-old the name of his girlfriend. He hasn’t bothered to introduce himself or shake my hand. “Well, no, my main concern is the colored shapes he sees a lot of times, especially in the mornings.” He’s already shaking his head. “I can tell you right now, I’m not going to be able to help you with any of that. All we can look at today is the eyes.” I’m confused already. “Yes, I know,” I tell him. He runs over me. “Any headaches in the family?” “Yes, I have migraines,” I tell him. I don’t bother to say: And so did my mother.
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He’s nodding, leaning back, lacing his fingers behind his head of thick gray hair. He’s square and lean like an ex-military guy. He probably goes hiking. After the appointment, at my son’s request, this doctor will bring his beautiful female Labrador bounding into the exam room, toy duck in her mouth, and she’ll beg for belly scratches and she’ll give me something to look at instead of the doctor, something to busy me so that I don’t explode. I will need this very badly, or maybe it’s the thing I need least of all, this diffusing of energy I’ve built up over the past half-hour, this deflection. I won’t be able to tell. “Yep,” he’s saying. “Willing to bet, he’s got migraines. Especially with the hereditary factor. I had them when I was a kid, still get them. Sometimes I get blind spots. Like I could be looking at you right now and only see half of your head. A kid might interpret spots like that as shapes, that’s probably what he’s having. I know, I had them all the time as a kid, but I didn’t know then how to communicate what was happening to me. That’s why I ask a series of questions to lead us to migraines, because I know how they go. Now Mom, there’s no way to test for migraines. And he can have migraines with visual disturbances that don’t even include pain.” I try to tell him I know this, but he keeps going. “There’s no way for me to test him for migraines,” he repeats. “I’m not going to be able to help you with that. All I can do is check his eyes.” He sounds almost stern, as if he’s lecturing me for wasting his time.
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I stare at him. I can’t understand what is happening. I say, “I don’t know what you’re trying to get at. Are you saying we shouldn’t be here? What are you saying?” My heart is thump thump thumping in my chest. My legs are crossed; my fingers, woven and resting on my tasteful black slacks. Some pearl beading on my nice sensible sweater catches a bit of light in the dimmed room. I’m trying not to move and not to scream. I have plastered my face with composure, wrapped my body in poise. I am performing mildly-concerned-but-still-totallyreasonable-mother as best as I possibly can. I am thirty-three years old. Mom died when she was forty-five, after a series of doctors ignored her complaints, shrugged her away, wrote her off. She died of Cushing’s Disease, undiagnosed at the time but a textbook case, I’ve come to know. The textbooks say a person will have tumors on either their adrenal glands (as Mom did) or their pituitary gland. They will gain weight until they have what the books call “a moon face.” Cushing’s Disease is curable. “No, I’m just saying I’m not going to be able to help you today.” “You can look at his eye, can’t you? I don’t have the tools at home to look inside his cornea, and you do, right?” “Yes, I can, and I will, but if it’s something else going on, well, this exam’s not going to tell us anything.”
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“My pediatrician told me to take him to see an ophthalmologist first, that that’s the right first step. Before we escalate to the next thing, a neurologist, an MRI. And in case it’s something optical causing the problems.” “See,” he interrupts, shaking his head and closing his eyes, all disdain and cock. “That’s not even the right word. Optical. That’s not even the medical word for it.” I pause, staring at him. “Well, I’m not a doctor,” I finally say, trying to level my voice, to balance it on the flattest plane I can find. I’m all curves, though, on the inside. He turns to my son, and I know he has won. I have said the thing he wanted me to say, and I hate him for it. After basic vision testing—LZHO, PQTV, etc.—he spends several minutes with a round, thick lens angled near each of my son’s brown eyes. “Look up to the right,” he says. “No, your other right—that’s okay. I get confused, too. Okay, now look up and to the left. Good. Now I want you to look down at this knee. This one. Yep.” He goes through every direction, having my son look eight different ways while he examines one eye, then eight different ways while he examines the other. My boy could almost be following a close-up of the moon-clock worksheet that he, too, will someday have to learn. The lens in the doctor’s hand is thick and round, with no casing or handle; he holds it between one strong thumb and one strong middle finger, and angles it this way and that. He uses his other hand to hold the little cone-shaped light
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thing they all use, far back by his own eye, looking through it. I understand that through this pair of lenses, especially that big round one, he’s looking inside my son’s eye, at the back and at the optic nerve. He’s checking for the thing we have not said out loud. This thing we don’t say: the good and reliable websites tell me that headaches and seeing bright lights or shapes are common symptoms. These websites say, If you’re experiencing two or more of these symptoms, it’s best to consult your doctor immediately. Headaches in the morning are also a big red flag. Vomiting in the morning, too. My son has not vomited or awoken with headaches—but these morning ones, I read, are caused by pressure on the thing-we-do-not-name, pressure that comes of lying down. Could the lights or shapes he sees—mostly always in the mornings—be a manifestation of that same pressure? Need the headaches be painful in order to count, or can they be the kind that don’t produce pain, but produce vision problems instead? I understand that to ask this doctor would be a waste. For the minutes he uses the moon-lens to examine the insides of my son’s eyeballs, I am still, and quiet, and I beam love at him because I want him to forget he dislikes me and to take care of my kid. Later, I will hate him when I realize he has not done the other tests they always do, the puff of air in the eyes, the other one with the tiny barn on a stormy day and you look at it while the machine whirs and clicks, measuring the eyes’ curvature. I will hate him for failing to do a full exam. I will hate him for deciding on my son’s diagnosis before he even walked into the room. I will hate him for the thing he says at the end. He says, “Your anxiety is palpable. It’s palpable to me, and it’s palpable to him. That could lead to
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behaviors that are either manipulative or reassuring.” I will hate him for knowing I am anxious and exploiting it, for calling me that word when, in his presence at least, I have been nothing but calm and sane, and sane and calm. He might as well have said I was hysterical. Probably he was thinking it. I will hate him for his implication: that something about me was causing this difficulty in my son. I will hate him for saying, “If it was my son? Or my grandson at this stage? I’d back-burner it. Just don’t bring it up to him, see what happens.” And then, when I tell him, “I have been doing that. That’s why I waited several months to bring him in, but he keeps on complaining about this,” he has nothing to answer. He thinks my son is fine, and I am not. And even though I hate him, I am following his incomplete advice. This doctor wants me to maintain the illusion, speak with confidence, and observe with care. I am good at all these things, even though it costs me. And: I want him to be right more than anything. I watch my kid play and annoy his little brother, and argue about bedtime, and laugh at something funny on TV, and I wait.
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RUBY AL-QASEM's work has appeared in The Baltimore Review and been a finalist in Sundress Publications’ Best of the Net Anthology. Her essay “The Girls” was a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2019. She has just completed her PhD in creative writing at University of North Texas, where she served as the Nonfiction Contest Editor for American Literary Review. She lives in the Dallas area. Al-Qasem wrote this essay while struggling to parse her son’s vision issues—from the hub of her investigation, rather than after, in hindsight: “‘The Motherpeace’ sprang from a singular thought, which appears in the first section: how terrified must my mother have been? As the essay grew and turned back on itself, which my own fears were also doing, it became as much about generational anxieties and medical trauma as it is about mothering while motherless—or, really, parenting while parentless. A balancing act performed without scaffolding. The tension between danger and safety I find in nature, carried with me from my countrygirl childhood, echoes my feelings about motherhood and domesticity: even our most natural shelters are often fraught with peril.
RUBY AL-QASEM
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