THE SUN, THE EARTH, THE MOON, THE STARS AND ME

 Today's story is from The Sweetest Lies, my darkest short story collection so far (and that's saying something). It's the lightest in the collection, in that nobody dies, but it's still a bummer. Any mothers out there who have gone through a similar situation will probably identify with my protagonist. 

THE SUN THE EARTH THE MOON AND THE STARS AND ME

I have four children. Aria, Mignon, Tessa, and Carlo. Put together in a room, they are the sun, the earth, the moon, and the stars. None of them ever doubted the fact that they were special - how could they, with me constantly drumming it into them?

Someone nicknamed Aria Little Egg, on account of the fact that she saw everything from the sunny side up, when she was in kindergarten, and it stuck. I can’t recall her ever not having a smile on her lovely face for long, unless she hurt herself, and even then she got over it far quicker than other children. Whereas I think most people would say they had at least one arch enemy in their school days, or were at the very least disliked by one person, Aria made friends wherever she went. Were it at all possible to bottle positivity, some entrepreneur would have made a fortune selling Eu De Aria years ago.

Where Aria was all hope and harmony, Mignon was the solid, realistic foundation on which dreams were set to ground. Mignon never made a decision without having thoroughly weighed up the pros and cons beforehand, even when she was little. I overheard a discussion between Mignon and her friends in our backyard one summer as they were preparing to climb one of my apricot trees that made me shake my head with pride.

‘Hey! Why don’t we throw fruit at Arnold Thompson’s house? He’s such a dork!’

‘Yeah! That’ll teach him for being so smart!’

‘I don’t know, guys,’ said Mignon, stepping back. ‘If we break a window, our parents will have to pay to get it fixed, and that’ll mean no allowance for a while. Plus, my mother needs all these apricots to make jam. Those jam pinwheels she makes for the bake sale at school wouldn’t be nearly as good without her apricot jam. How about we just ask him to give us a chance to answer questions in class for a change?’

My daughter, the realistic rebel. If there was a debate within range, she was there to mediate.

Tessa was the most changeable of all my children. There were days when she was running on all four cylinders, an immortal being, powered by an eternal battery. Then there were days when she was content to do nothing but reflect, and beam down her uncommon wisdom to the rest of us. On the days where she was running at her lowest ebb, the energy behind her eyes wouldn’t be enough to power a refrigerator bulb; on these days, she offered the world nothing but the darkest forecasts and insights, and would remain this way until her sunny sister came along and eclipsed her.

Carlo never met a realist whose outlook he subscribed to. Good fortune and success were only ever a bullet train ride away, and he would grab onto the door handle and be pulled along for the white-knuckle ride at a moment’s notice. Opportunity was everywhere; reason just got in the way. His success rate may have teetered around 70/30 most of the time, but that did nothing to squash his enthusiasm for a project…ANY project. Seriously. He would see two flies climbing a wall and run a bet on who would reach the ceiling first. He worried me more than his sisters did, but it was impossible to be around his kind of white hot enthusiasm and not get caught up in it yourself.

I’m immensely proud of all my children, and I have always believed in rewarding effort. No achievement in the Tully household ever went unmerited. Aria’s bedroom was filled with bears and dolls and other cheerful collectables by the time she was twelve; Mignon had had seven cavities before her thirteenth birthday, such was her love of chocolate; Tessa had wall to wall shelves overflowing with so many books that she had to start stacking them on the floor when her fourteenth birthday saw her add another ten to her library; and Carlo celebrated his fifteenth year on Earth by adding two hundred dollars to his ever growing/ever depleting fortune fund. My children wanted for nothing.

Aria breezed through adolescence. She counselled her friends through stomach cramps, crying fits, and the certainty that the whole world was against them, while feeling none of it herself, as far as I could tell. She was the sole of consideration and consolation. Nobody was surprised when she earned both a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s in school counselling. When it came to helping the poor, the downtrodden, and the disadvantaged, my girl was a veritable super hero.

Mignon experienced a little bullying at high school - being geeky and proud tends to attract teenaged terrorists like an open jar of jam attracts a swarm of ants - but she got through it okay. She once said to me that the reason it didn’t bother her was that the bullies were just using her and their other victims to feel powerful as a way of compensating for the powerlessness they felt in their troubled home lives. If anything, she said, she felt sorry for them. Rationality tied up in a sensible ponytail with a plain brown elastic, that was my Mignon. She channelled her fondness for sweets into a highly profitable small business, selling home-made truffles at sixteen, which led to her getting an MBA at Harvard Business School. She is now the CEO of Tully’s Chocolates, which has outsold Hershey, Cadbury, and Mars since its inception in 1998, and not a mother’s day has ever gone by without me receiving a huge gift basket of Mint Medallions and a bottle of Tully’s Truffle Cream.

Tessa took several detours on the path to adulthood, owing to her indecisiveness, flitting from one interest/course/boyfriend to another, dipping herself only halfway in, and whenever she seemed to be lowering herself a little bit deeper into one particular pool, she would decide that the water was warmer elsewhere, or that she was too weary to swim in the first place. This propensity for fickleness proved beneficial, however, when she began submitting short stories to magazines and periodicals in high school. Her fictions were short, punchy and, when the internet came into her life a little while later, proved to be just the right length for the battered attention span of the young and plugged in. Her collection The Little Book Of Brevity was the first short story collection by an unknown author to reach the top of the New York Times bestseller list and stay there for three months straight. The book was the size of my hand, and came with a magnifying glass. Nobody could ever accuse my Tessa of recycling characters, rehashing plots, or being static with tone.

Carlo’s journey to success was, to say the least, a troubling one. Because he walked the streets with his head held skyward all the time, he didn’t recognize a crack in the pavement until he tripped over it, and we were all worried when one of those cracks turned out to be a mafia middleman who gave Carlo a double hernia and a free root canal at the ripe old age of nineteen. At my husband’s insistence, Carlo flipped through a directory of night school career courses, yawning until he came upon one that sparked him: Sales and Marketing. Carlo took what he needed from the lessons he learned and built himself a nice little career selling everything from CD Roms to luxury condos to fidget spinners. If someone were sitting in an igloo, holding a neat martini in their hand, Carlo could sell them the ice with which to cap it off.

My husband Swan once said to me that I needed to stop living through our kids, but how could I, when my own life paled in comparison? I was in corporate law when Swan and I met at a watering hole in the city called The Bar (get it?), and being as crazy in love as we were, we were married and starting a family six months later. The decision to leave the law and focus on my kids was entirely mine, and I’ve never regretted it for a moment, but is it any wonder that I start every Christmas letter, email, or conversation with “How are your kids? Mine are GREAT.”

I wasn’t aware that the kids resented me leaving my career behind either, until Aria accidentally included me in a group email she sent out for Christmas. Without lapsing into exposition, I’ll let her first few sentences sum up the tone:

My parents are doing well, as always. Dad’s retiring this year. As I’m sure everybody knows by now, he’s presiding over the Trump impeachment. SO proud that Dad’s going out on such a high. My mother’s the same as ever, a happy housewife. She’s the person I get my positivity from, and in a sense I owe my destiny to her, but I wish she’d find a niche of her own to pursue. She’s always been so busy sorting out our problems that she ignored her own. It’s kind of sad, seeing her waste her days away in that old house.

As you can probably imagine, I was a little taken aback by this assessment of my character. Yes, I was a happy housewife, but I wasn’t wasting my days away. I dismissed the remarks as a little spray of psychobabble, of which my learned eldest child was guilty every now and then, and laughed it off. Then Swan received a text from Mignon, after he left his phone on the table to go outside and garden.

You have to talk to her, Dad. If she doesn’t find something else to do soon, she’ll just be living on our fumes forever. If the major firms don’t accept her, she could be a private investigator. She needs to needs to use her skills before she loses them.

Mignon the wise, handing out sage advice since 1984. Bless her firm, realistic heart. At thirty-eight, she was still too young to appreciate the simple joys of my quiet lifestyle.

I went to my local bookstore and bought a copy of Tessa’s latest book, after Swan refused to relinquish his copy for the fourth week in a row on the grounds that he hadn’t finished reading it yet, and the very last story - entitled The Flower Queen - peeked my interest for all the wrong reasons. It was set in a fantasy world divided into kingdoms which were named after flowers, and the main character was Queen Rowna, who held court over the vanilla-scented principality of Iris Land. Mona had six daughters, onto whom Rowna would impart her wisdom as they grew. By the time the princesses were women, their health, intelligence, and grace wafted throughout the kingdom, but the queen herself was wilting more and more with each passing day. She gave her last spritz to her youngest daughter on the day of her coronation, withered, and died.

The fact that the queen’s name and mine - Rowena - were separated only by the subtraction of a vowel was either a very clever allusion, or a simple case of creative carelessness. Tessa’s writing was never careless. Now I knew why Swan was so loathe to share. The story alone wouldn’t have bothered me, had it not arrived on the heels of what my other daughters had said about me. I couldn’t imagine Carlo ever speaking about me in such forlorn terms - or at all, for that matter - but I decided to beat him to the punch anyway and invite him over for lunch one Saturday afternoon. He managed to slot me in at twelve-fifteen, in between two marketing meetings. I made best use of his valuable time and got right to the point.

‘Honey, do you think I’m wasting my life?’

‘What do you mean, Ma?’ Carlo said, then took three gulps of his steaming coffee.

‘Your father and the girls think I’m living through you kids; that I’m just a silly housewife.’

‘Who called you a silly housewife?’

‘Well, no one did, not in so many words, but the sentiment was there.’

‘Don’t pay ‘em any attention,’ he said, pushing back his chair. ‘Listen, I gotta go. Thanks for the sandwich, it was great.’

He gave me a kiss on the cheek and left. He was gone for a couple of minutes when I noticed he’d dropped a fifty on the floor. I picked it up and opened the door with the intention of giving him back the lost note, then stopped. He was standing on the front lawn, chatting loudly to someone on his cell phone.

‘Na, I was just having lunch with my mother. Yeah, she’s okay. No sense of direction though. They’ll have to cart her out of the kitchen in a box.’

This was the (unintentional) missive that hit home. My husband and my kids saw me as nothing more than cook, chamber maid, and unwanted agony aunt. I won’t lie; I cried a little that day. A lot, actually. I had devoted the best years of my life to raising decent, well-rounded, mostly happy human beings, and now that they were all grown up, my services were no longer required. They were resented, in fact. But what else was there to do? The law was a clingy mistress; she demanded a big, fat chunk of your time and, at seventy years old, There really wasn’t a whole lot of time left to give.

This notion of time’s fleeting nature came crashing home to me when Swann had a heart attack. He was at his retirement party, being toasted for his part in the comeuppance of America’s greatest political monster since Nixon, when he collapsed and died. He had been the anchor to my ever-swaying barge, and now I would have to dock without him. The kids were wonderful, for a while. Aria came over regularly for coffee and a few words of comfort, Mignon took care of the financial and funeral arrangements, and Tessa wrote a funny, touching eulogy that summed up her tenacious, blunt-edged father and moved every single person in the room. Carlo arranged the sale of the house, once I conceded that it was too much for me to take care of on my own, and thanks to him I was moving in to a nice little condo overlooking the ocean by the end of the month.

After me taking care of them for all those years, my kids finally did me a solid and returned the favour. I was finally feeling accepted…until I realised that the motivation behind these kindnesses was not acceptance or validation, but duty. I was their mother, I had provided food and warmth and solace and guidance, and they in turn were obligated to pay me in kind. This became increasingly clear to me each time I invited the kids to dinner at my new place. Aria’s excuses went as follows:

‘I wish I could, but I’m chaperoning junior prom.’

‘I’d love to, but I’m going through the student files before the new semester starts.’

‘I’d be there in a heartbeat, but I don’t know how long this staff meeting’s going to go.’

Mignon told me that she couldn’t see any spare time opening up for a while, on account of Tully’s Chocolate’s take over bid for Cadbury kicking into high gear, but she would send me a gift basket in lieu of her company. (By the end of the year, just the smell of Mint Medallions was beginning to make me nauseous).

Tessa announced that she was taking the unprecedented step of writing her first full length novel, and was going into seclusion in order to complete it. I doubted this was true but, if it was, she was going to be there for a very long time.

Carlo did what all good salesmen did on my fifth and last try, and turned a loss into a benefit.

‘I can’t, Ma, I’ve got too much cookin’ here, but think about all the stuff you could do with all the free time you’ve got now. You could read, or go shopping for some new furniture, or even take that cruise you and Dad were planning.’

I have four children. Put together, they are the sun, the Earth, the moon, and the stars. None of them ever doubted the fact that they were special.

Too special, as it turns out.