THE THREE LITTLE SIBS

Maybe you remember “The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew.” I remember the book but not what happened. I have a clearer memory of “Mrs. Wiggs in the Cabbage Patch” who, inspired by an atlas, named her children for the continents: Europe, Asia, Africa, America, Australia. I don’t remember whether there was an Arctic or Antarctic, but I don’t think so. There was a horse in the story because this is set before there were cars. Much of the content was about struggling with the problems of poverty. The Cabbage Patch was not unlike Moccasin Flats. So when I think of my sibs -- which they don’t like me to do, except that Paul is gone now anyway -- I think of us as Peppers or Continents: cheerful, a little bit slapstick, safe from the terrible forces at large on the planet, and among friends. Until we grew.

Here’s a little album:







Then all that ended. I do not know why. Maybe it was only my own consciousness that changed. I started school, which was intensely traumatic, because I was a little girl who thought I should always do the right thing, but I never knew anymore what the right thing was. A friend of mine said she was so overwhelmed with excitement and love for the other children -- she’d been raised alone until then -- that she paid no attention to the teacher! But I was devoted to my teachers and terrified of the other students. With reason -- they responded to my fear by attacking me. We were little animals, after all. Melva Edwards, another oddball, was asked by the teacher to take care of me and she did. She had permission to go to the washroom without having to ask, because she endlessly drew on the paper towels. She’d tow me along with her and wet some towels to wipe my face. My report cards all said, “Mary cries too much.” I was always in trouble at home: too loud, too disobedient, to absorbed in my own world. Today I would be sent to counseling. My mother did what other mothers did in those days: switched my legs with a yardstick or the dog leash. My father spanked, which was worse.

Maybe it was bad health. I was thin, my legs ached, I had ocular migraines that gave me terrifying dreams (I needed glasses, but no one knew it.), I had worms of several kinds, I was constipated, and I read Hans Christian Anderson and Grimm fairy tales like “The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf” and “The Red Shoes” -- grim northern tales of transgression, obsession, pride and terrible punishment. We all caught measles and chicken pox and scarlet fever, which gave one brother a heart murmur -- but we didn’t die. I got pneumonia and was totally humiliated when the neighborhood doctor came over to the house and gave me a shot of penicillin in my bare butt. Our tonsils came out. We did NOT get polio, though the little girl who had lived next door before we kids were born had died of it. My mother made us take petrolaugar and some ghastly stuff we called Jyckoline, which was supposed to be a blood tonic or something, and cod liver oil. The doctor told her to scrape raw apple with a spoon and feed it to us, so we’d stand in a little circle with our mouths gaping like baby birds while she scraped and spooned. The best thing was when we had a cough and took Cheracol, which was alcohol and cherry flavoring. Our mother was not kissy, but she would kiss us good night and I remember return-kissing on the cheek, a big hearty smack that left a red sticky print.

It may have been adjustments among the parent generations. The war cast a long shadow of deprivation, disorder and depression even among the people who weren’t in the military. When the men came back, the women lost their wartime jobs and the communities they had formed. My father went back on the road and was in an accident in 1948 -- a head-on collision with a drunk on a winding coastal road at night -- that gave him a frontal lobe concussion which I now think changed his personality forever. One paternal uncle had asthma and repeated pneumonia so the doctor told him he’d have to move to southern California. He had been the optimist of the family and my mother and my Aunt May both cherished his wife. My maternal aunts had their children in these Baby Boom years and became preoccupied, which might have lessened some support. And my mother’s mother was dying of cancer. It was abdominal, it took a very long time, and some people accused my mother of causing it by making a bad marriage that worried her mother. My mother would have felt responsible no matter what.

My father became more and more remote. He related to little kids better than older ones. Our neighborhood began to acquire kids and some of them were from (ahem) the lower strata of society. They knew a lot of interesting things. I boasted that I could sound out words, so Jimmy Jeffers took a piece of brick and wrote on the sidewalk, F U C K. “Sound THAT out!” he said. I found it puzzling, not even a word. “Go ask your mother what it means!” he said. So I did. She was horrified!

But she and my father had idealistically agreed that sex was good, that obscenity -- while rude -- was not the end of the world, and that nudity was healthy. That was the theory. My mother began to realize that in practice other strategies might be better. Innocence can make kids vulnerable. She wanted to get back to church and she did, taking us along. My father sat alone on Sunday mornings with his grand idealistic atheism, scattering the newspaper around him. Then in the afternoon we’d all go for a hike or a drive. Nature worship we could agree on.

If people didn’t need to have babies while they were young enough to have the stamina for it, they might be better off waiting until they had more income and wisdom. At least in those days people waited until marriage and my own parents married late by the standards of the times. I was born when my mother was thirty. She used to say in an ersatz accent: “So soon old, so late schmart!” What I decided was that it was smart not to have children at all. Only my youngest brother had a child. And I’m very glad he did, but I’m also glad he didn’t raise her, passing on some of the less helpful patterns.