Coquetting Tarradiddles

Concerning Arboreal Murder…

Seeing as how Mother’s Day is coming up this Sunday, I thought I would devote the rest of this week’s entries to delving into the next-to-oldest profession by sharing some stories of my own mother. Somewhere along the way, I’ll do my best to talk about motherhood in general, despite the obvious fact that I am grossly unqualified for such things, on account of not having a uterus. Even so, I’ve been around mothers for most of my life, either as a childhood peon under the direct rule of their tyranny, or as an outside observer looking in on their strange and wonderful ways. Most recently, of course, I’ve become an active participant in the grand parental conspiracy, and I’ve suddenly come to appreciate the role that fathers play in the bizarre goings-on of the family unit.

By and large, the father’s role seems deceptively simple, but the reality of the situation is far more complex, convoluted, and mysterious. The conventional wisdom of the animal kingdom suggests that fathers lack the maternal connection to their children that mothers enjoy. As such, we are told that extra steps must be taken by nature to ensure that the dads of the world don’t kill, eat, or simply abandon their young. For example, I’ve heard it said that Mother Nature makes newborn children most closely resemble their fathers after birth, because it helps with the bonding process between a child and a party who lacks almost all credit for its existence beyond having played the glorified role of a sophisticated turkey baster. I’m not sure if I buy into such bio-mystical mumbo jumbo though, because if there’s one thing I’ve learned through both my current domestic situation and through growing up in a traditional nuclear family, it’s that fathers are – in large part – the sole reason that any child survives the terrible and mercurial mood swings of its mother…

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It is 1983, and I am almost eight years old. It’s December, and my excitement is growing with every excruciating day that ticks slowly off the calendar, building towards the inevitable percussive explosion of tinsel, gift wrap, and masking tape that is the annual orgy of gift-giving gluttony we call Christmas. It is a strange and fearful sort of excitement, filled with anticipatory wonder tinged with a terrible hint of doubt that colors my emotional mood, and my behavior isn’t much better.

Like any kid getting ready for his yearly visit from the fat and jolly anthropomorphic representation of human generosity and Germanic paganism, I am bouncing off of the proverbial walls. My older sister has been spending a disconcerting amount of time and effort over the past few weeks, expressing serious doubts as to the validity of the curiously generous and obese old man, and the doubt she has instilled in me is starting to take its toll.

In an effort to fortify my defenses as she continues to chip away at the rock of my belief, I am reading a fascinating tome of all things St. Nick. My mother bought it for me, perhaps having sensed my growing suspicions concerning the scientific improbability of Santa Claus. It is filled with meticulous explanations relating to the puzzling questions of the “Why?” and “How?” variety, and it is doing an excellent job of bolstering my faith in the red-suited fat man. That is, until my sister comes walking in the door, behind my mother. Mom walks into the kitchen to start putting away groceries, while my sister saunters up to me, a devilish grin on her face.

Santa Claus –
There is no better reason to lie to your child.

“Guess what?” she says, through the crooked smile of big sisters everywhere.

I look up from my book and shrug. “What?” I ask, innocently.

She sings her response in the mocking tones heard in schoolyards around the world and through all of time, since the first caveman decided to teach the rest of the tribe how to point at Ogg’s cro-magnon brow and make fun. “Mom told me what you’re geeeeeettiiiiing for Chriiiiiiistmaaaaaas!”

I immediately lose all interest in my book and give her my full attention. My eyes are wide and I make my gestures as non-threatening as possible, so as not to frighten the information away. “Really,” I gasp. “What?”

“Can’t tell ya!” she shouts, before turning to skip down the interminable length of the hallway between our rooms.

Her room is right across from mine, and the actual distance is only a few feet, but it sometimes seems like miles. She slams her door behind her, and I can hear her turn the weak lock of the ’80s suburban home – the type little brothers can pick with ease using only a toothpick. I get up from my bed, where I was lying and reading before the sisterly interruption, and walk to the kitchen to plunder the junk drawer for a stray toothpick.

As I round the corner, I see my mother standing at the breakfast table, pulling groceries from the brown paper bags people used to use before the fiendish plastic bags of today usurped their throne. I’m pulling open the junk drawer when she looks up from her unloading and hits me with the all-too-familiar, all-knowing Mom Stare.

“Leave your sister alone,” she casually commands.

“But she – ”

“I don’t care. Leave her alone.”

“But…”

“KRISTIAN!” she exclaims, and I can feel the capital letters. “I don’t care!” she shouts as she becomes suddenly and terrifyingly animated. “It’s almost Christmas and you two are fighting. Again!” She calms down a bit with the last exclamation, and more subduedly says, “Go tell your sister to come here.”

Having heard this tone before, I gleeful embrace this command, as past experience informs me that at least my sister is getting in trouble, right along with me. Misery loves company, especially when it’s your annoying big sister.

I knock on her door, and sing out to her in the same schoolyard tones she used on me earlier. “Gretchen! Mom wants yooooooou in the kiiiitcheeen!”

“I didn’t do anything!” she shouts in a muffled and angry voice from behind the door. I hear the click of the lock, and she throws the door open. She pushes me aside and remarks, “Why won’t you ever just leave me alone?!”

I decide it’s best that I just excuse myself from the escalating situation as soon as possible, so I let her stomp down the hall to the kitchen, and I walk quietly back into my room. I’m just sitting back down on my bed when I hear my mother yelling from the other side of the house.

“Kristian! Get in here! RIGHT! NOW!”
Those capital letters are even more terrifying than the earlier ones, so I jump up from my bed and my book goes flying from my lap and crashes to the floor. I sprint down the hall, and peek my head around the corner of the kitchen door, where I sheepishly venture a cautious, “Yeah?”

My mom is sitting at the table. Behind her stands the family Cookie Tree, which would soon become the stuff of family legend. It is an enormous artificial tree with white branches. Upon each branch hangs a virtual smorgasbord of seasonal confectionary delights. There are gingerbread men with raisin buttons and cinnamon-candied eyes, and there are sugar cookies in all shapes and sizes, each of them hand-decorated with colored frosting and candy sprinkles. Around its base sits a collection of cookie jars filled with gingersnaps, russian tea cakes, snickerdoodles, and more. It is a wonderful and glorious tree, and as the font from which all sugary goodness flows at Christmastime, it is a sacred object of hallowed reverence to an almost-eight-year-old boy.

My mom motions to my sister and I to have a seat. “Look,” she says. “You two really need to stop fighting. Please?” and I can hear the desperation in her voice. “It’s almost Christmas, and you two are at each other’s throats. It’s almost time for Dad to come home from work, and I still have to put away these groceries and cook dinner, and I’m just tired of you two fighting all the time.”

I exchange guilty glances with my sister, who is particularly vulnerable to my mother’s keen and apparently superhuman ability to navigate the treacherous roads of the Guilt Trip Highway. We both start to speak at once, but are cut off when my mother reaches into one of the grocery bags.

“I was going to give these to you at Christmas,” she says as she pulls out two boxes and places them on the table, “but if you promise to just go to your rooms and behave – quietly – you can have them now.”

She hands one box to my sister, the other to me, and we open them. Inside of each box is a single, blown-glass Christmas tree ornament. Mine has a little soldier in the middle, and my sister’s has a doll or a fairy or something. I’m not interested in what she got. Instead, I run into the living room to hang it on the green, non-artificial Christmas tree proper.

Unfortunately, my sister does the same thing. At the same time. An unfortunate collision results, and I drop my ornament. It is a fragile thing, it turns out, and the blown-glass was very, very thin. Microscopically thin. Terminally thin.

The natural state of siblings.

My mother hears the crash, and all Hell breaks lose. Every mother has a breaking point beyond which their children should never venture, for that way lies a dark and menacing journey into the heart of darkness – and it is in just such a place that my sister and I have suddenly found ourselves.

At first, we can make out the shouts coming from the kitchen. There are angry words like, “What?!” and “I told you two” and “COME HERE, RIGHT NOW! BOTH OF YOU!” (These capital letters are clearly CAPITAL letters, and both my sister and I instantly become aware of our own mortality.) The shouts quickly devolve into some sort of bizarre proto-language of clicks, grunts, and furious yalps, and while we can’t understand the words she’s yelling, we know what they mean.

We sheepishly walk into the kitchen, carrying our ornaments. My sister’s is fine. Mine, however, is broken. My mother sees it and that terrible switch in her brain flips, freeing the fearsome beast within. “What did you do?!” she shouts in a mixed tone of hate and sorrow. “I bought that for you special!”

This is going well beyond a standard sojourn on the Guilt Trip express and is quickly slipping into an alarming journey into uncharted and frenzied territory, where the natives are not only restless, but who are cannibals and will suck out your spleen through nose while you’re still alive. My mothers eyes begin to glaze over, and some sort of primeval beast takes over her body. We are petrified with fear.

Tonight on Fox –
When mothers attack!

She lunges towards us, and we leap out of the way. Still possessing enough self-restraint to not actually want to rip our limbs from their sockets and beat us to death with them quite yet, she instead spies some other unfortunate object into which she can pour her frustration and rage, like some sort of emotional spillway preventing a total collapse of the self-control dam.

The Cookie Tree never sees it coming. She launches into it with all of the savage fury of a hungry lioness on a sickly wildebeest, and soon my sister and I are dodging deadly white projectiles like little Ninja, as Mom violently rips each limb from the unsuspecting tree. Individually wrapped cookies soar through the air. Innocent gingerbread men meet their untimely end on the far side of the kitchen, smashing to pieces against a hard and uncaring wall. Sugar cookies fly into the ceiling, and plummet to the ground. The fragrant scent of cookie-death begins to fill the air, and we are terrified.

Soon, the entire room fills with the strange and gruesome smell of sugar and plastic and sweat. My mother is heaving huge breaths of enraged air as she sinks to her knees at the base of the disfigured Cookie Tree, now naked and ashamed of its limb-less and cookie-less plastic trunk. And Mom is just sitting there. Breathing. And crying.

She gently pulls one surviving limb from the tree and cradles it in her hand. A sad and broken cookie hangs pathetically from it, and Mom takes hold of it and sobs. She looks up at my sister and I, and in the most broken and woeful tone, she says, “I try, and I try, and I try – but there’s just no love in this house!”

Unsure of how to proceed in the face of a complete maternal breakdown that we caused, my sister grabs my hand as we both say, in unison, “We’re sorry.”

At this, Mom stops crying. She stops moving. She stops breathing. At this, our mother is clearly about to snap completely. She looks us square in the eyes and says, “You’re…sorry?” with an inflection so cold, we can see the icicles dripping from the question mark. “You’re sorry?!” she repeats, raising the cold volume of her voice with each syllable. “You’re SORRY?!”

She begins to stand up and move towards us. We are terrified, and in our terror we stupidly just repeat ourselves, chanting over and over like we’re invoking some mystical protective mantra. “We’re sorry! We’re sorry! We’re sorry!”

As I see my mother’s hand reach out to us, I close my eyes and wait for my short life to pass before them. I’m just getting past the potty-training section of my early years, when I hear the most glorious and heavenly sound imaginable. The front door opens. Dad’s home!

I don’t remember much after that, apart from the fact that I was happier to see that man come wandering in that evening than I had ever been before. That particular Christmas, money was beyond tight, and the stress levels of my parents was enormous. Regardless of our financial situation, they always insisted upon making our Christmas mornings the stuff of childhood folklore, with presents piled up around the tree like little Himalayas, and it had to be hard for them.

I don’t know how far in the hole they went every year, or how much they had to save to give us memorable Christmases, where all of our wildest Toy ‘R Us fueled dreams were realized, but they did it – year after year. Back in ’83, the year of the infamous Cookie Tree incident, was the year I got my first computer. Looking back, I don’t know how they managed to afford it, but it was the one thing I wanted more than anything in the world. It was an Apple ][ compatible called a Franklin Ace 1000, and I spazzed out over it in ways too freakish and bizarre to recount here. Suffice to say, I was thrilled. My sister got something equally amazing (in her mind, anyway), but I have no memory of what it was. The only thing I saw that Christmas was the beige monstrosity that was my new computer, and I was a deliriously happy geek.

Now son, let me tell you where the word “hysteria” comes from…

The moral to this story is that fathers exist to protect their children from themselves. At first glance, you might consider this a cautionary tale about the psychotic breakdown of maternal figures, but you’d be wrong. Children are horrible, vicious little beasts who will gnaw away at the bones of their mothers, who will patiently take the punishment over and over again. Always foolish, children never tire of testing their boundaries, and taking out all of their childhood aggressions and disappointments on their mothers is typical behavior. Mothers know this (or they quickly learn), and they are somehow capable of accepting it with grace and dignity and understanding…up to a point.

My mother is a very sweet and loving, peaceful sort of woman – and I’ve no idea today how in the world I could have ever provoked her to such tree-murdering anger, but I’m sure it was all my fault. (Actually, it was probably all my sister’s fault, really. She undoubtedly tripped me or something as she ran to put her ornament on the tree first, and I’ve just blocked out the painful memory of her hideous treachery.) You see, there will come a time in every child’s life where the kid just goes too far. Mothers, while amazingly resilient and resistant to their child’s endless assaults upon their sanity, are not without their limits. At some point or another, a child will find out what just that limit is, and that’s why it’s a good idea to have a father around.

Fathers are the great peacekeepers and saviors of their children’s well-being and their wife’s sanity. They come in after the fact and smooth out the emotions of all parties. Having not been directly involved in any of the insanity themselves provides the distance needed to look at the situation from the outside and figure out the best way to calm everyone down. (Of course, all of this is entirely dependent upon the fact that the father is not the one continually assaulted by their children’s ever-escalating assaults upon their sanity.)

If the tables were turned and the fathers were the ones facing down the double barrel shotgun of a child’s indomitable spirit of rebellion twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three-hundered-and-sixty-five merciless days out of the year – well, let’s just say that mothers don’t get nearly enough credit. Instead, we give them one lousy day of appreciation – and we spend it giving them gifts they neither need nor want, to which they seem eternally grateful. I once gave my mother a coconut monkey with a hollowed-out belly, wearing an enormous straw hat – and she actually thanked me for it!

We tell the story of the Cookie Tree every year at Christmas, as we decorate the tree and eventually come across the infamous ornament. It’s quite a sad little thing to look at now, having been hastily repaired that night by my father, with super glue and luck. The best part of the whole Christmas experience is watching my mother as we retell the story, year after year. She hates it – but in that special, endearing way that a mother has for tolerating embarrassing stories. She laughs a little, she denies a little, and then invites us all for cookies.

Ah, Mom – thanks for not turning out quite as crazy as I tried to make you over the years!

Ah, Mom – thanks for not turning out quite as crazy as I tried to make you over the years!