longingly at her home. No one knew it then, but all that crying presaged worse things to come with another move. Mom wept not only for the loss of her life as it had been but also for how it might have been, despite her passionate love for my father and her continuing desire for more kids.
By the time she was twenty-three, my mother had four children. Mark was the youngest of them; then Mary Beth, who is eighteen months older than him; then me, twenty months older than Mary Beth; and Steve, three years older than I am. The youngest in our family is Janet, who wasn't born until after the trauma of our move to Brattleboro, a town two hours from Poultney. She's almost nine years younger than I am.
In my mother's place, with all those kids, I'd have gone stark raving mad. Her nervous breakdown would have looked mild by comparison. By the time I was thirteen, I knew I wasn't cut out for parenting. I'd felt it almost from the first time I performed the adolescent-girl job of babysitting, for the princessly sum of fifty cents an hour.
As soon as the door would close behind the happy parents going out for the evening, I'd feel trapped and desperate. It was as if all the air had been sucked out of me. A couple of hours later, at the sound of the parents’ key in the door, I would feel an almost palpable sense of liberation. And I would be close to euphoric when I could leave. I knew then, on the cusp of abandoning my short-lived babysitting career, that motherhood and I would never ever be a good fit. It was demonstrated again when I was an adult.
When I was in my early forties, I made a gift of myself to my sister Janet and her husband, Dan, and also to Mary Beth and her husband, Paul. I offered each couple a week of free babysitting so they could go off on adult vacations. I stayed with Janet's kids first. Riley was a baby and his sister, Devan, was just walking. The next week, it was Emma, also a baby, and her sister, Libby, who was about four.
Even though they are my nieces and nephew and I love them like crazy, they drove me crazy. I felt exactly the way I had when babysitting in my youth. It may be hard for most people to understand, but two weeks with kids almost did me in. Creating the landmine campaign was less fraught with stress than trying to be a stand-in parent. Mom had to come and spell me from time to time over those two weeks, and she laughed at me every time she did. When the last day of my ordeal finally arrived, as Mary Beth and Paul pulled into their driveway, I was already standing in the door, bottle of champagne in my hand (for myself, to celebrate my liberation) and ready to flee. They, too, laughed at me.
Occasionally, and despite that experience, Mom still tries to tell me how different it would have been if I'd had my own. She'll always believe that if I'd had kids, I would have “loved it.” “Just look at how you are with your animals,” she insists. “Imagine if they were your children.” The fact is, I've never understood why she'd had four of us almost in a row when she was still practically a kid herself, or why she'd still wanted more.
My father never tried to sell me on having children. He loved all of us every bit as much as my mom did; but given his experiences as a child, he empathized with my desire not to have kids.
· · ·
My father's mother, Jean Buchanan, was an immigrant like my Italian great-grandparents. She'd arrived in America from Scotland at the age of seventeen, quite a looker and with some money in her purse. My dad said both details were true. I never saw any photographic evidence of the former; the woman I knew was hard, cold, and bitter. Any traces of beauty were long gone, if they'd ever been there in the first place.
Perpetually squinting through a haze of cigarette smoke, Jean uttered harsh commentary in a harsh brogue. She was always complaining about her lot in life or one or another of her eight children. I never met Dad's father. He lived with his second wife only a few miles away in another village, but he never cared enough to meet us.
By the time Jean married Roy Williams, she had blown through whatever money she'd brought to America. I remain ignorant of how they met and why they married. When I think of Jean, in particular, and Roy, from how my parents described him, I can easily imagine them as unsympathetic and broken characters from the Grapes of Wrath.
Roy and Jean scraped by while Roy managed a run-down farm in the town of Hampton, New York, which is across the bridge from Poultney. While our village had a population of twelve hundred people, the only thing that marked Hampton was a grocery store by the side of the road that ran north through the state to the Canadian border. Hampton was a town that wasn't. My father was born in an old bed in the sad old rented farmhouse in a town that existed only as lines on a map.
My mother says that Jean was a sharp and unloving mother. The words “I love you” did not pass her lips, and she never held or hugged her kids. When my father reached ninth grade, Jean made him quit school and go to work to help support his seven younger siblings. She required that of all her children, each in turn. Before the others were old enough to help, my dad was the one who had to collect water from the farm's well every day for the family's needs.
My father didn't live in a place with electricity, indoor plumbing, or bathrooms until he was seventeen years old, which was when he joined the navy, with his mother's permission. Until then, he'd always used an outhouse. I didn't know this until after he died in 2004, because he had been too ashamed to talk about it. It wasn't until then that his weird jokes about chamber pots, which he referred to as “piss pots,” made any sense to me at all.
When they first got married, Dad told my mom that he would never, ever go camping. Not that I can imagine for a second my mother ever wanting to either. It isn't her style. He said that he'd camped out the first seventeen years of his life and he'd never do it again.
My father was a kid when he developed his deep-in-the-gut hatred of inequality. In part it manifested itself through his profound dislike of the Republican Party, a dislike born in the grocery store in Hampton. He had the humiliating chore of going there to pick up the Depression-era support checks that helped the family survive.
The store's owner and his sons happened to be Republicans; they also happened to be men who abused the system and took a cut of families’ support checks for “administering” the relief money. Those who dared to complain found even less money in their hands the next time. If they complained too much, there might be no money at all. And not only were those desperate families stolen from, they were treated like dirt in the process.
For my dad, these men epitomized greed, corruption, and— maybe the worst thing in his estimation—a complete lack of regard for the common man. Or as he put it, the “little guy.” For his entire life, that family rode the waves of my father's psyche like wraiths. Whenever any of us accomplished something grand, something unexpected, he'd wish he could transport himself back in time and stride into their long-closed store, puff out his chest, and brag like mad. He'd show them. How could he possibly be trash if his family could do such great things? Imagine when I received the Nobel Peace Prize.
A few years after Mom and Dad were married, they managed to buy a grocery store in Poultney from one of Mom's Italian aunts and her husband, who'd taught Dad to be a butcher in the store. As soon as it was his, my father defiantly hung Democratic Party posters in its two big windows, which faced directly onto Main Street. When Roy saw the posters, he rushed into the store and tried to take them down, fearful that people would no longer shop there. All those in Poultney who mattered, and most of those who didn't, were Republican in those days.
Dad turned on his father. He didn't give a damn if no one shopped there. He was a Democrat, and he wasn't going to hide his beliefs from anyone. He didn't care what anyone thought. The signs stayed put. And no one stopped buying their food at my father's grocery store.
I inherited that attitude from my father and from my grandfather Ralph. When I was younger I didn't realize, or couldn't acknowledge, that it had come from both of them. As I grew up, I increasingly identified
