When Liberty Cabot pulled into the parking lot of Pomeno’s bike shop, there’s no doubt Jared’s bruised and battered face transported her, at high speed in reverse, to a much earlier tragedy. Jared was not Cabot’s only son. First came Jared, then five years later, Vaughn was born, the biological son of Liberty Cabot and Wayne Pomeno. It is quite possible—in fact highly probable—that Pomeno favored Vaughn over his stepson, Jared, from the day of Vaughn’s conception.
When Jared was ten years old and Vaughn was five, Cabot was known to indulge ritualistically in smoking marijuana at bedtime. It was January in Wisconsin, dark before 5:00 PM, a month for hibernation. Surely Vaughn was already asleep when she toked up, but like all young children, he would wake up early the next morning. Where was Cabot headed at dawn, when she allowed him to sit shotgun without a belt or car seat, and how high was she after sleeping off the joints she smoked? Was Vaughn babbling and blowing warm air into the bubble of his clasped hands? Maybe he was not sitting on his pockets, but rather on his knees, high on the privilege of sitting in the front, as my children would be. I imagine his passenger’s side window was frosted with ice, etched with fingernail train tracks, as our winter windows are, and that’s why Cabot did not see the truck that blindsided them. She rolled the stop sign, right into the truck’s forward trajectory. The judge would accuse her of still being numb from the THC.
Vaughn hit the windshield headfirst and suffered head injuries so severe that he died at Children’s Hospital two days later. The state of Wisconsin charged and convicted Liberty Cabot of negligent homicide and sentenced her to eighteen months’ incarceration with five years of extended supervision. When Liberty Cabot and Wayne Pomeno lost their son, her guilt and his resentment likely made recalibrating their hearts impossible, and I’d guess Jared, their remaining child—not Pomeno’s by birth—bore the brunt of their grief. Of course judges tend not to be interested in these kinds of hypotheses, though from the hands-off nature of neglect to Pomeno’s hands-on abuse, Jared endured a range of disciplinary philosophies, and his mother suffered at both ends.
It is difficult to resist our children’s requests—“Can I sit in the front seat, Mama?” Who does not want a companion at shotgun, a chance to talk, against the barren flat-scape of winter? By the time our fourth child, Francis, had arrived, I was laissez-faire about car seats. Our toddlers sat in booster seats meant for older children, and on the long extracurricular circuit about town (hockey, figure skating, swimming, softball, baseball, piano lessons, and theater) I allowed my children to roam the van or build forts. “You may freely walk about the cabin,” Irelyn and I would often joke, although she worried.
“Mom, it’s illegal,” she’d insist. “You’re going to get pulled over. It’s not safe.” But in this modern age, the pushback from bossy two-year-olds who won’t sit in their pediatrician-recommended five-point restraints seems just as grueling as an imagined film reel of a deadly accident, and far more immediate. As they played house in our mobile home, I would stare deep into the rearview mirror, monitoring for headlights, wondering if those orbs of light were really closer than they appeared. Fern misunderstood our reference to the “oh shit handle” and would scream, “Grab on to the ocean handle!”
My parents always allowed us to roam our full-size van too, as we careened up mountain roads in Wyoming on vacation. We played hide-and-seek, curling into little kitten balls under removable cushions. Did my mom ever panic, even momentarily, when an oncoming driver laid on the horn? I often pulled in front of oncoming vehicles at interstate speed, blunted not by drugs but rather by exhaustion and daydreams. Liberty Cabot fell into line, somewhere between Mama McNally and Annie Jungwirth, as just another mother much more enigmatically human than the labels she earned in the database for Wisconsin court records might suggest.
For every praiseworthy act we committed as parents, we neglected another. A friend with two children once joked her kids turned feral, like mangy cats, while she ignored them for a day to paint the living room. With only two hands, I could rarely accommodate four at once on long home days. While I helped Irie with piano theory homework, Leo played too many games of Madden NFL, and while I baked with Francis, Fern ran off with the chocolate chips, devouring all sixteen ounces for lunch. One of my most neglectful offenses was the breastfeeding. As a working mother, all I ever needed to wake well rested and prepared to teach was to roll over in the night and pop my nipple into the warm opening of my babies’ mouths, but as a result, my children’s front teeth rotted. When Irie and Francis both needed dental surgery, doctors and nurses embarrassed us with long lectures on dental care. When Francis woke from his series of extractions in his hospital bed, a little crustacean beneath his hospital robe, I recognized my negligence in his whimpers.
Another doctor at Children’s Hospital, where Leo was once treated for a urinary tract infection during his first year of life, looked at me as she pulled back his foreskin for the catheter, and said, “Wouldn’t this be a lot easier, Mom, if he were circumcised?” I was mortified. “He would be more handsome too, if you know what I mean,” she added, smiling wide, oblivious to the grave tyranny of her words.
Long before marriage, Ryan had decided against circumcision for our boys. In 1997, while in college, he happened upon “The True Story of John/Joan,” an article in Rolling Stone by John Colapinto about David Peter Reimer’s sex-reassignment surgery following the botched circumcision that burned his penis beyond surgical repair. The tumultuous life that ensued, in which he was lied to by his parents,
