My mom perched her collectible eggs on precarious ledges, little Humpty Dumpties poised for great falls, and later on in life I’d wonder if all the king’s horses and all the king’s men might put so many women together again. All around me friends lost babies to miscarriages, bisected uteruses, kidney failures, floating placentas, chromosomal abnormalities, and ectopic eruptions, and I worried my dosage units of suffering awaited me in the future. Ryan and I were fortunate to birth our full-term able-bodied children in May or June to fit my teaching schedule, so that even chocolate eggs at Easter time racked me with survivor’s guilt.
But the Ovular Society, on the brink of menopause, threw epiphany parties in long robes and wizards’ hats and cackled through the night, working on their sugar highs. I felt like the little bird in P. D. Eastman’s story Are You My Mother? My mom laughed and snorted uproariously, like I’d never seen before, and I’d think of the orange-and-yellow digger spewing soot. The excavator is not the little bird’s mother, though it does lift the yellow-beaked critter back into its nest.
When Ryan and I were teenagers, we’d don rubber masks on Halloween and trick-or-treat at my dad’s, never revealing ourselves, so I could look inside his house from a stranger’s perspective. Later, in my twenties, I would drive by my mom’s and tell myself, when I resisted beeping the horn, she was just some lady on a street corner shoveling snow. Sometimes, I wished I could have surgically removed my parents from my heart, worth the pain to feel whole. Now when I look at old photographs of my parents—my mom’s dark, flowing hair or my dad’s black beard, nothing like the gray-and-white-haired figures they are now—I’m not entirely sure I can identify them.
At Christmas in 1983, my kindergarten year, toy stores were selling out of Cabbage Patch dolls at breakneck speed. Shoppers went to fisticuffs inside depots where the plastic-faced, yarn-haired babies were offered on a first-come-first-serve basis. My own mother shopped till she dropped in Appleton, Oshkosh, Fond du Lac, and Milwaukee, to no avail, locating, instead, a lady sewing homemade imitation Cabbage Patch dolls off Highway 21.
On Christmas Eve, I opened up a casket-like box and met Marita Marie. Her limbs were panty hose sausage-looking things filled with polyester stuffing; her face was embroidered into a sinister expression, eyes like slits; and her hair was made from an old toupee, sewn to her panty hose scalp haphazardly. She was wearing a mint-green frock. Within months, her thin skin would rip open, her cottony guts spilling out. I did not feel the least bit of loyalty toward Marita Marie and determined, early on, I’d make a bad mother. Was I capable of discarding my children, I wondered, and if so, what circumstances might incite me to commit such a crime?
Instead of dolls, animals, or other stuffed loveys, Irie preferred to mother faceless objects. When she was three years old, she adopted a soft-sided playground ball, also preferring her babies without torsos or limbs. Perhaps planetary roundness most closely resembled the way my stomach inflated during pregnancies with Leo, Fern, and Francis. Or maybe, in her mind, the baby lay nestled inside the ball like a chick, because entirely of her own accord, Irie named the ball Eggy.
Sometimes we’d be forced to substitute in changelings of Eggy’s same texture and size as he was prone to rolling away, but Irie preferred Eggy to any other, even as he shrank over time, losing air with little intermittent gasps. She swaddled Eggy in baby blankets, latched him to her hip with belts, and gave him an old swimming suit for adventures in Lake Winnebago. At times, I’d think of Pascal in Albert Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon and his helium-filled best friend following him on a journey through Paris.
Once at a park in Milwaukee, Irie and I simultaneously laid eyes on a girl kicking Eggy’s twin through the grass, his bulbous body skidding to a painful halt on the pavement. Irie stepped backward and tripped, landing in an openmouthed, unblinking stupor, sick from her first experience with mother bear syndrome.
“That’s not your Eggy,” I said. “He just looks like your Eggy.” How could I explain that Eggy was from a tall open-sided bin at Target, not from some sacred or creative space in which Irie was regaled as the matriarch?
After Eggy came Moony, a stuffed turquoise crescent moon the length of Irie’s forearm. This baby, who cost fifty cents, was grabbed with a metal claw from a stuffed-animal pit at a local pizza joint. In second grade, for pajama day, she carried Moony to school but returned home without him. He never turned up in the lost-and-found or in a neighbor’s yard; we retraced our school-day walk a dozen times. We never did figure out how she lost him. She cried for nights on end, going limp and ragged even if we so much as mentioned the real moon in the sky. After Moony, by some grace of God, came Starry, a pocket-size turquoise-and-gold stuffed pendant cut loose from Moony by accident before he went missing. Starry, Moony’s little baby, slept inside Irie’s pillowcase. Never consistently, but randomly, she would double-check for Starry at bedtime, like a mother peeking in on a baby. He went missing after I had changed her sheets one day, and Irie, already nine years old, wept uncontrollably until I found him.
After Starry came a series of babies named Rocky. On a ten-pound chunk of gravel, she drew a face in Sharpie, keeping him under her bed in a special padded box until he was deemed too dangerous to keep inside. Ryan envisioned our children mistakenly or, worse yet, purposely hurling Rocky at each other in a savage sibling feud, so we relegated Rocky to the garden, an “outside baby” much like
