WE SAID WE had four children including our husbands.
THERE WAS A small body of water, a man-made pond, in the center of town, which our children used to ice skate on during the winter and swim in during the summer. They dug holes under the fences, stole wood from construction sites, and built forts on the other side. They climbed in and out of the barbed wire fence through a hole covered by a woodpile. We thought woodpiles were snake dens and we told them not to do it, but we knew they would, and we had our snake kits ready.
MUD, MUD EVERYWHERE in the rainy summers, in the melting snow of spring, and our children played like piglets. Soon they carried pocketknives they got by trading candy with their friends, and we were afraid but we knew we had to let them be children. Once we found out from our neighbor that on their way to school, as they cut through backyards, our young boys slashed the underwear hanging on the clotheslines, and we took their pocketknives away.
OUR BOBBIES PRETENDED to change flat tires, our Cheryls were the best skiers, our Michaels threw rocks at the garbagemen. They played Ring Around the Roses and held hands with other women’s children for the first time. They bobbed for apples; they made Valentines.
OUR CHILDREN WOULD be in class and hear a big boom and ask, What was that? Over time they grew accustomed to it and like most children were preoccupied instead with their friends, with the girl who won the spelling bee, with what they might eat for lunch, with what fort they might build after school.
THE FIRE CHIEF’S daughter was the most popular, our daughters told us. Our daughters just wanted to be left alone, wanted to read books, or wanted to be well liked, but they were foreign, they were not the fire chief’s daughter, they were outsiders because we did not go to church on Sundays.
WHEN OUR DAUGHTERS, the talkative ones, weren’t doing well at school we met their history teacher, our friend Louise, after class. What is she doing wrong?
She never puts her hand up in class.
THIS WAS SOMETHING we could manage. We had been that girl, or we could not understand being that girl. Either way, when we got home we marched into our daughters’ rooms. I don’t care if you know the answer or not, you put up your hand. And wouldn’t you know, their grades in history improved.
OUR CHILDREN ASKED us to fix their bikes and to replace their tires so they could ride to the stables and feed and exercise the horses. And once we did fix their tires they said they would rather walk. We told one another then, All boys should be buried at twelve and not dug up until they are eighteen. But we thought of the boys actually buried at eighteen, and we didn’t say it again.
OUR CHILDREN FOUND shotgun shells they thought were empty and one child banged them against the ground; they exploded, they tore through Cadillacs, they knocked our boys back, two boys could not hear for a week.