{"id":136348,"date":"2019-05-14T09:00:07","date_gmt":"2019-05-14T13:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=136348"},"modified":"2019-05-14T11:40:55","modified_gmt":"2019-05-14T15:40:55","slug":"children-with-mothers-dont-eat-houses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/05\/14\/children-with-mothers-dont-eat-houses\/","title":{"rendered":"Children with Mothers Don\u2019t Eat Houses"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sabrina Orah Mark\u2019s monthly column,\u00a0Happily<\/a>, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Turns out, for three months, Eli, my five year old, had a small black pebble in his ear. Don\u2019t ask me why it never bothered him or why I never noticed. I am only his mother. When the very old doctor gently removed the pebble, Eli said, \u201cOh, there you are. I was looking for you all over.\u201d<\/p>\n

About a week later I read about the Makapansgat pebble, a two-million-year-old reddish-brown pebble described as \u201cwater worn\u201d with \u201cstaring eyes.\u201d In 1925, this pebble, a pebble with a face, was found outside the vicinity of extinct hominids, implying that it was carried a good distance, as one might carry a fairy tale, because in the pebble a human recognized something\u00a0and so kept it and carried it.<\/em><\/p>\n

In Grimm\u2019s \u201cHansel and Gretel,\u201d it\u2019s not the breadcrumbs but the moonlit pebbles that point the children home. The breadcrumbs, eaten by birds, are the vanishing path that lead Hansel and Gretel to an edible house inhabited by a ravenous witch. At first, Hansel and Gretel gently nibble at the house, like mice. Then Hansel tears off a big piece of cake-roof. Then Gretel knocks out an entire sugar windowpane. The children are insatiable because what they are really hungry for is a mother and their mother is gone. Children with mothers don\u2019t eat houses.<\/p>\n

While I write this essay, my mother stops speaking to me. The reasons are as old as the oldest fairy tale. As old as pebbles. For days my chest feels like it\u2019s filling up with dry leaves. My head is bricks and glass. A shattering takes up residence in my body. I am forty-three and her silence still does this to me. I want sugar. I want to sleep.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In less than three paragraphs, the witch in \u201cHansel and Gretel\u201d goes from mother to un-mother. First she feeds the children her house. Then she plans on eating them. She is as \u201cold as the hills\u201d because she is as old as all the un-motherish parts of all the mothers\u2014since the beginning of time\u2014added up. She is the stepmother\u2019s hatred of Hansel and Gretel grown older and more feral. A hobbling, hungry hatred. A blind hatred with a \u201ckeen sense of smell.\u201d What nourishes the witch are the children she despises.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s always good,\u201d says my mother, \u201cto be a little bit hungry.\u201d<\/p>\n

When I was twelve and my twin brothers were nine, we lived in our own apartment in New York City. We had a television on a cart we\u2019d wheel around the living room waiting for The Wonder Years <\/em>to come on so we could disappear into a family. And we had a frying pan. We had small hands our grandfather would close around thick wads of cash. We had a father we saw on Thursdays and every other weekend. We had a mother in the penthouse, eight floors above us. We went to Yeshiva. We studied Talmud. We stole school lunch.<\/p>\n

Now I live in Athens, Georgia, with the kudzu and the red clay and the lubbers in a house most likely built over the bones of Civil War horses. I have run away from everything that once was familiar. There are pebbles everywhere. Piles and piles of pebbles. Everyday my sons come home with pebbles in their pockets, their lunchboxes, their socks. Like a thickening starburst, the pebbles make paths that stiffen in every direction. There are so many pebbles. They shine bright. The pebbles are rising. I miss my mother.<\/p>\n

I mean to write about home, but I keep confusing it with hunger. I mean to write about hunger, but I keep confusing it with home.<\/p>\n

Home in fairy tales is more like a parenthesis. A single curved bracket before a picture is hung.<\/p>\n

If you stay home there is no story. No pebbles, no witch, no oven, no water to cross, no apron pockets filled with jewels. Home in a fairy tale is like a cradle sawed down the middle, each half rocking gently on opposite ends of the woods. A cracked shell. The warm crook of two arms that will never know the other. What lies between is the hunger. What lies between is a child warmed by a small pile of brushwood that will soon go out.<\/p>\n

Noah, my seven year old, carries around a small brown bunny. His name is L.F. At first I think his name is alef<\/em>, like the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. But no, it\u2019s L.F. \u201cWhat does that stand for?\u201d I ask. \u201cLost and found,\u201d says Noah. \u201cGood name,\u201d I say.<\/p>\n

Hansel and Gretel, left in the woods, believe their father is close by because they can hear the sound of an ax. But it\u2019s not their father\u2019s ax. It\u2019s the wind knocking a branch their father has fastened to a dead tree. It\u2019s the sound of being abandoned. Even for a fairy tale, it\u2019s a blow.<\/p>\n

The father\u2019s branch returns later as the little bone Hansel sticks through the barred door to trick the witch into believing he is not yet plump enough to eat. By showing him how a father can turn into the wind, Hansel\u2019s father teaches him how to be a bone instead of a boy. It\u2019s the lesson of a lifetime. It\u2019s what keeps him alive.<\/p>\n

Over spring break, I send my sons to a camp for \u201ccreative rewilding.\u201d Their teachers live in a bus. Eli says his teacher\u2019s name is Jewel, but I find out later it\u2019s Joel. He has an arrow tattoo across the bridge of his nose, pointing east and west. If it rains, the children stand under a tarp because there is no actual facility other than the woods. \u201cWhat did you do today?\u201d I ask. \u201cWe learned how to walk through the woods like a deer.\u201d I flash back to Yeshiva of Flatbush, 1983. I am eight years old. In a white button-down shirt and a long blue wool skirt, I am singing \u201cWe Are Leaving Mother Russia\u201d at the top of my lungs. There are about a hundred of us singing into the brown air of the school auditorium: \u201cWe are leaving Mother Russia \/ We have waited far too long. \/ We are leaving Mother Russia, \/ When they come for us we\u2019ll be gone.\u201d The rest of the song is full of prison and the Russian sky, and dead boys, and passports, and freedom, and \u201canother Hitler waiting in the wings.\u201d I rarely went outside.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have to be really quiet,\u201d says Eli. \u201cA deer never ever steps on a branch.\u201d I did not know this. His face is painted with glittery blue ash. I can\u2019t tell if I\u2019ve brought my boys as far away from my childhood as I possibly could have, or somehow brought them closer. Closer than I could ever bring my own childhood to me. Which path of pebbles is this?<\/p>\n

I grew up surrounded by rabbis. My sons are growing up surrounded by trees.<\/p>\n

Sometimes I feel like I\u2019ve made a terrible mistake.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou need to get the hell out of Georgia,\u201d says my mother. \u201cAnd go where?\u201d says my father. \u201cThis is the most beautiful house I\u2019ve ever lived in,\u201d says my husband. \u201cI wish we lived in Israel,\u201d says Noah. \u201cI\u2019ll teach you how to button your sweater,\u201d says Eli. \u201cFor when you\u2019re small again.\u201d<\/p>\n

When the doctor removes the pebble from Eli\u2019s ear and hands it to me, I imagine pushing it into my own ear. As if it might whisper directions home.<\/p>\n

It is a Jewish tradition to place not flowers but stones on the tops of graves. It is to keep the soul from getting lost. The Hebrew word for \u201cpebble\u201d is\u00a0tz\u2019ror<\/em>, which also means bond. Often, on Jewish tombstones, are these words: \u201cMay her soul be bound up in the bond of life: \u05ea\u05d4\u05d0 \u05e0\u05e4\u05e9\u05d5\/\u05d4 \u05e6\u05e8\u05d5\u05e8\u05d4 \u05d1\u05e6\u05e8\u05d5\u05e8 \u05d4\u05d7\u05d9\u05d9\u05dd\u201d<\/p>\n

Or as I like to read it: \u201cMay her soul be bound up in the pebble of life.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Samuel Beckett\u2019s Molloy<\/em>, Molloy (who is in his mother\u2019s room)\u00a0cannot remember how he got there, cannot remember if his mother was dead when he arrived, or dead after, or even dead enough to bury. Molloy, who cannot remember his own name, has a thing for sucking stones and wants to establish the best way to distribute the sixteen sucking stones he has to suck among his four pockets so he sucks each stone equally. So no stone is sucked less than another stone. \u201cThey were pebbles,\u201d says Molloy, \u201cbut I call them stones.\u201d<\/p>\n

Are the stones the ancestors of Hansel\u2019s moonlit pebbles?<\/p>\n

Molloy sucks the stone, and then puts the stone back in his pocket, but never the same pocket he retrieved it from. He desires to circulate the stones with great fairness, as a father might give bread out to his children. Did he forget to suck one stone? Has he sucked one stone too many times? But why stones? Stones are minerals pushed up from the earth\u2019s core, as the earth\u2019s crust grows and erodes. Stones are the earth\u2019s heart-of-the-matter. They come from the center.<\/p>\n

When Eli was an infant I breastfed him endlessly, while he rapidly lost weight. His latch was crooked, and in my postpartum fog I didn\u2019t realize he was burning more calories sucking than he was getting from my milk. \u201cMaybe there\u2019s something wrong with your milk,\u201d said my mother. \u201cMaybe it\u2019s making him sick.\u201d<\/p>\n

Molloy sucks the stones so as to take every conceivable path. But it\u2019s hopeless. \u201cThe solution,\u201d he says, \u201cto which I rallied in the end was to throw away all the stones but one, which I kept now in one pocket, now in another, and which of course I soon lost, or threw away, or gave away, or swallowed.\u201d Right after this Molloy begins to see black specks in the distance: old women and young ones, gathering wood, who come and stare. One woman gives him something to eat. \u201cI looked at her in silence until she went away.\u201d After Molloy gives up his stones, women like water worn pebbles with staring eyes begin to appear. Women like too many paths that never lead to mother. That always lead to mother.<\/p>\n

I am reminded of Lot\u2019s wife who turns to stone\u2014well, salt, a hard mineral\u2014because as she fled Sodom she looked back, perhaps for her daughters, perhaps to see her city one more time. She turned back and looked, like I look. She turned back to see what she will now forever look at without seeing. Lot\u2019s wife doesn\u2019t even have a name. And her punishment is horribly unfair. I wish Molloy could put his mouth around Lot\u2019s wife and loosen her out of her petrified state, out of her pebbleness. I want to name Lot\u2019s wife L.F. A name that sounds like alef<\/em>, but really stands for Lost and Found.<\/p>\n

The lactation consultant explains to me there is too much air between my breast and Eli\u2019s mouth. I pull him closer.<\/p>\n

When my grandfather died, my mother gave me his favorite sweater. It\u2019s the color of the woods in winter. The first time I wore it I reached into the pocket and touched something hard. Three breadcrumbs. Maybe crumbs from the rye bread that he loved. I keep them in a small tin can on my bedside table. Eli\u2019s black pebble is in there, too. If they were children I\u2019d name them all. But they\u2019re not children. They\u2019re three breadcrumbs and a pebble. And they live where I live. They live with me at home.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Read earlier installments of Sabrina Orah Mark\u2019s monthly column, Happily, here.<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n

Sabrina Orah Mark is the author of the poetry collections\u00a0<\/em>The Babies\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>Tsim Tsum.\u00a0<\/em>Wild Milk, her first book of fiction, is recently out from Dorothy, a publishing project. She lives, writes, and teaches in Athens, Georgia.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I mean to write about home, but I keep confusing it with hunger. I mean to write about hunger, but I keep confusing it with home.Home in fairytales is more like a parenthesis. A single curved bracket before a picture is hung.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1615,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[45325],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-136348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-happily"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nChildren with Mothers Don\u2019t Eat Houses by Sabrina Orah Mark<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"May 14, 2019 \u2013 I mean to write about home, but I keep confusing it with hunger. I mean to write about hunger, but I keep confusing it with home.Home in fairytales is more like a parenthesis. 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