Settling In Gently by R.A.Davis

 S torytime!     Today I had a long string of ignored texts from the pharmacy, informing me that our various prescriptions were all ready for pickup. It was nearly time to go pick up RJ from school, so I decided to stop at the pharmacy on the way. MP insisted on coming with me, because she is finally over her cough and still on strike for her online 6th grade classwork, and bored out of her mind. That meant I had to bribe Liko out of the bathtub, where she was happily practicing singing underwater. She proudly informed me that she could laugh underwater, so I never needed to worry about her drowning, and thus she would be perfectly FINE if I left her at home alone, in the bathtub, MOTHER!!      This was not as reassuring as she thought.      "Cake pop, Liko! Get out of the tub, come with us, and you'll get a cake pop!"     Geriatric motherhood means bribery.      She emerged, slightly mollified, like a queen...

When I was 10, I got my period. A black smeary embarrassing surprise in my panties, discovered after the long walk back from the Takoma Park Folk Festival. I hid the soiled panties, threw them away.  What did this onset mean? What kind of person did this determine I would be? I had some alarming ideas about immaculate conception. Perhaps God, someone who seemed terrifyingly real and literally potent, would want me to be the special chosen vessel for the next of his sacred seed. In my room, amid the hoarded little boxes of shells and peach pits and candy wrappers and coins and stickers and fruity smelling erasers, a pile of ruined underwear grew, ignored, a testament to a kind of hostile takeover of my body, over my life. * When my daughter Rosie Jo was 9, her dad died. With her stunned big hazel eyes in her round white face, she told me seriously that she was scared she had to be the man of the family now. I said, no honey. We don't replace the people we've lost. They...