Update on Kathie
After Mary Szybist
Update on Kathie
After Mary Szybist
From the time she could wrap a tiny fist around a doll’s arm or leg, drag it with her through the house, Kathie has pretended at being a mother.
In the kitchen this morning, Kathie cuts strawberries, butters English muffins, pours milk into sippy cups. She transforms tangles into tidy French braids. Holds her breath while the girls bicker about which My Little Pony is prettiest, praying she won’t be pulled onto the selection committee.
Somehow, Kathie hadn’t realized how much arbitration her chosen field would require—or how much kneeling in front of a toilet.
Three weeks ago, a second line appeared on the pee stick. When she tells her husband the news, he seems far less enthusiastic than he seemed during the event that brought about the second line. Kathie doesn’t worry about this right away. How much more work could a third baby be?
Before Kathie left the workforce to be a fulltime mother, she ranked hardworking first on her job applications. She secretly thinks she might be a little slow and that the ability to work hard will make up for deficits in other areas.
Kathie likes to help out in the teachers’ workroom at the Montessori school. If they asked her, she’d probably come every day to laminate flash cards and wipe down Pink Tower blocks with disinfectant.
Kathie believes the more she does, the more people she takes care of, the more people will love her.
One day, she will understand she can never do enough. But she’s still quite young. We can let her pretend a while longer.
Update on Kathie
After Mary Szybist
Kathie likes to work first, then do the things she loves. The only problem with this is that she has a habit of turning the things she loves into chores.
This, unfortunately, often includes people.
Kathie can be observed at the office answering emails, handing out name tags, making coffee and introductions. She also files a lot of papers. Putting things into their proper places helps her feel like she’s making progress. She knows this is an illusion. But at least it’s a neat one.
Kathie wonders if she’d be a better person if she drank more herbal tea and less Chardonnay.
When she was an infant, Kathie’s paternal grandmother announced to her mother that she was a “blah baby.” Since the first time her mother recounted this event, Kathie has worried about being a bore.
Also, she has often pondered the reason for her mother’s recounting.
Kathie has too many clothes and too many children. She can’t seem to decide which ones she should let go of.
Kathie fills every shelf and surface in her house with books––fiction, memoir, essays on the natural world, history, astrology, self-help, art, children’s books, philosophy, poetry, and psychology (including the most recent version of the DSM). But no math. Also, no politics.
Kathie’s mother has always complained that Kathie’s eyes are bigger than her stomach. Kathie now admits she might have a point.
Someday Kathie would like to learn to play the guitar, but she’s afraid of being a cliché, and also that she doesn’t really have the ear for it. Her full plate and big eyes present additional problems.
It’s not uncommon to see Kathie speed-walking around town; she’s what you call a kinesthetic person.
Kathie sometimes closes her eyes and tries to imagine herself as a wife. She has history in this department. She just doesn’t see a future.
Kathie likes flowers more than is reasonable. Something in her blossoms when she cuts hydrangeas for the ginger jar. And, oh how she misses the garden at her old house––the peonies, snapdragons, allium, lupine, tulips, and lavender. Especially the lavender. She didn’t want to leave them, even though she did want to leave the husband who lived there with her.
Once upon a time, Kathie was very pretty, but now she has the menopause and her skin has begun to resemble plucked chicken flesh—not a spring chicken.
Kathie told herself that once the children were grown, she could be herself; she found out she’d been herself all along.
She’s not sure whether that’s good or bad. Mostly, it’s a chore.
Kathie believes that this world and this one body are all we get, and that reincarnation is also a possibility.
Sometimes Kathie fantasizes about making art with all the supplies she’s collected, but usually she just rearranges her supplies. At those times, she wonders what she’s afraid of and whether the dogs need to go out for a walk.
Kathie likes to sit on the swing on her front porch and let her mind drift, especially at sunset. The purpling of the sky makes her cry.
The most interesting thing is that she can’t decide if this is because she’s happy or sad. Maybe she doesn’t need to choose.
Update on Kathie
After Mary Szybist
If you were a deerfly circling, dive-bombing as she trots along the path through the pasture, you’d see that, Kathie, in her second year on the farm, is dressing like she means to stay. Bee bonnet, net pulled over her face. A loose-fitting, long-sleeved shirt. The middle finger of her gloved hand riding the breeze like a great crested flycatcher set on dinner.
She’s relegated shorts and t-shirts to the back of her closet, along with sundresses, sandals, and ankle-skimming prairie skirts never meant for actual prairies. She’s decided to stop running from things that bite, let herself be moved by what matters––desire
for the spotted fawn napping early summer mornings in a bed of flattened pasture grass, fox kits tumbling in the weed scruff behind the barn, Queen Anne’s Lace flowering shoulder-high in the ditch all the way down Ammons Road.
Charm of a dozen goldfinches swaying on forsythia branch tips—sun gods sailing on a shining sea.
It’s like every time she fell in love. Only now, there’s no man to break her fall.
No one to empty and rebait the mouse traps, mow the lawn, turn off the kitchen lights on his way to bed.
Kathie is figuring out how to live without a backup plan, while praying the septic tank doesn’t back up, and for a brief lull in the unending cycle of plagues—stink bugs, groundhogs, hornets, attic flies, groundhogs, mice, masonry bees, mice, Japanese beetles, groundhogs, deerflies, mice, groundhogs, deerflies, sweat bees, voles, deerflies, groundhogs, deerflies.
For fifty years, the pests were people––domineering mothers, absentee fathers, hungry children. Kathie’s analyst helped her set boundaries, suggested she learn to say no. Together, they amplified dreamscapes and analyzed family patterns. They talked about paradox; how common it is to want two things at the same time.
These days, the vermin have at least four legs and the focus is on Kathie’s relationship to the land. She wonders if these aren’t all threads in the same big tapestry that Penelope unweaves each night. This section needs more earth tones, says the wise and patient queen. And so it does.
Kathie considers nature’s palette, which is mostly camouflage––the spotted fawn, smelling only of sunshine, nearly invisible inside a nest of burnished grass dotted with ox-eyed daisies.
She wants to wrap her arms around the small beast, bury her face inside its satin neck.
She wants to tiptoe away, let it be.