Cutting Teeth(102)
Over the last couple of months, she has observed her daughter and it seems that as she does so, she’s been able to put on any number of lenses. When she’s suspicious, she can find the peculiar way Noelle sometimes whispers orders to her dolls as a clear sign of sociopathy. When she’s overwhelmed by love, which happens just as often, she will latch on to the way her daughter holds on to her arm as she’s falling asleep to try to keep her from slipping out of the room.
“What do you think?” Dr. Beggs asks. “Do you see signs at home that she doesn’t?”
Mary Beth’s hands drop onto her lap. “She’s always been loving to us. And to her sister.” Doesn’t this woman understand that this very issue is the source of the confusion? “She’s worried for characters in movies. Like Olaf. She doesn’t want him to melt or anything. I always thought that was very emotionally intelligent. She likes puppies. She’s very gentle with them.” Mary Beth has already vaguely begun researching the possibility of getting a Seeing Eye dog, a cute one, something to help them, or maybe just her, move past this experience toward something positive. But that would be another responsibility on their plates.
Dr. Beggs murmurs her understanding.
“But I don’t know. I don’t feel like I can trust myself anymore. Maybe I’m not seeing her clearly. Poor choice of words, I know, but her teacher wrote—”
“She is your child,” Dr. Beggs cuts her off. “I don’t think you’re deluding yourself into believing she’s a good kid. Has she gone a little power mad? Yes, I think she probably has at school. Is that a problem? It can be. And there may even be a diagnosis to be had, but I have to tell you that my professional opinion, in which I am very confident, is that Noelle is experiencing a childhood phase that, with the proper guidance, she’ll outgrow in record time.”
“You’re … sure?”
“I’m sure. In fact, in a few years, you will look back at this stage of Noelle’s and laugh. It will feel like a blip on the radar. A small hurdle in the grand scheme of things.”
Mary Beth tries to picture herself a few years in the future. A few years back is, after all, a lifetime. Because a few years back, she wasn’t even a mother. She couldn’t picture her daughters’ faces. She didn’t know their names or the way they smelled or the dimples on their bottoms. And so, as she tries to imagine a world that exists a few years from now, she finds she can’t, that her imagination never has been or could be that vivid.
If it were, she would know that in a few years, the vampiric phase of the children at Little Academy will have been reduced to just another novelty case study in a textbook on children’s psychology and one poorly written true-crime account. All the affected children will have lost the urge to bite with the loss of their first baby tooth—there will be several parents who speed this process up with a trip to the dentist and no one, at least no one within the community, will offer opinions or judgments on the matter. In a few years, Mary Beth will have a three-year-old. Having managed to improve her sex life considerably through the truncated 30-Day Sexy Back Challenge (courtesy of the now-incarcerated Pastor Ben Sarpezze), coupled with a break in her birth control regimen following a well-timed stroke, she will have gotten pregnant for a third time. Unexpectedly. Another girl. Therefore, in a few years, much to her chagrin, she will still be buying Pull-Ups and changing bedsheets. A never-ending stream of mushy food pouches and Legos on the stairs. She will be celebrating her eighteenth wedding anniversary, but at least that will still somehow feel closer to her fifth. She will never fully recover her eyesight, but she will get a retired guide dog named Bart and he will slobber and smell and she will feel God’s love beaming through him. Along the way, she will have lost touch with Rhea, their kids no longer going to the same school and their painful secret being easier kept when kept apart. She will take hand-me-downs from Darby, who, incidentally, will have opened a popular gym for middle-aged folks with a comically buff man called Cannon. She will still go to church, albeit a different one. She and Doug won’t save nearly enough for college because that problem feels too far away and thus, when Angeline gets into a good private, Christian college without a scholarship, they will suddenly wish they had viewed time and their money a little bit differently. She will be alarmed when her youngest goes through a biting phase, but it will pass, as will the worst of Noelle’s disruptive behavioral disorder, though she will later take medication for ADHD, about which Mary Beth will become an expert and an advocate. Over those years, the Brandt family will battle bouts of talking back and tantrums, ridiculously involved homework assignments, and when it comes to Noelle, Mary Beth will never cease being skeptical of her daughter when she is involved in a disagreement with a friend, not even when she’s an adult. The struggles and triumphs will ebb and flow with a feeling of both discovery and déjà vu, like they are pulled by the rhythms of the moon. Time and again as the years press on, she’ll be asked to give more and more and more of herself, serving up seconds and thirds and fourths and fifths, then regenerating entire pieces of her body and soul like the poor mommy octopi Lola Morton comes to study as a marine biologist off the Hawaiian island of Kaho‘olawe.
And like a good scientist, Mary Beth, too, will wonder about the mystery of it all, how in the process of raising new humans, you become a new one yourself. How love for a child can accomplish feats modern medicine and technology can still only dream of and it will do so in the blink of an eye. For that love will rewire your brain, alter your personality, modify your DNA, and explode your heart, all, somehow, without killing you. On the precipice of parenthood she once thought: What if I change? When the scarier question was: What if I don’t?