Moms Don't Have Time to Have Kids by Zibby Owens

Author:Zibby Owens
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781510766402
Publisher: Skyhorse
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Abby Maslin is the author of the Washington Post bestseller, Love You Hard: A Memoir of Marriage, Brain Injury, and Reinventing Love. She is also a public school educator in Washington, DC, where she lives with her husband, TC, and their two children. A nationally recognized speaker for traumatic brain injury and caregiving, Abby is an avid yogi and a devout coffee-drinker.

Snow and the Night Sky

JEANNE MCCULLOCH

The message was written in a spidery hand on a scrap of paper ripped from a legal pad, the edges ragged. It lay on the table in an unfamiliar kitchen, held down by a coffee mug. I had gone with my boyfriend, maybe he was already my fiancé, to visit his aunt in Weekapaug, Rhode Island. She lived alone in the family house and barely spoke a word to us, though from time to time we heard her moving along the hall upstairs, the uneven floorboards creaking in the dark house as the wind blew off the sea. We were just twenty-four.

“Your sister called to tell you Snow is dead.” That was the message. I didn’t see the lugubrious aunt again. I got on a train back to New York for the funeral of my childhood best friend.

Her real name wasn’t Snow, it was Cathy. But Cathy didn’t do justice to her flaxen blonde hair, it was too plain a name. We tried for a long time to come up with a counterpart for me, but my red-brown hair only conjured words like ‘Rust” and “Irish setter”—for a while we tried “Terracotta,” but it was too much of a mouthful.

Our mothers had met dropping us off at Sunday school in the local Episcopal Church, and bonded over the fact that both families had just arrived in New York from Europe, and we were beginning schools across the street from each other on the Upper East Side: Snow to the more conservative school, where, in 1968, girls wore Nixon buttons pinned in their hair ribbons; and me to the more progressive, where we wore black armbands and canvassed the Yorktown neighborhood for social-studies credit.

It’s been said that you do not make friends, you recognize them. What did we recognize? A way of being easy with each other, I suppose. A love of the madcap. Shaky Super-8 movie footage shows us dashing around in my family’s den wearing my mother’s fur coats, the hems puddling at our feet.

When Snowflake the albino gorilla graced the cover of National Geographic, we spent entire Saturday afternoons in white turtlenecks and ballet tights, our hair tucked into my mother’s white latex bathing caps, perched on the arms of club chairs and the backs of couches, munching imaginary bananas. We invented a language—it went bwa, bwa, bwa—that only albino gorillas could speak. On Sunday mornings, we zipped maroon choir robes over our neon-striped mini-dresses and fishnet tights and walked demurely up the aisle of the church, taking care not to let our chain belts clang against our hymnals.

During the spring we

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