Chouette by Claire Oshetsky

Author:Claire Oshetsky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2021-08-06T00:00:00+00:00

Five

After the Day of Tears and Blood comes and goes, your mother keeps looking after you the same as ever, and she keeps picking you up when you scream, and changing your diaper and scrubbing your poo from the walls, and playing music with you in the afternoons. She even takes you out hunting at night, now and then, to look for turkey-babies and other small delights, and it may even look to the outside world as if your mother is the same person, and that nothing has changed.

But everything has changed. Your mother’s mind is filled with a cacophony of voices, all crying out the same lamentation: “I’m a terrible mother, I’m a terrible mother.” The voices are usually accompanied by Henryk Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, and Górecki’s songs are sorrowful indeed, and that is my mood. I turn up the music in my head to full volume until nothing—not you, not your father, not even the birds that come a-rap-rapping on the roof and windows—can get through to me. Now and then a wily voice in my head will sneak in, though, and try to convince me that I should trust your father, and that maybe what you really need is a good medical fix. But most of the time the voices just remind me what a bad mother I am. It’s an endless cycle of cackle-gossip in my head that leaves me confused and disheartened.

Your father can tell that I’ve lost my mother-confidence. Every day he comes swooping in with his next new idea about how to fix you. Once the therapy dog disappeared without a trace, I thought that would be the end of it. But your father found a nearby stable full of specially trained therapeutic horses, to take the place of the dog, and when you didn’t get along with horses, your father tried llamas, and when the llamas didn’t help you, he decided to forgo animal therapies and to see what Modern Medicine can do for you. He’s taken you to see Doctor Zoloft, Doctor Benzodiazepine, Doctor Chelation, Doctor Rectal Flushing, and Doctor Hyperbaric, but none of them have done you any good. He doesn’t give up, though. He’s convinced that there is a perfect dog-child in you somewhere. He just needs to keep poking holes in you until the holes are so big that a perfect dog-child can crawl right out of your body.

You’re three years old when your father tells me that what you need is swim therapy.

“It helps nonconforming children learn how to conform,” he says. “The child learns to trust the parent, so true bonding can begin.”

You can’t even walk yet, I remind him.

He waves a hand in the air at me dismissively.

“Honestly, honey, you’re such a quitter when it comes to our girl,” he says.

He isn’t really asking for permission. He isn’t really interested in my opinion, even. He already signed you up for a half dozen Mommy and Me sessions at the Therapeutic Swim Center.

“All right,” I say, because I’m worn down by his exuberance.

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