Becoming Mommy (“So Let It Be Written; So Let It Be Done”)

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By Bethany “BST2” Armstrong

(It was the moment when I took my baby sister’s tiny hand, put a crayon in her chubby fist, and guided it to and around the coloring book, that I thought “I’m the Mommy now. I gotta be good at this.”) “So let it be written; so let it be done.”

My childhood was the stuff of fairytales, a hero’s journey. I cannot tell you how old I was when I became Mommy but I can tell you this story is going to be messy, chaotic, and a kinda, sorta, beautiful trauma; more Grimm than Happily Ever After. The best stories are the ones that hurt us the most, the ones that hold up a magic mirror to our lives and let us see the truth of our own journey.

I am guessing when I say, I was 6, or 7, or 8. Definitely pre-menstruation, pre-leaving our church. That would have made my middle sister 5, 6, or 7; my youngest sister 3, 4, or 5. My memories of those days are very blurry, as often happens with severe trauma. The days and years were a kind of Wonderland with the memories shuffled together like a deck of old cards with half of the heart suite missing.

This story could have taken place years sooner, or years later. The only person I could possibly get an accurate date from is mother, and she’s an unreliable narrator on her best days. Every tale I tell, every piece of my soul I share, is remembered through the looking glass. Forgive the smudges.

This was the 80’s, of that I’m certain. My mother worked odd hours as a surgical nurse; dad worked odd hours as a farmer and they needed someone to parent their children. Mother asked a lady from our church, who lived just down the road, to babysit us.

The first day, our sitter, the old woman that mother had paid to watch us, made us clean her whole two-story house. At first, we felt like Cinderella, cleaning the castle with precious possessions strewn carelessly on diamond glare glass. The glitter and the sparkle of a luxury that mother would not provide, kept catching my magpie eye.

Our sitter must have felt our covetous gazes, so intent we were on the glitz and glamour, jealous that her son could grow in such opulence. When I was just barely close enough to touch the figure that drew me in most, because I knew this figure, it was kind, sweet, Jesus; she shrieked so loud; I jerked and knocked the pretty, cheap glass to the floor.

You would think I had committed a heinous act, the way she screamed, rather than an accident resulting in her mocking shepherd falling harmlessly to the plush carpeting. I listened to her, but I have no memory now of all the things she said to us, all the ways she shamed us. I complained to mother, but mother said there was no way an adult Christian woman would do such a thing, would berate a child to that level.

The next day, we helped with the lawn while she hollered at us in harridan screams for not knowing how to comply with her demands. Everything we did was wrong. We drowned her plants; we didn’t have her garden gnomes placed facing the sun, the inexpensive, plastic swans were “supposed to be facing the same direction and not facing each other you stupid, ugly twits!” I complained to mother, but I must have been lying, she didn’t believe a word of it. I remember thinking, “When my children come to me, I will believe them over ANYONE.”

The next day, the worst of days, a stifling summer day, the malignant Maleficent of a caregiver packed us and her son in the way back of her Chevy Blazer, picked up her friend, and went to garage sales for what felt like hours and hours. The four of us crammed in the back, no seatbelts, no A/C, no windows rolled down, because we needed to “toughen up dammit!” The clock was slowly ticking, seconds felt like days. We stayed in this heated hearse because we were trained to believe that all adults just wanted what was best for us and we were too dumb, too childish, to know any better.

We were not allowed out of the SUV while they shopped; not allowed to breathe, let alone complain. The four of us sat, stuffed into that too small space not meant for the cargo it was carrying, sweat and tears stinging our eyes. I sang songs to them, made up stories about villains turned heroes, anything to distract them and myself from what I was thinking; “this… this is how we die.”

All four of us survived that day, though her son would eventually die of neglect. It gives me comfort to know her tale ended from the resulting investigations into her abuse. Massive heart-attack I was told. “Poor woman”, my mother related to me as I was finally able to close the story of this particular hellish excursion with a brutal ending.

But back then, I was still in the middle of my tale, with no clue for how it could end in anything other than pain for myself and my sisters. Mother came to pick us up, I told her of the garage sales of doom and this time she was furious. I thought “Finally! She’s going to be our white knight!” But it was the weekend, it was time for church and forgiveness and absolution for everyone but her children, her darling daughters.

By the end of church on Sunday, my baby sister was sick, so very sick. She had a high fever and mucus draining from her eyes like tears. Mother took her to the emergency room. Pink eye was the diagnosis. Pink eye in both eyes. Maybe from being stuffed into that cursed Chevy Blazer, that hot coffin of a pumpkin coach, or maybe from the lack of a mother’s love… I really can’t say. But at the time I thought, “mother won’t send us back now, thank you God. We are finally free from that wretched old woman.”.

Then Monday came, and mother had to return to work. My tummy twisted as she transported us up the river to the wicked witch’s dungeon. My baby sister’s eyes were sealed shut with goop and snot and crusted boogers, and mother was taking us back to the penitentiary. We were unloved and unwanted, punished for the crime of being young and alive, hostages to her whims, her career, her broken heart, and her heavy-handed, clumsy version of love.

My middle sister was fine with our predicament. She trotted up to the threshold of my nemesis’s lair. She was “special”, “touched in the head”, or “retarded”, as they said, and she had no idea how much danger we were in.

I knew. And so, I, mother’s precious precocious progeny, eavesdropped on Mother and Monster’s conversation. I hid behind the door, just in earshot, a Cheshire grin upon my face. I knew what I was doing was wrong, but I did it anyway, and with an unholy glee. I heard how to apply the eyedrops, when to deliver the medicine, how to baby my baby sister through this terrifying trauma.

I learned as much as I could before I was caught. I was berated for being one of those “little pitchers with big ears”, a nosey naughty evil child poking her enormous lobes into adult conversations, “thinking she’s so smart.” Like Dumbo, a shamed, mocked, defenseless baby, I tried to close up, wrap myself in my ugliness and my shame, and hide myself away.

Once I was appropriately chastened for trying to help my sister, for lacking faith in the adults around me, for lacking faith in God, Mother left for work. The sitter dumped the bag of coloring books, crayons, and medicine at my feet. She told me to mind my sisters and to not make any messes, as she locked us in a room with a luxurious white carpet. Like a pack of princesses, we were ensconced in her tower of terror, bartered for a bit of cabbage.

It was the first time I ever wanted to kill another human being, wanted to see that soft, pure white carpet turn hard, tainted, and red with blood. Mine? Hers? It didn’t matter, either was escape and safety. My sword would slay the dragon one way or another.

I sat down next to my precious baby sister, smiling a little as my middle sister started destroying the room, performing her version of slaying the beast so that I could start preparing for my task. I applied my baby sister’s medicine, though later I learned our sitter had claimed credit for it, and I sang and cooed to her. I told stories of our middle sister’s antics, trying to make our time in the tower a little easier. A spoonful of sugar to help the bitter medicine go down. My sweet sisters were unknowingly showing me the path to defeat the evil queen. Dropping breadcrumbs for me to follow. Such wise, precious children.

But it was the moment when I took my sweet baby sister’s tiny hand, put a crayon in her chubby fist, and guided it to and around the coloring book, that I thought “I’m the Mommy now. I gotta be good at this.” That was the moment they became MINE and not mother’s.

My resolve strengthened, I got us through that summer’s day, and all the rest to come. I stopped going to our dear mother about my baby sisters, my precious daughters. I just handled it myself, like a Mommy does. I cleaned up their sick. I cuddled them to sleep. I played, even when the desire for play had hibernated in me. I took them on adventures around our farm. I rewrote our shared fantasy, changed the narrative of their childhood.

I’m ashamed to say I wasn’t always the heroine in this drama. I physically forced them to do the things that made them taunt me with “Make Me!” and “You’re not my mom!”. I tossed them in cold showers when their tempers ran too high. I understood it was from wanting mother, and not me, for comfort and protection, and that was okay. I wanted mother too. I gave them the best childhood I could, but I loved and resented them in equal measure.

I’m the Mommy now. I gotta be good at this.

And so we lived, my daughters and I, fiercely, brokenly, and happily ever after.

“So let it be written; so let it be done.”

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