delusion

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Doubt, for me, was served up on a platter by my sensible shoed mother who had taught kindergarten for the past 10 years. Her parents had both taught elementary school for fifteen years and were now principals of matching urban impoverished elementary schools.
My childhood was an externally expanding shelf of age appropriate books, summer school classes and day trips to the Natural History Museum. My mother was pages torn from a parenting book, experience scrawled notes in the margins.
I was five, sitting on the edge of the bathtub because the coiled orange spring of the bathrooms space heater were my only escape from the crisp chill of morning, when she matter of factly changed her soiled maxipad in front of me while explaining simply but never patronizingly, that it would happen to me too, and yes my baby sister Emilia as well. She was part fortune teller, part mysterious holder of pink packaged, redbrown secrets and part science lesson planner. Mostly, I loved it because it had a Dont go talking to your girlfriends at school about it. Lots of parents dont want their kids to know yet. Tacked to the end of it.
We never had a kids table and we never thought our cat, Eeky, went to heaven. We watched Dad lift her from the street on the flat underside of a shovel and carry her to the ringed sawdusty stump in the backyard. Like a sacrifice on an altar, she lay with her cat claws frozen extended and a redblood secret smeared through the fur on her stomach.
Dad dug a hole in the backyard and buried her in a Payless Shoe Source box, so the dog couldnt get to her. The stomach churning, vomit smelling, heart pulling understanding of dead cats was adult business, the grown ups did it but two (then three) pairs of almost matching brown eyes watched it all.
Dont babytalk to him. Dad and I dont babytalk to you, my mother would say when I cooed adoringly at my brandnew baby brother. She was teachers bone of teachers blood.
I was ten when the decision was made that I was old enough to be Mom and Dads helper with the babies. Emelia was eight years old and some count of months Im sure she could have readily supplied. Benjamin was still sealed eyelids, clenched fists and teeth hidden under gums. I ran my fingertip over the fleshy pink gums in his tiny puckered mouth and felt his hard, pebbly teeth waiting inside, like words in a pen.
My parents told me like they were telling me a precious secret reserved for the ears of grown-ups and their special helpers. I anticipated something like the sleigh bell from The Polar Express, a magical half-dreamed secret sound.
They told me that there was no man called Santa Claus and the beautiful tree that stood in the corner of the living room heard the Secret and suddenly looked so silly, gaudy, her perfectly formed pine needles shamed by glass orbs of color and twinkly lights. Her natural grace defaced by the liars and the lied to. The words trickled slowly through liars lips but the realization hit me with a locomotive force. The sticky, trembling anger grew and pulsated silently in my chest, my balled fists. Encapsulated somewhere between emotion and reason, in that cordoned off chasm where 10 year old girls who have always been reasonable enough to have the facts layed out for them arent allowed to go.
It was a lubricated, dirty realization. An epiphany like a strangers eager stare through your open dedroom window. Not a realization of something new, but of what had always been. This was different. Not acquired knowledge but the too late now acquisition of consciousness of my vast and tragic ignorance.
If I wasnt a lied-to, I was a liar. So, as chewed tipped, pink-chipped nails stripped price tags from presents and held ribbon down in the middle for much quicker Mom hands to bow, I pretended that I loved being her helper.
In some way, maybe I did. Sweet, soft speaking Emilia didnt get to help and neither did brandnewbaby. None of the 28 little strangers who weighed on my moms heart and mind long after the (three oclock) class is over bell rang got to help either. Not even Manuel Chavez who she said was Just the sweetest kid, I absolutely love him and I just know his moms doing drugs again. His dads this gangbanger and weve tried to get Healthy Families involved but . Every Sunday she sat by the bay window in the kichen and talked to my grandmother on the telephone about the little faces that consumed her with the enormity of their plight. Even Manuel Chavez didnt get to help her.
The words were lined up in exactly the right order as I turned them over in my head, but like the names of my mothers other kids whos rrs and ns rolled around my brain, my mouth was never able to wrap around them just right. All those years I had so willingly and naively believed. How many sugar crusted lies had they served me over 10 years and 10 Christmas seasons?
Did the dead eyed knowing adults share amused glances and patronizing smiles while the lied tos gnawed on morsels of folklore disguised as history? We never even tasted the knotty pits of deception at their cores.
A funny tasting mix of shame and embarrassment rose in my throat as I remembered page after page of eagerly inked greed, neatly listed in columns under the heading, Kates Christmas List that I had created just days before. I kept it on the coffee table so I could make additions should a particularly enticing commercial overwhelm me with coveting.
This settled, softly like sediment. This not photographed, not videotaped moment became a faint, time-dulled throbbing indignation. It may have been the belief shaped Black Hole in the Universe, the remover of believing and the welcomer of Doubting. Or it may not.
Beginnings and endings are slippery, evasive things. They are opposites occupying a singular point on a circle that begins where it ends. Yet, it never really does either. They are quiet things that pass as moments we know only as numbers sliding away on a clock face. seven giving away to eight, uncelebrated, unnoticed, anticlimactic and yet the climax of life, of existence. They are the brass percussion crescendos of our piano minuet lives. We slip through life deaf or else consumed by the roar.