Yesteryear #2
She nodded, wiped the pulpy juice from Jessa’s cheeks and chin, then got up to clean up the mess.
People refused to believe my babies were as amenable as they appeared online.
There’s no way this is their actual life!
!!!, the Angry Women would write. (That’s what Caleb and I called them.
The Angry Women.) To which I would reply: absolutely nothing, of course.
A mother’s main task is to protect her children from the world.
There was no need for some hateful witch in Manhattan to see how physical Samuel got with his brother (and even his sisters, sometimes), no need for them to witness Stetson’s daily tantrum over arithmetic (I loved that boy, but he had not been gifted with a standard helping of brains).
If the Angry Women found out about any of my children’s failings, they’d go crazy with bloodthirst. They’d also be devastated.
None of them realized it, of course, but they needed me as much as I needed them.
It was a symbiotic relationship. I was a shark, and they were five million tiny fish, nipping at the nutrients along my belly.
Little idiots. They were desperate to eat me. They had no idea I was the one who was keeping them alive.
How does it feel to know that millions of people around the world know intimate details about your children?
“I show only very selective moments of my children’s lives.
And besides, none of them have any access to screens—have you seen the studies, by the way?
Of what screen time does to children’s brains?
If you ask me, my children are much better off in this household, where they occasionally show up in videos for my account, than in some other household where they’d be staring at an iPad all night.
I mean, really.” Sympathetic cluck. “It’s an epidemic. So sad. You should look into that.”
“You’re up early,” I remarked to Producer Shannon as I poured my coffee.
“Couldn’t sleep,” she said. She was frowning at one of the knobs on the camera, twisting it one way, then the other, a grumpy expression on her face.
When Shannon first showed up at the ranch, she was nineteen years old, a Barnard dropout with pink hair and a nose ring who was willing to do professional work at a student rate.
Now she was twenty-one. The nose ring remained; the pink hair had been abandoned in the name of her natural brown.
I wasn’t sure if that was an indication of any personal identity shift so much as a practical acceptance of the realities of living an hour away from the closest city.
Not exactly many options when it came to qualified hair colorists near a five-hundred-acre farm.
I paused, then said delicately, “Are you having those dreams again?”
She looked at me. “Who told you about that?”
In the dreams, Shannon stood on the nearby hillside, watching the farm burn to the ground.
The house, the chicken coop, the gardens: all aflame.
Car-size balls of fire raining down from the violet heavens.
As the fire spread across the fields, she would run—or try to run—while the barn collapsed, the animals screaming in the rubble.
Sometimes she could see us in the distance, waving to her.
Saying something. And sometimes—when the dream lasted this long—she could see beams of light shooting down from the heavens, shining grace onto my children and Caleb and me. Saving everyone but her.
“Nanny Louise is worried about you,” I said—which was more diplomatic, I thought, than Nanny Louise is sick of being startled awake in the middle of the night by screaming. All our farm employees lived in a set of rooms above the stables, next to the homeschooling classroom.
“I’m fine,” Shannon said. “It’s no big deal.” She leaned past me to plug in a battery charger. For a moment, we were silent, standing side by side in the small corner of the house where we spent nearly all our waking hours together.
You might just have the most beloved kitchen in America, these days. Can you tell us a little bit about it?
“Oh, gosh—where do I even start?”
Through the camera’s discerning eye, the cooking space was perfectly cluttered: a half-filled mason jar of water here, a flour spill there, a few forgotten flower stems strewn across a worn-looking cutting board.
It looked like a space where a mother worked; like a kitchen in the real world, only obviously better than anything the real world had to offer.
People think they want minimalism, they think they want a house absent of stuff, when in fact a perfectly uncluttered home makes them want to kill themselves.
A space must always look lived-in for someone to want to live in it.
This is a completely obvious notion, when you take a moment to really think about it, but most people don’t take a moment to really think about anything. Most people are morons.
Another bonus of this area of the kitchen was that it was right next to a long row of windows, so the light, once the sun rose, was a perfect soft-bright at any hour of the day.
Just standing near that kitchen corner made me look and feel a good six years younger.
God-given plastic surgery, I called it privately, though I wouldn’t dream of saying something like that online. The Angry Women would eat me alive.
Have you ever had any work done?
Laugh, laugh, laugh.
“God, no. I’m sorry, no offense to others who have, but me? Personally? I would never.”
Shannon was looking blankly at the windows now, which seemed on these early winter mornings to offer a portal into a world shrouded in black.
I knew she was thinking about the dreams. It was clear she didn’t even have an inkling of an idea of what they meant.
How could she be so dense? God was clearly trying to reach her, in about as direct a way as He could, He was sending smoke signals and carrier pigeons and writing messages to her in the sky, and she was ignoring all of it.
She’d probably schedule a call with some scam-artist dream interpreter before she even considered that her brain might be offering her a nonmetaphorical insight.
It was a shame to watch her totally bypass revelation, but not exactly surprising.
Shannon’s partially Barnard-educated brain was a blunt instrument, secular and smooth; it was about as suited a tool for speaking directly with God as a pair of rubber spatulas were for open-heart surgery.
And why might the Lord want to reach Shannon so badly?
Well. Shannon had misbehaved.
Shannon looked up at me, and our eyes locked. My cheeks flushed for having been caught staring at her with such an openly judgmental look on my face. “By the way,” she said, “my new phone arrived today. Thanks, again, for letting me do the rush shipping option.”
“Of course.” One of the children had dropped Shannon’s phone into a puddle, apparently, a week earlier.
And because I was such a good boss, I’d remedied it immediately, handing her the company card to order a new one along with a little lighthearted joke: Wouldn’t want you to be stuck out here without access to the real world!
“Weren’t you going to wear the purple apron today?”
“Ah!” I said, and laughed. “Whoops! Pregnancy brain.” I hated that phrase, pregnancy brain, but it was an excellent way to sound relatable.
The apron I was wearing was a dark navy.
We were using these videos to announce a new shade option for the aprons on our online store ($35.
99, 100 percent cotton, buttons made of recycled plastic, made in Spain). “I’ll go get it now.”
As I left the kitchen, Nanny Aimee walked in with my toddler, Junebug.
Jessa got up from the table, her glass empty now, and trailed whimsically after me like a dandelion puff.
She grabbed Junebug’s hand as she passed, and soon both nannies were calling plaintively after the little girls as they followed me up the stairs.
“It’s fine,” I called over my shoulder. “They can come with me.”
It was a particularly special gift from our Creator that we had been blessed with three girls in a row.
All children were gifts from God, of course, but groups of girls, little jewelry sets of two and three?
That was something else altogether. A girl was lovely, a boy was nice, but girls, plural, were rainbows and fluff, personified.
Radiant balls of delight. Such community-oriented creatures; with the addition of each new little lady to their little-lady tribe, they all seemed to grow a little taller, glow a little brighter.
They carried each other like dolls. They braided each other’s hair.
They picked and preened and poked at one another with motherly obsession.
The boys would keep us fed when we were old and feeble, I liked to say, but the girls?
They would dance around our wheelchairs, toss rose petals over our graves.
Plus, I’ll admit it: they were easier to train.
The boys occasionally resisted or got frustrated or bored, but not the girls.
They could perform on film for hours without complaint, just like their mama.
“Mom.”
I winced instinctually, then rearranged my expression into softness.
“Yes, honey?” I was standing in front of my bedroom mirror, fixing the new apron, and my eldest daughter, Clementine, was standing in the doorway.
She had turned twelve over the summer and promptly stopped calling me Mama a few days after.
It made my eye twitch each time I heard her say Mom; I hated the word.
It was such an ugly sound, so short and masculine, far much less musical than my preferred alternative.
I didn’t fight it, though. Clementine was a preteen, which meant she was testing me.
The worst thing I could do would be to push back.