She Treats Everyone Like A Mother

At the end of the world, I got my house ready for a party.

I told the Artful Dodgers I was baking cookies in the afternoon. This was the day of the Mandrake’s graduation from preschool, and I wanted to treat them to something. I didn’t have any money to buy her a present, but I had a package of cake mix, and a very good recipe for cake mix cookies with sprinkles. The children promised me they’d be along at five o’clock, but they were running late.

Baking cake mix cookies is an odd form of therapy. The simplicity of the recipe is satisfying to my autism, somehow. A package of chocolate cake mix, a stick of butter, two eggs, then mix in the waxy sprinkles. Or, a package of vanilla cake mix, eleven tablespoons of butter, two eggs, and those same sprinkles. Or, a package of brownie mix, a bit of flour, a bit of oil and water, an egg, and sprinkles. For any of those, substitute chocolate chips or nuts or crushed candy for chocolate chips as you like.  Make cookie-sized divots on parchment paper, put them in the oven, and out comes food. This kind of thing calms me, even though with the PCOS I can’t often eat sweets anymore. I usually craft sweets for other people, and it makes me feel good as if I’ve eaten them.

If only I didn’t constantly also feel as if the world was coming to an end.

If future historians write about this time, they will be liars if they don’t stress that it constantly felt as if the world was coming to an end.

If future history students study the second decade of the twenty-first century in the United States,  they will never understand what these times were like if  they don’t understand that in the chimney of Northern Appalachia, in a leaky old rental house in what used to be a middle class neighborhood, on a cold and rainy May afternoon that felt like November, I was standing in my kitchen, creaming butter and sugar together with a fork, panicking that the world was coming to an end. I cracked two eggs, and washed my hands to get the egg off,  and as I washed my hands I felt the walls of the world shattering like eggshells. I turned on a YouTube playlist, and swayed back and forth to the silliest of music, and I popped a tray of perfect colorful divots into the oven while singing “Jubilation, she loves me again, I fall on the floor and die laughing:” yet, all the while, inside, I was crying.

Just as I was mixing up the second batch of cookies,  I heard the knock.

“Sorry we’re late!” gasped the Sylph. “We were all over town!”

The family doesn’t have a car, so ‘all over town’ means walking for an hour behind their mother like a raft of ducklings. Instead of the Mandrake taking the bus home from her preschool downtown, the whole family had attended her preschool graduation, and then trooped behind their mother on errands and to appointments before walking up the concrete steps back to LaBelle. I’d have offered them a ride if I’d known, but I don’t even think they have car seats.

It turned out that this was the Mandrake’s birthday. She just turned five.

I extolled her for being a big girl now, practically a lady. She beamed as I asked her if she’d had her party yet, or if they were going to wait until the next food stamp disbursement. No, they didn’t wait. There was a cake just for her at one of the establishments they’d visited downtown– a place with a such generic name that I thought must be a non-denominational church. It turned out to be a resource center that works with poor families. That was her party:  cake with the social worker and a walk home.

“Well… I think the Birthday Girl should be the one to put the sprinkles in the second batch of cookies!”

The Mandrake agreed that she should.  She stood on the chair to wash her hands, and then to carefully pour a measuring cup of sprinkles into the dough. Most children would dump the cup all at once, but she shook it gently so they fell in a little snowfall. She is a natural born baker, much better than me.

Meanwhile, the Sylph had found a cartoon about ponies on the television. While the cookies were baking, the Mandrake came to watch the cartoon as well. She asked to be covered in a blanket, and laid her head on my arm.

“She always treats everyone like her mother,” said the Sylph.

Again, I feared.

These children don’t deserve to grow up in interesting times. No child ever does, but especially not these. Not children so trusting they wandered into my garden in the first place, before I’d met their mother, here in a poor neighborhood in Steubenville where so many terrible things have happened to children. Not a little one who leans on the arm of a neighbor and trusts her as she would a mother.

Then again, was there ever a good time to be a poor child in Northern Appalachia?

Was there ever a hopeful time to be a five-year-old girl trooping after your siblings  on foot, at the junction where the Rust Belt collides with the Appalachian mountains, on the bank of the most polluted river in the United States?

And what hope do we have now?

After the children left, I went to sit on the porch.

Charlie the cat crawled into my lap, which she doesn’t often do. She tends to prefer to sit next to me, but this evening, she sat on me, rubbing her head against my jacket. The cold drizzle continued as if it would never end.

Around us, the traumatized neighborhood of LaBelle shimmered in the pink haze of cheap street lamps. Above us, the firmament was the color of an old bruise. Above the firmament, and here below it with me, was that most puzzling Deity: a God Who doesn’t make it all go away, but who comes to dwell among His creatures.

Not a god who makes it all go away, and makes things as they ought to be. Only a God Who comes as a little child, and knocks, and receives whatever we give to little children.

No answers at all, not one. Only the Great Commandment.

A God Who doesn’t say “all of these kingdoms I give to you, if only you will worship me,” but rather, “Whoever receives one of these little children in My name receives Me; and whoever receives Me, receives not Me but Him who sent Me.”

A God Who says both “The poor you will always have with you, but me you will not always have,” and “Surely I am with you always, even until the end of the world,” and then lets us realize what it means.

Again, the Lord said to Ahaz, Ask for a sign. Let it be deep as the netherworld or high as Heaven.  Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and bear a child, and will call him God-With-Us.  

Who is my mother, and who are my brothers? Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.

A God ever-present. A God all-trusting. A God all-helpless, as a gift to us, so that we might help.

A God Who treats everyone like a mother.

Just for a moment, I understood.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.