Everything That Rises Must Converge

My mother was a Catholic-abiding woman who did her rosaries and fully obeyed the term “you reap what you sow”. Whether I ate a second chocolate chip cookie, or didn’t want to go to church, whether my shorts were too short, or I talked to a boy too long in her sight, she would tell me I was planting the roots of my own destruction. This was a frustrating philosophy to instill into a tomboy who wanted to wrestle in a muddy field until I or my opponent got hurt. I always felt judged by my feminine, prudish mother, and felt superior to her because despite doing everything traditionally right, she was treated like garbage by my father. An aloof, solitary man, he would often leave the house on long business trips, to get away from her or I, or both of us.

One night, my mother, a naturally skinny woman whose post-pregnancy weight clung to her abdomen like clear wrap, cooked in the kitchen. We were both angry with one another. I can’t recall the incident, but I was in time-out, my ears reddened by pinches and slaps I felt I didn’t deserve. I heard a cry from the kitchen--my mother had burned the front of her wrist on the hot licks of the stove fire. My time-out finished instantly, I went over to her and inspected her forearm and her subsequent wails as she washed her arm out under the cold water of the sink. I resisted the naughty urge to repeat her oft-mentioned “sow what you reap” line. The Daring Book for Girls, a book I read as religiously as my mother read the Bible (another reason why I didn’t respect my mother, who never read anything but the Gospels), mentioned a fact about butter and burns. Butter and burns, I thought, and said out loud.

My panicked mother was alone in the house, except for me. She took a stick of butter from the fridge and rubbed it like lotion against the red welts on her arm. I felt a little uneasy, butter and burns, what was the connection with butter and burns?

The next day, her forearm was horrifyingly black. We visited the hospital where she was diagnosed with an underlying skin condition, aggravated by the burn. Later, I reread the section from The Daring Book of Girls which warned against using butter for burns. My mother didn’t make the connection and placed the blame solely on her skin condition.