I read about a girl once, a terrible story, the officer on duty and coroner both called out sick for an entire week, whose anxiety and many would argue abuse on the part of her parents lodged her into her parents’ living room couch, fused her, really, skin melded into stuffing. Waste. Detritus. A terrible story.

What about the smells, I’ve always wondered in cases of such gross neglect.

How did she stand herself, yes, but the mind on fire is capable of nearly anything. It’s her parents I wonder about—the monstrous lurking within them and whether they, such suitable people within the community, so capable of hiding their sick seeping between door cracks, closed windows, who just never invited folks over for parties (“We’ll come to you; we’ll bring cake”), infused their daughter with their monstrosity or if something drove them over the edge, if, at first, they were trying to do the best by her they could, trying, as I once tried with my own daughter, to keep her happy. Isn’t that a parent’s job? Not happy per se, but well, and happiness seems an integral part of that.

So the outside world scares her, let her stay in the house. So the house scares her, let her stay on the couch. So the trek to the bathroom mangles in her mind to a gator-infested swamp or a misstep off a steep cliff, and the trips to the therapist she once made proved futile, and, really, she’s much too big now, much too heavy to carry to the car, let her do her business in a child’s training potty.

How that turned to a towel, I still don’t understand.

Caregivers snap too, don’t they?

Mothers.

We snap.

My daughter wouldn’t eat her vegetables for the life of her. It went beyond children’s turning their noses at lima beans (which, let’s face it, those mushy, mealy, worthless things deserve nothing more) or feeding their limp and overcooked brussel sprouts to the dog. We tried hiding them in smoothies packed with ice cream and fruit, or noodles fried and doused with soy sauce, on pizza brimming with cheese both crisp and stringy and wonderful, on countless iterations of thick, creamy sauces and crisp, snappy trays piled with sweets and savories. And at the touch of a vegetable on her tongue, a single, delicate touch, mind you, she would become a rocket launcher, a spigot, a cherub font.

When she says we ate sour apples and cold chunks of yellow cheese for dinner three nights in a row, her eyes and face are laughing but something about the upturn of her lips rubs me as judgment, as criticism, like I should’ve been cooking her hot meals those nights instead. Hot meals like they serve at school if you’re poor enough, only we’re not poor enough all the time. Only some. But she’s too picky for cafeteria food. Not that she doesn’t know we’re sometimes too poor for groceries. She’s weighed the bag of moon-faced tortillas against the tub of butter, knowing full well that you can eat tortillas plain without butter, but not the other way around, so she put the butter back. It’s not pickiness from spoiling or pride. Just plain dog-tonguedness. As in, her tongue’s so stubborn it won’t let her stomach anything it says No to. Like the broccoli I made her with melted cheese. She gagged it down so I wouldn’t scream at her for wasting, for insulting my cooking, for making herself anemic (she says it like iron-deficiency makes her a special creature, A Nemic). But her stubborn reflex wouldn’t let her keep it down, and she threw it all up at the kitchen table, apologizing to me as she scooped the mess into her palms. I stopped screaming then.

Sopped her up with a napkin, laughed, “You really don’t like vegetables, huh?” And hugged her before taking her to the bathtub.

It’s easy to criticize the parents of the spoiled, naughty children who made it into the chocolate factory only to learn their lessons, earn their just desserts for such patently obvious deadly sins, chewing gum incessantly included. (“She was a bad egg,” of the rotten brat who wanted the whole world to fit in her pocket, and her parents for obliging her).

But what of the parent wearing a thick pair of trauma goggles strapped tightly to their face, nay, lodged into their skull, indented into the bridge of their nose, quite emblazoned around their eyes, deep, dark circles; what of those parents trying desperately to keep the goggles as far from their children’s faces as possible? And every decision made from that wobbly perspective.

At the rodeo once, in my hometown where I took my daughter after years away, the rodeo clown called down strapping young men, fit, macho men, he called for, from the central stands, a college boy and a military man, so declared the rodeo clown in his thick, Southern accent, though I grew up in the Mexicali desert. And those two boys while the barrel racing cowgirls were setting up, meant to entertain us, the crowd huddling together under blankets with paper cups of steaming hot chocolate in the bleachers. A simple task, it seemed at first for two able-bodied twenty-year-olds. Shimmy through a set of cones to the clown’s assistant, a dwarf holding a water bottle apiece, which the young men would gulp down then weave back through the cones to a football where they would kick it as far as they could. The farthest kick and fastest time would win a bag of beef jerky. Tada!

Simple, right?

But, oh, the rodeo clown, said, here’s the kicker. The cincher. He took out a pair of goggles and explained the men would wear these fine spectacles, which would mimic the effect of several bottles of beer, a twelve-pack, depending on your tolerance.

And how we laughed as the college boy then the marine stumbled, nay, fell face-first into the dirt where the steers were just wrestled to the ground and wild broncos bucked cowboys into the cement block surrounding the stands, where mutton busting children unclutched heaps of white, curly wool and one was stomped flat in the stomach by heavy sheep hooves.

Those men in those goggles veered this way and that, as if the whole earth had shifted, as if the whole world were playing a trick on them, and we were. But only in jest. Only for a game. A rodeo. For a bag of jerky.

What of the girl, many years back, who drank a cup of beer offered by a stranger down at the booths of that very rodeo, on the way to the bathroom; who told her boyfriend that a nice man had offered her a cup of beer and she’d accepted; whose boyfriend punished her, after the rodeo.

Why, that girl became a mother.

With a daughter.

I had such a mother, as a daughter. I was such a mother, with a daughter.

That girl on the couch, I wonder, who died there, fused to the cushions—were there trauma goggles involved or did her brain just break of its own accord, because that happens too. She’s gone, and her parents to prison. There’s no way to ask her.

Although I have my speculations.

In the end, either way, I understand that girl and her entire world on the lifeboat she made of a sofa.

For the world stuffs us full and we must relieve ourselves somewhere.

It’s been a long time. And we monsters survive, the ones made by our own accord and others.

There came a time when I served my daughter mostly cake, mostly cheese. And watched her become just like her mother. Although the world treated her mother so—

Do you think the goal is to live here as long as we can? To punish ourselves into invisible boxes we give lofty names like God, like well-adjusted, like PTA volunteer, like clean bill of health, like good citizen, like normal, like economically sound, like picks themselves up by their bootstraps, like able-bodied or wheelchair warrior (“She’s a fighter; won’t let anything stop her”)?

A trumpet blares from across the lake where teems of birds float on the surface, watching for fish to catch, parsing sunbeam from fin, snatching at just the right moment, and living another—God bless America, the trumpet wails.

What of we who totter the edge every waking hour, Hamlet lodged in our throats, Ophelia—

Is it enough to let our daughters eat cake.

Something so sweet. Home, sweet.

When it could have been worms. Couch stuffing. Rodeo dirt.

---

Jennifer Givhan is a Mexican-American and Indigenous poet and novelist from the Southwestern desert. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices, she is the author of five full-length poetry collections and three novels, most recently River Woman, River Demon, chosen for Amazon’s Book Club, as a National Together We Read Library Pick, and featured on CBS Mornings. It also won a Silver Medal for the International Latino Book Award in the Rudolfo Anaya Latino-Focused Fiction category. Her poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, POETRY, TriQuarterly, The Boston Review, The Rumpus, Salon, Ploughshares, and many others. She’s received the Southwest Book Award and Cutthroat’s Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, among many others. The 2023 Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at The University of New Mexico, Givhan lives in Albuquerque with her family.