Seven Words About Lemons by Megan Leonard

Girl.

The day my daughter decides to make a lemonade stand with her friends, her best friend announces loudly, casually, in the grocery store in front of the one-pound bags of sugar, that the tooth fairy isn’t real. She knows it’s just her mom. My daughter is nine. Her listening younger brothers are six, four, and one. The four-year-old has never even lost a tooth, never yet had the joy and thrill of finding the cool coin, flat and waiting under the pillow. My daughter does not speak for a moment. She has just told her best friend that the tooth fairy corresponds with her, in tiny little letters. I am hosting the friends for the day, trying to be a good mom, trying to make space for my daughter to have friends over even though the house feels chaotic with four kids as it is. The girls spent the morning making a list: Lemons. Sugar. Poster materials. Quarters to make change. When we go to the bank to get the quarters, I ask for $15 in ones and quarters. There is only $9.14 in my account. This is the account we pay the mortgage out of; this is the only account with any money in it. I settle for $9 in quarters. It feels wrong to take the $0.14 too. 

The day my daughter decides to make a lemonade stand with her friends, I am supposed to be doing a self-paced writing retreat from home. It is summer, and my four young children are also home, every day, all day. Summer childcare for four children is a financial absurdity that was never even on the table for consideration. I also work for pay from home. And I also maintain my writing life, including this self-paced writing retreat. 

Twice a year I try to do this, this self-paced writing retreat at home, with children, while also working for an income. The entire month of April, poetry month, I try to do this. Random days when my writer friends without children say do you want to write a poem a day with me, I always say yes. When I gave birth to my daughter I promised myself motherhood would not scrape away at my writing life. Like many writer-mothers before me, I write books in the dark while my children sleep. I am sure if I say yes to every invitation to write I will keep my writing life full, flourishing, not-scraped. Even if some of those invitations feel absurd. 

This time the self-paced writing retreat from home is with other mothers—other mothers who are far away, not physically with me, also writing in their own homes while their babies nap. We are encouraging each other by text, by email, sometimes by voicemail message. I think to myself, I will write some poems today while the baby naps. 

Back at home with their supplies, my daughter and her friends work hard on their lemonade stand. Nothing more is said about the tooth fairy. When the girls cut the lemons, boldly using the real knives, the sharp knives, the long knives, the glorious sharp tart smell of lemons fills the kitchen. I cannot remember the last time I sliced a real lemon. They scream a girl-shriek scream when the knife slips against a wet peel, shooting a round, yellow lemon across the counter. They laugh. They pick it up off the floor. 

Glow.

I remember the moment my mother brought me to summer camp for the first time with such clarity, like a single, sun-filled globe in my mind’s eye: the smell of sunbaked pine needles, the swept wood of the cabin floors, the way she shook a sheet into the air like a golden scarf that billowed down, perfectly tucked and clean, a tuck and clean I would never again achieve in the remaining two weeks of my stay. Then it was time to change into my swimsuit and say goodbye and go take a deep-water swim test. There was no changing room—it was just a cabin full of bunks. The earnest, conscientious counselor sweetly stepped outside so I could change in privacy. All the girls are just going to be changing in the cabin, my mother said as she helped me struggle into my swimsuit as swiftly and as discreetly as possible. You’ll have to get used to it. 

My own daughter still sometimes runs around the house stark naked just to be silly. She’ll have a conversation with her younger brother with her clothes half on. My own daughter is going to summer camp, the same sleepaway camp I went to, at the end of the summer. She will not think twice about changing in a cabin with other people, other girls—she is eager for the girlness, the girlhood, the freedom of being together in that we’re all girls here kind of way. She craves that from the universe that gave her three little brothers. I wonder how long that sense of freedom and delight will last, how long that comfort in her body will last. I have not yet told my daughter her life will always be valued less in the world than her brothers’ lives, and she is young enough that she doesn’t know it yet. 

When I gave birth to my daughter I promised myself motherhood would not scrape away at my writing life.

The day my daughter makes a lemonade stand with her friends, I do not write poems when the baby naps. The girls are running in and out of the screen door, calling out We need to refill the pitcher! and We need more cookies! They taste their own creation and pucker their faces in disgust. They need more sugar, more water, more ice. I teach them that the acid will dissolve the sugar if they mix the sugar directly into the lemon juice before adding water. They slop lemonade on my kitchen floor, they drop ice, they shriek when the little brothers steal another cup, another cookie. They stand at the end of my driveway and shout, their voices loud enough to carry to the houses in the far part of the neighborhood. When the neighbors come with their quarters, the girls run into the house again to tell me: We got another sale! They gave us two whole dollars!

Sour.

To pay for those two weeks of summer camp, we apply for scholarships. We apply for scholarships through the state and through the camp’s financial aid office. We ask my parents for help. We set aside a whole pandemic stimulus check, though the setting-aside hurts, though I have to say to my husband, eat at work, I don’t have anything to feed you for dinner. Though I stop eating dinner altogether. 

When women say to me that they are better mothers because of childcare, it makes my heart pucker, my throat pucker. I think I know what they mean: they mean that having help, having someone else watch their kids, allows them to have a more self-fulfilled life, a life with room for career or exercise or maintaining a beautiful home or engaging in friendships or any of the myriad other pursuits of joy and authenticity that we all took for granted before having a mewling baby who needs constant holding. I know that part of what they mean is that as a woman, as a mother, it is hard for them to not feel guilty taking time for something other than directly caring for their children. 

But I hate it because to my ears it sounds like a door slamming. That option of being a “better mother” feels like a choice that isn’t mine. I tell myself other choices were choices I made that made that door slam: having four children, being a writer and not something more lucrative, marrying for love and not money. Choices I wouldn’t change even if I could. Then there were other choices that weren’t choices: illness, medical costs, disability, pandemic unemployment. I tell myself that we are extremely privileged and it is absurd to get upset about what other people say about what makes a mother “better,” that the people who say this to me don’t know how it sounds to someone who can’t afford childcare. As a woman who cannot afford childcare and who cannot afford to not work for pay, I work opposite my husband’s regular weekday shift; I work at night, while the children sleep. On weekends. In the early morning hours before they wake up. And often, in desperation, I work while I watch my children: a baby strapped in a carrier on my chest, a toddler watching Daniel Tiger, me trying to hold on to the continuity of thought while pausing to wipe a bottom and pour a drink and mop a spill and redirect a squabble. In the pandemic, a whole chorus of parents sing a siren song decrying what has always been our household’s necessary normal—watching one’s own children full-time and also working is deemed impossible, soul-crushing, rage-inducing. I wonder if I am crushed. I wonder if I seem enraged.

At night, after my children are asleep, I send off a beautifully edited manuscript to one of my clients. She is also a mother. I’ve taken a pile of her poems, written haphazardly across years, and pulled the threads to make them sing a story together. I’ve helped my client let her best lines rise and shown her how to let the parts that were just spinning gears fall away. I am so goddamn good at what I do. I know I am not supposed to say that out loud. As I close my computer and brush my teeth, my husband asleep hours ago, my children breathing the peaceful sounds of deep sleep, I feel fulfilled and powerful and happy: satisfied with work, satisfied with what I put out into the world as my offering. I tell myself that that feeling is all the other mothers really mean when they say paying for childcare makes them “better mothers.” I try to tell myself it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t bother me, when friends with grandparents who watch their children for free or whose incomes are very different from ours say I don’t know how you do it, I need my sleep. As if I do not also need sleep.

I also hate it when writers, mothers, say they need time alone to write. I also need time alone to write. If I admit I need time alone to write, I might then be forced to admit I can’t write, because I am hardly ever alone—certainly not in the long, deep silence, room-for-leisurely-concentration sort of way. If I let myself entertain these thoughts, if I let myself believe that writers need time and mothers need time, I will despair. Instead, I tell myself I can live a both/and existence, one in which a “self-paced writing residency at home” while working for pay and caring for four children (and their friends) while supervising a lemonade stand makes sense. 

When mothers say they need time alone to write I know what they mean is that even mothers deserve some space, some physical and mental space, to themselves. That what every non-mother creative person takes as their artistic right should be allowed for us, too. Before I gave birth to my daughter, I told myself I will go away one weekend a month to write—an inexpensive hotel, a cute little AirB&B, I told myself I will leave the baby with my husband for 24 or 48 or 72 hours and write for all of those hours. My husband nodded, solemnly, when I told him this plan. But then, the reality: with four babies spaced two years apart each, someone was always nursing, or I was always pregnant. There was always a newborn, there was always a surprise medical bill, there was always a prescription that wasn’t covered. There were always preschool fees we didn’t know would be so expensive, prenatal yoga or toddler music class that seemed more important, a heating bill or a new winter coat that was a more necessary or urgent use of the money. Instead of saving for a writing retreat, we claw pennies out of the grocery budget for a full year to save for two weeks of sleepaway summer camp. I don’t want to feel like my children are automatically at odds with my writing; I don’t want to believe I must have space or time away from them to feel fully like myself. I don’t want to believe I get to be part of the conversation—a citizen of the world of writing—only if I have the ability to temporarily exist as a woman without children. Lucille Clifton had six children, I tell myself, propping my laptop on a cereal box next to the stove while I stir the sauce for dinner. She kept her typewriter on the middle of the kitchen counter. I want, for my children, the favorite parts of my own childhood, and this often feels like a sharp piece of shale stuck in my shoe. The wanting flints against other needs, at night especially, when the baby wakes to nurse and I can’t get back to sleep. 

People love the idea of mothers writing a whole novel in fifteen-minute increments during their lunch breaks, or a whole collection of poems pecked into the notes on their smartphone while they simultaneously rub backs and rock babies and sing lullabies. It’s so sweet. It’s so non-disruptive. No one must be bothered by the woman’s writing this way. No one must do without her care for 24 or 48 or 72 hours. No one must do without a winter coat or a music class, no one has to say no to summer camp. There doesn’t have to be a pause, a choice, a loss, an absence. 

Pour.

All I want to do is write to my daughter. A week after the day she made a lemonade stand with her friends, we finally bring her to the long-awaited sleepaway camp drop off. I am not allowed to make her bed for her. These are the post-covid protocol rules. We say goodbye outside the cabin, standing under the pine trees. I was worried my daughter would be cold at night, so I packed her the wool blanket off my and my husband’s bed, but I worry she will not know how to fold it twice over her twin bunk. I am not sad, not until nighttime, when, back home again, I do not get to kiss her goodnight. I buy special stationery for these two weeks. I buy stamps. I pay for the stationery and the stamps out of the money set aside for her little brother’s preschool in the fall, and I worry about how I will put it back again before school starts. 

I want desperately to fill pages and pages and pages of letters to my daughter. I do not want to edit poems for other people. I do not want to help a friend revise her resume. I do not want to call my health insurance for the fifth time this week to try to get my life-necessary medication covered, I do not want to modulate my patience and my voice to the cheerful pharmacist who chirps that I always have the option of paying for the $660 medication out of pocket. I just want to write to my daughter. I just want to ask my daughter how her swim test went—she was so nervous about it, so worried she would be terrible, after practicing hard in her lessons all summer. Her body is long, like a bolt of lightning, like a fawn, like a teenager. She is not a teenager. She is nine. She has the muscle control and limb control and strength of a nine-year-old, but she has to wield that strength in a body that is already taller than some of my fully-grown adult friends. Was she able to windmill her way twenty-five feet through the lake water without touching a toe to the sandy bottom? I ache to know what swim class she is in. I don’t actually care what swim class she is in. I don’t even know what the swim levels are. But I know she cares, and it crushes me to know there is something in the world she cares about and she can’t talk to me about it. Instead, she is talking to friends or counselors about it, or maybe she is not talking about it at all. It is a swim class. I tell myself over and over again. It’s just a swim class.

When my daughter was a baby, I resented everything that took my attention away from her. I hated my work. I did not want to think about anything except whether or not she liked the black and white book about the cat, or did she maybe seem stronger already, and was that a real smile? It was physically painful if someone else held her, even for just a few minutes. I only wanted to talk about her. I dreaded talking to friends because I had to pretend to care about things other than my baby: their breakups and new relationships, their work, their arguments with their mothers, their trips. All I wanted to say was Her toes are so peely and I don’t know why, or In the morning, she is happiest. She loves to be on her changing table and coo at me. Or, The baby massage I learned in prenatal yoga is perfect, she especially likes it when I touch her face as if I am smoothing the pages of a book. I did not care about any part of the universe that wasn’t her.

And the universe came in anyway, of course it would. It could never be just her and me forever in our own orbit, I know that, I knew that, I know it is good for her to have a swim test and not tell me anything about it. I know it is good for her to eat dinner with her cabinmates and talk to them and chatter away with her counselors and for me to not even know if she ate her fruit or if she wanted extra milk or if she didn’t like the pudding. The morning we bring our daughter to camp, my husband buys a jar of Country Time Lemonade powdered mix. It would have been so much easier to make that for the lemonade stand instead of making the lemonade fresh. It would have been cheaper, too, even if we did buy the lemons in bulk from Aldi, just slightly overripe, making them even better for juicing. On the morning of camp drop-off, my husband stirs himself a huge glass of the sweet, powdered drink before we carry the trunk to the car, the spoon tinkling the glass and the ice, his big, satisfied slurp annoying me. 

When she is at camp, I can’t speak to my daughter for two weeks. I write her a letter every day and in my letters I ask her if they serve lemonade at lunch, remembering the big vats of it from my own girlhood. It is not what I want to ask—but I cannot put this chasm into words and I wouldn’t want to, because it is not for childhood. It is her job to miss me a little bit at bedtime, and it is my job to ache. I feel annoyed when her brothers interrupt my letter-writing. Her dear, sweet little brothers, who are right here with me, talking to me, sharing every tiny thought with me, and instead of holding their faces in my hands and drinking up every utterance, I am aching for my daughter’s absent voice. It is the first time there will be whole days, whole thoughts, whole adventures, whole worries she will sort through herself, which I will never even hear about. 

Pucker.

The night of the day my daughter decides to make a lemonade stand with her friends, I tuck all my kids in bed late. The excitement, the cleanup, the sugar from the lemonade and cookies means the sun has already set by the time everyone is dreaming deeply. I am supposed to work. This time after bedtime is my paid work time. I am too tired to work. I text one of the other moms doing the at-home self-paced writing retreat. I didn’t write anything, I text. Not even one poem. 

It’s ok, she writes back. 

I am already lying down in my bed with my head on my pillow. I open the notes on my phone. The light from my phone makes the baby stir next to me, makes him roll into a little ball, bum in the air. Maybe I will write one poem before I close my eyes, I write.

Yes! the other mother texts. It’s rolling with what is and sipping things and carving out even the tiniest slices. 

Maybe I will just try to type ten words about lemons, I write. 

Then: No. Maybe seven. 

Pitcher.

On the day of the lemonade stand, my daughter’s friends fight. I come outside after changing the baby’s diaper, barefoot to the driveway, and my daughter is alone sitting behind the table. They’re disappointed we’re not making that much money, she says. It’s all my fault. I let them down. They said it’s not enough. The friends and my daughter made all the signs themselves. They debated about their prices, settled on $0.50 for a cup of lemonade, $0.25 for a cookie. Whenever a customer shows up, they run around like the playing cards in Alice in Wonderland, all pouring from pitchers and placing cookies on napkins and taking money and making change all at the same time. I have no idea if they are making the right change or not. The baby cries all afternoon, an angry, ragged wail every time I try to put him down. My boys keep stealing cookies. I was supposed to try to write a poem today. I am not sure if I am doing a fantastic job of letting the girls have their independence, or if I am being negligent. 

I want to say something to my daughter that will help her through this small moment with her friends. Behind me, her friends pass in shadow behind the screen door, talking to each other and not her. I tell myself, be a good listener, but I don’t really know if that’s what I’m supposed to do in this moment. My daughter crouches her shoulders, and her yellow hair drops in front of her face when she puts her head down, yellow from July sunshine, yellow from all the days in full sun at the beach and the pool, in swim lessons, in open swim. My daughter has never had an allowance; we’ve never had enough extra every week to commit to one. Any money at all to her is a treasure, a delight, something to be proud of. She saves her tooth fairy coins, the coins she finds on sidewalks, all delightful, all magic. I don’t know how to explain the idea of “not enough” to her. I don’t want her to take on the mantle of her friends’ disappointment, I want her to be proud of the clink of her earned quarters. My daughter and her friends make $8.00 each from the lemonade stand. An undreamed of sum to my child, money of her very own.

Later in the week I will have to borrow my daughter’s share so I can take my kids to the municipal pool, which is free for kids but charges a small fee for adults. I promise my daughter it’s still her $8.00, and when I pay her back, I will pay her in paper bills, not the quarters she earned it in. It’s ok mom, she says. You can keep it. I insist, insist that I will not keep it. 

Sun.

On the day of the lemonade stand, I don’t find anything wonderfully wise or smart or just right to say to my daughter when she sits alone, believing she is responsible for her friends’ disappointment. But the girls somehow make things right even without my wisdom—something is said, or perhaps nothing is said, and suddenly the friends pour out of the house again, my daughter sits up, they yell, just a little less vivaciously now, GET YOUR FRESH LEMONADE! I stand in the driveway with the toddler on my hip while the big kids and little kids draw huge chalk letters declaring FRESH LEMONADE together. The maple tree that grows over the driveway throws a dappled sunlight, and the red and white checked tablecloth looks perfect under a huge, antique glass urn filled with the lemonade the girls squeezed and measured and stirred themselves. I am struck by how perfect this moment looks, how happy and beautiful everything looks at this one single moment. The girls laugh when someone lifts the painted rock holding down the paper napkins and the napkins blow across the street. They chase them, catching every single one, faster than I could catch them; they run faster than I could these days, it seems like. The girls show the younger brothers how to make big bubble letters in bright colors. 

I know there will be whole stories I will not get to hear. It is right, of course, for my daughter to have a whole life, all her own stories, all her own experiences and adventures, and I am not entitled to them. I think of all the things I never told my mother—not deep, dark secrets, just angles of myself, stories, anecdotes, points of view. My whole life, the rest of my whole life, might be craving my daughter. After she was born, I thought, what if I want something different now, for the rest of my entire life? As if wanting made me who I am, as if wanting something different from what I wanted before made me unrecognizable to myself.

When I was a girl I cried every time on the last day of camp, my arms thrown over the shoulders of the girls I had only known for two weeks. We sat on our trunks—the trunks our mothers packed for us to go, but we packed ourselves to return—and promised to write to each other, promised to never forget, swore loyalty and love and allegiance, and cried that we would miss each other more than anything. I tell myself I will have to remember to let my daughter have her time when I pick her up: her time in the arms of the girls she has befriended, when what I will want to do is run right at her, drink her up, squeeze her, hold her all for myself again. I can’t remember what my mother looked like when I was young. I just remember her waiting, peripherally, while my friends and I sobbed on our trunks. 

Now it is my turn to be someone’s periphery. While my daughter is gone, we sleep with all the windows open. I imagine her in her bunk—I imagine her tucked under our blanket every night, the lake making peaceful sounds when she wakes in the morning. I imagine the loons waking her at dawn with their haunting calls, and I wake early too, with the dawn light pouring in the open window like lake water, the damp morning chill curling over my skin where the wool blanket would normally be. When we go to pick her up, we will drive half the morning down rural highways and dirt roads under the dome of deep summer, the sunlight infusing every green leaf in the thick canopy stretching over the road, light like a glowing globe, like an ocean, and I will want to drink it all in one luscious gulp. 

I will tell myself not to even try to think about poems, I will tell myself I will think only of seeing her again, I will only worry about the sandwiches for her little brothers and the snacks and the water bottles—but words about summer and sunlight and wanting and love will steep my thoughts anyway as we drive, and I will have lines or images to murmur to myself, to peck into my phone while the road curves, gets closer and closer to her. Each word will taste like a sundrop. When we arrive at her cabin, I will tell myself to wait, I will remember to be the periphery. I will take the wool blanket, stuck all over with pine needles, from a heap on top of her trunk and fold it quietly in my arms while she hugs her new friends. I will wait at the edges of their joy and sorrow. 

How foolish I’ve been. Of course we can never go back. I cannot go back to wanting something different, to wanting less, to being more contained. I cannot catch every fluttering napkin taken by the wind, every shadow or dappled moment, or every word. Instead I stand at the periphery, and I spread like light or liquid spilled. Like a memory of the sun, I run toward it. I run toward all of it.