I lived in Omaha then

I lived in Omaha when my daughter was born. So did she. That was 1982.

She was three years and six months old when we moved to Minneapolis. This story took place when we still lived in Omaha, so maybe she was three, or younger.

I grocery shopped at Baker's Grocery. The one I went to was in a small strip mall called Baker's Square. In Minnesota, Wisconsin, maybe Iowa, there is a chain of restaurants that specialize in pie called Baker's Square. I first started shopping at Baker's because I associated it with the pie diner-y restaurants in Minnesota. My then-husband told me there was no connection and I vaguely believed him but I felt adrift in Omaha and I liked pretending it was the same Baker's, as if relatives of the pie purveyors had branched out into groceries. Or vice versa.

Anyway, I did all my grocery shopping during my Omaha days at Baker's, at the Baker's Square mall. I remember telling my then-husband that I missed the brand Gold 'N Plump chickens. The chickens sold at Baker's in the early eighties seemed skinny, all skin and bones. Seriously.  Food varies around the country.  You don't know this unless you have moved around. I never got used to the skinny chickens sold in Nebraska. Even now, I wonder why there was such a difference in chickens. In those days, I had never heard of an organically-fed, free-range chicken. I started hearing about those, and wanting them, by the time Katie was five or six. I remember telling my then-best-friend Joni that yes, the chicken her then-partner Cary insisted on buying was much tastier and much better for my daughter than my Gold 'N Plump warehoused chickens but, geez, those organic free-range chickens cost twice as much.  Joni and Cary were a two-income household, more or less. As a freelance copy editor and aspiring Zen Buddhist priest, Cary did not exactly pull down big bucks. In a good year, maybe Cary earned ten grand and that would have been an very, very good year. Cary's family had money and even in her forties, her father, a Stanford professor emeritus at Stanford, underwrote her regularly.  I remember her telling me that her dad said "I guess I better buy you a computer" back when everyone didn't own computers.  Back then, I paid $2,500 for my first computer. I bought a used Mac SE, one of those boxy early Macs. It had 30 MB hard drive which was considered pretty good. You kept everything on floppy discs. They called then floppy discs but the mac discs were not floppy.

"You should consider buying organic chickens," Joni said one day at Rainbow, the grocery store I patronized when I moved back to Minnesota, "It would be much better for Katie."  Joni loved my daughter. She loved me too but I knew that mostly she had taken me on so she could have Katie in her life. And that was okay by me.  Katie needed more adults in her life than me.  Joni and Cary were two of the smartest, most wonderful people I have ever known and loved. And they had the most wonderful circle of friends I have ever been knitted into. All lesbians, a few male spawn from when some of the lesbians had been married to men. Back in the eighties, less lesbians had babies as couples than today, although of course some did. Joni always said she had wanted to have kids but Cary did not want them.  So Joni was a child therapist instead. And she greedily enjoyed my Katie. And Katie adored her. It was win win.  Mostly.  Until it wasn't.

"They cost so much, Joni," I said, feeling bad that I could not give my daughter the very best.  I wanted to give Katie organic, free-range chickens but I also wanted her to eat every day, not just every other day so I could swing organic.

When you have a kid, it's not just feeding them that cost money. People who have not raised kids don't seem to factor in the many costs of kids. The fact that kids constantly grow until, at least, early adolescence means they don't wear clothes out. They out grow them. Shoes.  It seemed to me that if I wanted to guarantee a growing sprout, all I had to do was buy a pair of good shoes, like Buster Brown's or Stride Rite's. If I spent thirty two dollars on a pair of stury Buster Brown t-straps for school, you could bet money Katie would outgrow them in six weeks. And birthday party invitations means birthday gifts. And movies, cello lessons, theater tickets, museum admissions. I always had season tickets to the Children's Theater when Katie was young enough to be interested, and then tickets to the Guthrie, Theater in the Round, opera tickets, concerts. We always loved Theater de la Jeune Lune, which is now defunct, sadly.  And then dance performances. Not to mention dance classes. I stuffed her life with culture and culture costs money. Opera day camp. Theater day camp. Camp camp. And answer me this, how come every year, it always seemed like we had to shell out for a ton of new stuff for camp that year? Where did the stuff go?

If Katie would go away for a couple weeks, maybe for summer camp, my money output plummeted.  Kids cost money.

Once, Katie went to a Girl Scout camp up in the Boundary Waters. The main focus of this particular camp experience was canoeing, so the girls had to bundle everything onto or into one backpack.  At that time, Katie and I each had one small, expensive feather bedpillow. A small feather pillow stuffs pretty well. She said she could not sleep without a pillow. But as we packed for that camp, I realized that she would never touch her pillow again if she took it camping. She would be forever worried that it had bugs. Katie was diagnosed obsessive compulsive at age ten. A doctor wanted to medicate her. She and I both rejected that, but I worked around it. Impulsively, I offered to let her take my pillow. She gave me a big spontaneous hug. She took my pillow to the boundary waters, slept happily with it.  I had solmenly pledged that I would not use her pillow while she was gone. I used a foam pillow that week. I never touched her special pillow. Her fears about things like that were very real.  My sister said I spoiled her. But I didn't think I was spoiling her. I thought Katie's fears were very real to her. I am sure they were.

I also knew that obsessive compulsives often hate the people they love the most. She loved me the most and she hated me the most.  I told myself, back then, that she hated me so much because it was safe to hate me. I have wondered if my friend, Mr. X, also has some OCD issues, if he has focussed his fear of me on me because, weirdly, sickeningly, he actually loves me.  I can't stand the way he treated me and I am very sorry he left me but I couldn't stand the way he treated me anymore.  He treated many other people in his life much better than me. And I was mean to him. What came first, the chicken or the egg. What came first, Katie's hatred of me or Mr. X's. Do I deserve fear and hatred from each of them? On my bad days, which there are more of these days than good ones, of course I blame myself.

Oh my goodness, I forgot what I was writing about.  Baker's Square.

Little girls, and I imagine this is also true of little boys but I have not raised a little boy from start to the cusp of adulthood, begin to insist on being independent. When Katie was two and three, she often resisted holding my hand as we walked together because, as she put it, she was a big girl.  Every little kid I know wants to be a big girl. Or boy.  There were times when she acquiesced to my insistence that we hold hands, such as when we crossed the street and in parking lots, but, even in such a strict circumstance -- it was my rule that she had to hold my hand in all parking lots until she was so tall that her head was higher than the top height of the average car.

"Drivers don't see you, honey," I told her countless times, "in a parking lot, if you are walking between cars and then you walk out away from the cars, a driver might not see you and run over you."

I explained to her, again and again, that parking lots were particularly dangerous place for little kids to walk without holding an adult's hand. I also tried to explain to her that being 30 inches tall prevented her from being able to see moving cars. Drivers couldn't see her, she couldn't see oncoming cars. It make perfect sense to hold my hand.

But she seemed to think parking lots were relatively safe, as compared to streets. She always tried to break away from me in parking lots. And when I was returning to the car, pushing a shopping cart full of groceries, I couldn't hold her hand. She was supposed to hold the car. Of course big girls did not sit in the shopping carts. Plus those seats in shopping carts are not big enough for two year olds; they are meant for babies.

So. One day, as we walked to our car, me pushing a full shopping cart, Katie dashed quickly away. A toddler can run fifteen feet in a few seconds. Fifteen feet in a parking lot is not much. Just enough to take you from between two cars to being smack dab in the middle of a moving car. She darted. I screamed her name. I screamed it, a blood curdling yell because I wanted the sound of my voice to scare her, to shock her into stopping long enough to at least think "Mom is yelling at me, what does she want." I had screamed "Stop Katie." I wanted my voice to frighten her into frozen position. And it did.

Just as I screamed, a man hopped out of his car and spoke to me scornfully. "You lazy cow," he said. "You should have screamed at her. You should have run over to her to pull her out from in front of that car."

My heart was pounding, my pulse racing. Katie had come within a couple inches of being hit by a car. True, the car was going slow, it was, after all, a parking lot. But a slow moving car could crunch down 30 inches, maybe 30 pounds, of kid.

My scream had worked. Katie had stopped instantly, frozen. Then she flushed bright red and started screaming, just as that man yelled at me for not running. If I had run, she would have been hit. There had only been a couple seconds to make her stop.