Whenever I meet my parents’ friends, they always say “You look just like your mom.” I think that’s only because they haven’t see her mom. I look at pictures of myself and I see, just the way I hold myself, how I laugh, the flash of “up to no good” in my eyes, my Grandma Doris.
There are worse things in the world.
It’s funny. My mom is fearless in ways that just floor me. If there are bugs to be gotten rid of or mice to be shooed back into the field or pets to be put to sleep, my mom can do that. And yet, when I was on the canoe trip, I wigged out twice at the sight of spiders. Not only was I embarrassed, I felt a little like I’d let my mom down.
On the other hand, my mom is not good with blood.
One of my earliest memories is breaking my foot. I climbed up the antique marble-topped dresser in the recalcitrant brother’s room as a part of my nefarious plan to toss him out of the crib and the dresser fell over on me and broke my foot. Scarier was that the marble top missed my head by mere inches. For a long time, it was in two pieces, but before they gave it to the Butcher, my mom finally found a mason who could fix it.
Anyway, I remember laying on the couch while my dad called the doctor and my mom cried about what a bad mother she was.
Another of my early memories is when my dad almost cut his finger off with his electric hedge trimmer. My dad is always cutting stuff with the electric hedge trimmer. We consider ourselves lucky if the worst he does is to sever the cord, because at least then he can’t injure himself.
But anyway, this time, he had almost cut his finger clean off. And he came in the house dripping blood everywhere and my mom just starts screaming and crying hysterically while my dad stands there all like “What do we do?” and so I took him into the bathroom and rinsed his hand off in cold water and then applied pressure to it while wrapping it, meanwhile instructing mom to get on the phone with the doctor and to get us all in the car to take us into town so he could fix dad up.
I wonder where I learned that…
I was a pretty together kindergartner. I wonder what happened.
Tiny Cat Pants 
I was a very good second grader. Third grade, however, was a bitch.I’m good with blood too. I take pics at car wrecks and the like, cool as a cucumber.But putting up my clothes after they’ve been laundered perplexes me.