The Styrofoam Vegetable Tray

This is probably one of the most honestly written pieces of my life, and I have had to write in stages in order to stay firm in my honesty and not sugarcoat or humor through the story I'm forcing my hand to tell. I refuse to let myself off the hook on this one. I will not cower behind self-created subterfuge.

It all began with a black Styrofoam vegetable tray. It probably came into our home under spears of asparagus or summer squash. I collect them afterwards to be paint trays for my kids; it's my way of dealing with having Styrofoam forced upon me. I like to find some other life for it between original intent and final destination (landfill).

Before yesterday, it was a rather innocuous item, this Styrofoam tray, unnoticed in my daily life, unconsidered and relatively unimportant.

Yesterday, however, it became a pretense for my rage, a symbol for the beast that lurks in my motherhood, a reminder that I lost my shit.

As I write this, I can feel the sick churning in my gut – the feeling of guilt, remorse, of wanting to undo what cannot possibly be undone. Not only can yesterday NOT be undone, it will live on in how my daughter looks at me, what she thinks of me and how she recalls me from yesterday on.

She was painting a box in the den to use in her science experiment for viewing the phases of the moon. I was in the kitchen preparing lunch, and it is apparent to me now that I was under duress – why the hell I can't see this shit coming all these years later is beyond me, but there it came nonetheless.

I walked into the den, saw her work space and asked what the hell she thought she was doing – why hadn't she asked to use the vegetable tray she was using as her paint palette? She instantly lowered her head; her face morphed into shame. You know, I can't remember the birth weight of either of my children or their height in inches for that matter, but I'll never forget that look on her face.

I digress.

See, my daughter and I have battles over her asking to use items in the craft room – it’s a consistent struggle between two strong personalities and my asinine need to have order, to know what I have and to know how much, of nothing that matters at all really. As I write this and read my own words, I can hear my mother screaming, irrational with rage, over "her face mask," "her shampoo," "her hairbrush," blah, freakin’, blah. I can recall lowering my own head, masked in shame, feeling so deeply inadequate. Not understanding. Not getting it. Not realizing that there was nothing to get – that’s blind rage, man. My own seed of rage was incubating in all of those senseless moments strung together by her remorse and my forgiveness.

So I kept yelling at my own daughter, irrationally – the exact words I used are beyond me now or else it's that I don't want to know, don't want to remember. "Ask, could you just fucking' ask" was the theme of my shit-toss.

Feeling like her victim, like I'd never survive this stubborn girl with no care for permission to use these, apparently precious, Styrofoam trays but also knowing, on some level, that I was out of control, I forced myself back to my room. One foot. Then the next. And see, looking back, that was probably not the wisest choice I've ever made. In my room, my desk was littered with her crap from her morning studies and she had left the computer on – both of which are huge pet peeves of mine. The sane part of me beckoning from the small fraction of rational mind I was working with wanted to warn her. But before that thought got air time, I began yelling in this baritone voice, much more like the howl of a reluctantly-mounted elephant during a mating ritual than a mother who loves her child.

She rushed into my room, a servant of my ridiculous rage. She gathered her things from my desk and shut the computer down amid the torrent of expletives.

I shut myself in my bathroom, hell bent on curbing the progression of my anger, now well past anger and well into lunacy. I ran my fingers through my hair, gathered a clump in each hand and I stared at the maniac looking back at me in bathroom mirror, all wide eyed and shocked, as if she herself could not comprehend the derangement of her reflection.

I gave my body to the wall behind me and slid to the cold, tiled floor. I cried into my hands. I still felt like a victim yet all the while I knew I was creating one, in her.

I wounded my daughter yesterday, I changed who she was and worse, in the aftermath I felt like I wanted to die, like I needed to die to eradicate any further threat of me to her. It was a pseudo consideration really, a play on ideas, a sham, because I knew all too well that any erasure of my existence at this point would only mark me forever as the lunatic vegetable tray mom. No glory in that exit, man. No. I don't even want off that easy – I don't roll that way.

I've been better but I've been worse, and this life I lead will, if nothing else, be ripe with my own accountability. Unlike my mother, I will shoulder the blame, I will admit my weaknesses – I will own my dark side.

The black Styrofoam vegetable tray – could have been asparagus or summer squash that brought it into our home. It should have been nothing more than a vessel for the vegetables, yet it has become a tag for a moment I want to un-own, undo or at least redefine. But I exist within a fixed and finite realm of screw-ups and lasting impressions and I can't go back like I'd want to – I’d walk into that room and throw the freakin' vegetable tray away before I used it as an excuse to berate her. It was never really about the tray and I knew that.

I spent the next day cooking with my daughter and I got to be the mother I meant to be the day before. And I learned something. I'm not a monster. I'm a human being; once a child, I was shaped in a context I have not yet outgrown. But day by day, I peel back the layers, and I come closer to the essence of the mother I always wanted, the one I always needed, and now, the one I desire to be.