Daughter-Mother Dilemmas

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen, philosophers, and divines. –  Ralph Waldo Emerson

At the age of seven, you walk out of a bathroom stall at school. A teacher bursts in from the hall. Her eyes lock onto the mirror above the sink. It’s been vandalized with soap. The teacher looks at the girl standing there, then whips her head towards you. Rage fills her eyes. What do you do? All your life you’ve been told to wash your hands after using the toilet. Germs make people sick. But if you stay, Hell fire will rain down.

You step towards the sink. The water running over your hands seals your fate. Bubbles and blame. “It wasn’t me,” the other girl says. Your quiet denials boil the teacher’s blood. She lines you both up by the door. “We’ll measure your hands and then see whose prints these are!” The gaps in the mirror’s graffiti reflect your blank stare. You could have escaped.  You could have washed your hands in the classroom. Or not at all. You feel ill. You may get in trouble again when you return to class. You’ve been gone too long. More than two minutes.

*

Find a penny, pick it up, all day long you’ll have good luck!

In the box store parking lot, you find something better than a penny: a quarter. Twenty-five times the luck. It glints there plain as day on a bright yellow bollard. At waist level, even, you don’t have to stoop to pick it up. If you’d left the shopping cart by your parked car, you would have missed it. But you returned the cart to the corral, where a sign reads “Shoppers: Doing Your Part Keeps Prices Low.” In your mind, $0.25 is added back to the receipt in your bag. You can almost feel your teeth cracking the bright orb of a gumball from the machine just inside the store. The cart bangs the metal side rails.  Your hand extends to claim the quarter, but muscle memory snaps it back. Someone has beaten you to the gum, and clipped the eagle’s wings.