Mother Robin

I think more of my mother in the Lenten months. Not because she was baptized in the Catholic church as an infant, though it delights me to imagine her as a baby being adorned with holy water, the priest sprinkling it onto her forehead like salt into a cooking pot, while her round face reddens as a late spring cherry. The reminder is much simpler than a religious reminiscence. My mother comes to mind more in the months somersaulting toward Easter because of the holiday’s profitable commercial products. The grocery stores, their aisles lined with sweets in ballerina pinks, and baby chick yellows so bright they could cheep, always carry Whoppers-brand Robins Eggs. The candy was once sold in miniature cartons, like the ones school lunch milk comes in. It’s now more common to find the thimble-sized sweets in cellophane bags. Either way they’re packaged, they make me think of her, my very own Robin.

The name written on her California birth certificate is Robin Taffy Requejo. Her mother, a woman who I’ve never met with the nickname Tootsie, claims she was eating taffy while watching fireworks when she went into labor on the fourth of July in 1970. My mother’s middle name is a testament to the holiday’s patriotic treat, even though she was born on July 5th, missing the Independence Day cut off. Still, she’ll remind my siblings and I that she grew up believing the sky’s celebration on the eve of her birthday each year was in honor of her. I like to imagine her turning six or seven, her shoulders sun peeled and cheeks freckled with summer. Her hazel sunflower eyes glowing all blue and red as she looks upward, transfixed by night turning into day just for her.

For my two siblings and me, she made holidays and birthdays just as magical as hers had been, with elaborate and edible celebrations. Robin’s cakes came in any form: jack-o’-lanterns, flamingos, baseballs. She fixed intricately decorated sugar cookies for all occasions that had a corresponding cookie cutter. My family ate our fill of frosted autumn leaves and spring flowers, glazed ornaments and turkeys. One Halloween, she transformed apple slices into monster mouths for our lunches, smearing two of them with peanut butter for the lips and lining mini- marshmallow teeth in the middle. That same year, she managed to build Frankenstein from a grilled cheese sandwich. Saint Patrick’s Days were accompanied by green scrambled eggs, and she once baked tomb cookies with us for Easter. We put the solid balls of dough into the oven and sealed it closed with a few strips of blue painter’s tape. When we took them out, the round cookies were hollow as the empty tomb.

In the years when our birthday gifts for her were more often homemade than purchased, my siblings and I were allowed to pick out treats at the Dollar Tree to include her birthday present. Red Vines and Red Hots are her candy of choice, Good & Plentys, too. I’d usually veto the fennel flavored, purple and white pills of black licorice in favor of the first pair. Those long, spiraled tubes and little shelled morsels Robin savors, with the first’s chewy sweetness atoning for the sticky, cinnamon heat of the next, I adore as she does. I recently bought myself the candies simply because I missed her and wanted to feel like she was close by. Some might hypothesize about passed down palates or maternal genes linked to a bodily hankering for red dye 40. I theorize differently: I simply have so much love for my mother that it cannot help but pour over into the things she loves, too. But I can’t overlook being raised on the delicacies, acquiring the taste by her hand. Whether or not she’d admit it, Robin tended to my sweet tooth like a gardener to a flowerbed.

Sweets were often the currency of our household, especially our cul-de-sac home in Indiana. When it came time to give our rubber duck themed bathroom a scrub or vacuum the sand-colored bedroom carpets – it didn’t matter if it was spring cleaning or just a tidy up, as the kids in my family were mess makers in all seasons – my mother would give us each a plastic bowl from the kitchen. It was an easy exchange: each chore we completed earned a couple pieces of candy. Bite-sized treats worked best. Marshmallows, Hot Tamales, chocolate chips. The more house we cleaned, the more candy we’d collect. I coveted my small bowl and its contents. The way my mother would count out five pieces of candy, or whatever number my duty had equaled in candy coinage, as if she were following a recipe to its exact specifications. I loved how the confections layered lazily, first loosely rolling about the bottom of the bowl like marbles, then piling atop each other as my precious collection grew. Since I snacked and cleaned simultaneously, popping them in alternating flavor pairings into my mouth as I went, my heap never seemed to stack very high.

Robin’s sugary labor incentives were not without a less-processed counterpart. During those years of candy payments, we cared for a garden in the backyard. It was no more than a few feet wide, surrounded by a rectangle of knee-high chain fencing, but its fruitage surpassed its size. We grew pumpkins, melons, squash. We could have filled our inflatable swimming pool to its colorful plastic brim with all the strawberries the patch spat out. Stalks upon stalks of scallions shot from its dirt like rows of soldiers, standing at attention. I should have turned green as the onions from how many of them I ate straight from the soil. My siblings and I helped our mother look after the baby garden, as if it were our own child. We watered it with the looping, snaking hose, its nozzle turned to the shower setting or sometimes the mist setting if we wanted to catch a rainbow in the watery haze. Eventually, the strawberries took the garden over, monopolizing the soil and suffocating the neighbor fruits and vegetables. They spread past the point of salvation, so Robin surrendered our little plot to the burgeoning plant.

Next to the strawberry commandeered bed sat our wooden swing set. It had a green slide, green swings, and a covered structure at the top, like a treehouse without the tree. One spring, probably around the same time the berries multiplied, a robin made her nest under our playhouse’s roof and laid three eggs. Each of my siblings and I named one. From several feet away (Robin didn’t want our scent to scare the mother bird away from her babies, so she told us to keep our distance), we watched those eggs crack and hatch into impossibly tiny, pink droplets with black bead eyes, hooded by a veil of translucent flesh. We peeked around playset corners as they sprouted feathery tufts which soon evolved into feathers themselves. We saw her feed them, straight from her mouth into their orange, yolky beaks. Day by day, they began to look more like birds. Then came an afternoon when our curiosities were met with an empty nest. We knew they’d left us for good, that their mother was through rearing them for what sat beyond the swing set walls. There had been three baby birds in total; three of them, three of us siblings. One robin for them, and one Robin for us.

Robin has not spoken to her own mother, Theresa, better known as Tootsie, since the day her and my father got married and Tootsie did not attend the wedding, hence my unfamiliarity with her. Tootsie was unforgiving of her daughter inviting her ex-husband, my grandfather, to the ceremony. There’s plenty about her and Robin’s relationship that I won’t ever know. The only image I have of Tootsie has been painted with second hand brushes and paints, handed down to me from her daughter. Robin has alluded to extravagant shopping sprees and episodes of mania. She’s told me stories of violence, like the time Tootsie threw garden shears at her second husband, my mother’s stepfather, and they stabbed him deeply enough that a hospital visit ensued. Robin said they made up in the ER waiting room, kissing and doting on one another as he bled.

My mother insists she did not have a poor childhood, that Tootsie loved her and there are fond memories to go along with ones involving sharp objects or absence. Still, I have wished over and over that I could re-deal the cards and give her a new mother, one who will make her special holiday treats with the same attention to detail she does. Sometimes, I’ll wish we could trade places. I’d send myself back in time and be her mother instead: the mother she should have had. I’d go to her wedding and help her get ready. I’d tell her the fourth of July fireworks on the night preceding her birthday were, yes, for her, and set off even more the next night. I’d care for her the way she deserved.