Dalai Mama Dishes

by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

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Girl Cub

Posted December 17, 2007
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Ever wonder what Catherine sounds like? Listen to her read this blog entry.

Because I have work coming out of my ear holes, I set the kids up to watch The Jungle Book through dinnertime: the thing we call "Pizza Movie Night" even though tonight, technically, it's Trader Joe's Spanakopita Movie Night. What a wonderful idea, eating spanakopita in bed! Because phyllo pastry is just so tidy, the way it shatters into a fountain of flakes when you so much as look at it. By the end of the movie, we're covered in pastry like it's ashes and we're victims at Pompei. Later still, I will munch absently on the crumbs while reading in bed, until I put something in my mouth that turns out to be not actually spanakopita.

Ew.

For now, though, I'm just sitting with my laptop, keeping the kids company, but only half watching. I couldn't resist this old movie -- especially since it was on the sale rack at the Salvation Army for 50 cents (you know you've really made it when you shop the Salvie's sale rack ...). I have a vague uneasiness about the film's racist undertones (Aren't there monkeys singing "I Want to Be Just Like You" but in conspicuously African-American Louis Armstrong voices? Even though really, as I recall, it's not actually Louis Armstrong and possibly, even worse, a white singer sounding like him?) and a similarly vague attraction to its old-fashioned pacing -- but I'm not paying enough attention to confirm either. In fact, when the kids ask me questions, I can't answer them. "Is he a good guy or a bad guy?" they want to know, and I squint at the screen, see a hugely coiled and sneaky-eyed python, and guess, "Bad guy?" Whenever the children crack up, I look up to see the bear rubbing his butt crack on a tree or Mowgli bumping into an elephant's butt crack. I should have "butt crack" tattooed across their knuckles just to guarantee their permanent joie de vivre.

I look up to see a shapely, cat-eyed girl filling up her water jar, then look up again a minute later to see the credits rolling. "Was that a happy ending?" the children wonder, and I say truthfully, "I really don't know. What do you think?" "If I'd been raised by animals, it would be sad to leave them," Ben says. "What's that word? Semi-sweet?" "Bittersweet," I say. "Me too," Birdy says. "I would stay with the animals."

Next the children want to know if it ever happens in real life, and I tell them the story of Romulus and Remus nursed by a wolf. I explain that it's a myth, but we decide to look it up on Wikipedia, and all I can say -- as I say so often about the Internet -- is "Who knew?" I mean, really. The entry on "feral children" is longer than my own teats, with which I could suckle Romulus and Remus from two counties away. I read aloud, and it's never clear which stories are taken to be myths and which, if any, are taken to be factual. It all blurs together into sentences like "Most feral children prefer to eat off the floor," as if you were asking for advice about what to do if one shows up at your next holiday party. There are lists of famous feral children and their adoptive families: lots of dogs and wolves, bears and monkeys, even gazelles and the occasional farm animal: Daniel, the Andean Goat Boy, amd The Bamberg Boy, raised by cattle (I consider a cow for a parent: great milk, but probably not very effective discipline). You half expect to see babies raised by fruit bats and armadillos, by earthworms and badgers. We follow a link to feralchildren.com. Again: who knew? Maybe we could get a subscription to Feral Child Fancier, I think, because I'm hilarious like that -- except the site is actually sad: more abandonment than singing families of cartoon hedgehogs.

And I should have been more careful. Later, half into her pajamas, Birdy is chewing her lip, her eyebrows pulled into a little "W" for worried. "So," she says, real casual-like. "Do you think your parents just, like, drop you off in the woods after they find the right kind of animal?" Ah. I explain that no, these are really unusual circumstances -- probably not even real -- where babies ended up in the woods or in the care of animals. I am careful not to use the words "lost" or "left." And I'm surprised to realize that, in a Venn diagram, this conversation would actually overlap with ones we've had about adoption: reassurance that children are wanted and cared for, unease around the issue of how babies are parted from their birth parents in the first place. I'm not having the conversation I thought I was having, and I wonder what it would feel like if Birdy were adopted -- whether I would think to say different kinds of things. "We would never leave you," I tell her, and she makes a dismissive sound like, "Pfff," and says, "I know that!" But her shoulders drop back down, and she leans happily against me. I am a bear, a wolf: I would protect her with my claws and teeth, slice open my own fur skin and wrap her in it if I had to, in this fierce, animal love.

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About Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman is the author of the memoir, Waiting for Birdy: A Year of Frantic Tedium, Neurotic Angst, and the Wild Magic of Growing a Family, available online and in bookstores nationwide.

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