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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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Taboo

Posted May 27, 2008
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Photo of Ben and Birdy

Ever wonder what Catherine sounds like? Listen to her read this blog entry.

If I'd married my brother Rob, I trust we'd still be sitting together in the back seat of the car, taking turns laying a single tormenting finger on the other person's side and screaming with indignation. "You're on my side! Mom! Rob's on my side!" Maybe we'd lay our wedding-ringed finger on the other person's side, just to be extra annoying! At least this is what I'm imagining while Birdy presumes aloud that she and Ben will be partners one day. I'm imagining their wedded bliss expressed conversationally: "Benny, that's not fair!" and "Well, Birdy, it is fair? I mean, I got those three rubber bands myself from Whole Foods? And I was actually very nice to give you one." and "But you have two, Ben, which is so not fair, and yes that was nice, and I did say thank you, but that doesn't make it fair. Because it's not." Only with iced lattes in their cup holders instead of collections of pebbles and acorns.

Ben interrupts my daydreaming. "Birdy, we're brother and sister, so we can't get married. What is it again, Mama? It's something like you get sick and die, right?" I love the way kids blow apart social convention. We're already so accustomed to our culture's most profound taboo that we don't question it. Why don't you marry your siblings? Because it gives you such a goose-pimpled case of the heebie jeebies that if your mind even started to wander over towards wondering about it, you'd flip the breaker and cut power to it and create a kind of curiosity black-out before you got smote by a lightning bolt or a pox or a plague of locusts. You'd think, in fact, that the children could easily imagine the possibility that they would drop immediately dead of fatal irritatedness, even while they were still pushing wedding cake into each other's mouths, but they don't. Like all taboos, this one has to be learned before it can be internalized.

I don't answer "exogamy" - marrying out of your family - even though that's what I learned in graduate school: that there's nothing inherently wrong with wedding kin, except that it prevents families from linking up with other families, which is a social web that culture depends on. Instead I stick with "you get sick and die." I explain a tiny bit about genetics and the greater likelihood of producing offspring with diseases, which leads Birdy to wonder, naturally, if she and Ben are sick but don't know about it, which I then have to try to explain more clearly, stumbling over the word "carry" because I can picture what she's picturing: staggering through life with a bucket of illness in each hand. Afterwards, the kids are silent for a moment, absorbing this information before Birdy offers, with her inimitable sweetness, "Ben, I'm just saying - if you don't get another partner? I'd be happy to marry you. Not until we're grownups, though, obviously." And Ben says simply, like the good husband he may one day be, "Thanks, Birdy."

This is the same Ben who asks, not even a full hour later, "Mama? What if you ate a great big pile of juicy, saucy, delicious barbequed ribs and you loved them, and you were like, 'These are the best ribs I've ever eaten!' and then you found out they were person ribs?!" "I think I'd be horrified," I answer, and Ben says, "Yes - but would you have not liked them in the first place? I mean, would you only not like them because they were human?" And the baton of taboo is back in my hand, I'm off and running, I'm talking about cannibalism, about the sacredness of human life, of human death. I'm not making any jokes ("Want to stop for a bite?" Michael used to say when we lived in California, every time we drove past Donner Lake). And Ben, literal, composting Ben, says, "After you die, you do actually get eaten. You get eaten at least once! I mean, you go into the ground, you grow into a plant, maybe an animal eats you and maybe a person eats the animal." Cycles of life. Indeed. But I can't get a word in edgewise, because Ben is still talking. "I mean, the only way you wouldn't get eaten would be if someone went into outer space and flang forty billion gallons of liquid nitrogen onto the earth. And then the only sound your frozen ears would hear would be the clink-clank of everything breaking."

Oh.

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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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