When the Moon Became a Star by Kathleen Gerard

I used to believe that the only reason my mother didn’t abort me was so I could do stuff for her - like cooking and cleaning; laundry, ironing, and even grocery shopping. You see, my father ditched us before I was even six months old. The way my mother tells it, one night he went out to buy baby formula and disappeared straight out of West Virginia, never to be seen again. A few years after he left, my mother was either working double shifts down at the coffee shop, moonlighting by selling Tupperware, or going at it between the sheets with my step-father, Darryl, who spent most of his time crunching on Cheez Doodles while collecting unemployment.

Maybe that was why from the moment I could crawl my mother had me creeping under the beds to reach the dust bunnies, as she called them. Why, by the time I graduated from diapers to training pants, I was emptying out the waste baskets on trash day. I remember just learning how to ride a two-wheeler when I started to separate whites and darks. And by the time I stuck my tongue into the gap left by my first lost tooth, my nail-bitten fingertips were already pressing through mounds of ground chuck as I slapped together meatloaf.

And the older I got, the more obvious it became that I wasn’t like other kids - those who talked about their ballet or piano lessons, and some, even their karate classes. I wouldn’t dream of telling them about the new cleanser I had used to scrub off burned grease from the stove. And I’d marvel when other kids would open their lunch boxes, surprised with a special dessert or a little love note from their moms scribbled on their lunch napkins. But when I loosened the lid of a translucent Tupperware container -- my mother’s idea of a lunch box -- I was never surprised, as I always packed my own food-to-go, usually whatever Darryl didn’t stuff into his big, fat mouth at dinner the night before.

But I was surprised, very surprised, the day the doorbell rang at the birthday party of one of my third grade classmates. Here I thought it was going to be some sort of corny-looking clown or some second rate magician. But instead, my mother waltzed in, wearing her oversized, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis-type sunglasses and a hot pink rain slicker the color of shellacked cotton-candy.

“Sweetheart, did you forget we have errands to run?” she said, a cloud of ozone-depleting hairspray from her perfectly teased and blown-out perm encircling me like a transparent net.

“But, we didn’t even have cake yet?”

My mother yanked my cone-shaped birthday hat straight up from my head so that the thin, rubber band beneath my chin snapped. Then, she gave my Buddha-belly a little pat. “Oh, I think you can afford to miss the cake, darling.”

The next thing I knew, I was a hostage in our wood-paneled station wagon, loaded with Tupperware in all shapes and sizes. I grit my teeth as the windshield wipers sloshed back and forth and rows of houses passed by in a glossy blur. When the rains started to pelt the roof of the car like a spray of bullets, in my mind I fired each and every round directly at my mother.

“Okay, first stop. Put up your hood, darling,” my mother ordered cheerily as she pulled into a strange driveway and threw the car into park. She nearly elbowed me in the face as she reached into the back seat and placed a huge, Tupperware cake carrier -- one that looked big enough to house a cat -- between us.

“Why can’t I be like other kids?” I blurted out, my bitterness slithering before her as mean as a snake. “Why can’t you be like other mothers?”

I could see my mother’s wide eyes, even behind her dark glasses. “Because other kids and other mothers are ordinary,” she snapped, her nostrils flaring. “You and me, we’re different - and you, you’re a DiMaggio, Jodie. Don’t you forget it.”