To Sing Frogs Chapter 32e

The tradition of our fruit basket has continued. Here is the current rendition

“I’ll trade you an onion for an apple.” I held out the flaking skinned bulb to my wife. The fruit basket was now filled with zucchini, onions, and potatoes. It hadn’t taken Sarah long to figure out she couldn’t be starved into submission when refusing to eat what was provided at mealtime.

“Mama, yoo saye der ees food een basket ee wee can eate food een basket aney tyme.” She’d gorge herself on apples, oranges, and bananas. The basket served its purpose. Our children didn’t hoard food. Now Sarah had taken the weapon, painted her own insignia on the side, and turned it around against its creator. If Amy changed her position from what was taught in the soft books Sarah could prove that her new mother was a liar. I wouldn’t have cared. I’d have let the kid cry foul. Amy was smarter. She didn’t want to hurt their relationship so she simply changed the foods kept in the basket. Sarah preferred eating anything to raw zucchini and onions.

Amy took the onion from me and put it back in the basket. “The apples are in the pantry on the top shelf. Are you sure you deserve one?”

That was the closest Amy would ever come to scolding me. She always left me with an out, able to avoid being called on the carpet. Our relationship and our family meant more to her than fair. I understood that both of those things, so important to her, were just as important to me. They couldn’t be all they were supposed to be unless I was fair. “I’m sorry. I haven’t been doing my share.”

“I just need some help,” she said, non-accusatorily, almost pleasantly.

It wasn’t that there were man jobs and woman jobs in the Simmons household. I didn’t wear wife-beater tank tops nor did I send my wife to the kitchen to fix me a sammich.

The evolution of where we performed our work was natural with the choices we made. In the beginning Amy wanted to be a stay at home mom and we both wanted to build our own company. Start-ups are brutal and I was soon working seventy-five to eighty hours a week. There simply wasn’t time for me to help around the house. In fact, Amy would come to the shop and help me when she could. As the years progressed it just kind of worked out. The time she put in at home was similar to what I did at the company. That wasn’t the case anymore. It was time for me to put in some extra hours at home. Amy had too much to do.

We sat down at the still unfinished antique table as I crunched on the apple. “I know I need to do a lot more around here to make this happen. But the other girls are still in Russia. We need to keep pressing forward.”

Tears leaked from my wife’s eyes and spilled down her face. It wasn’t an angry reaction. She was just frazzled. “I don’t know if I can do it. I know I can’t do any more than I’m doing right now.”

“I know. I need to do a lot more and I can. I used to work long hours and if White Knight needed it now I’d do it again. The company doesn’t need it though. The home does. No big deal. I’ll put in the hours.”

Amy nodded but she still cried.

It boiled down to loading up each side of the balance scale. What would we expose our other children to by bringing these troubled girls into the family? (It was a given that coming from the same background as Sarah and having endured it longer, they would have even more difficulties than she did.) How many years of suffering would the older sisters experience before expiring—in the street, from one cause or another—if we didn’t intervene? What would our other children have to “do without” by adding more teenagers who would require more than any of our other children ever had? What would the older girls “do without” if we closed our eyes and moved on? Necessities? Definitely. Life? Probably.

 

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