By Madeline Simms
Featured Art: “Eye of Horus” by Ryan Davis

It is a Wednesday when I ask for help in the kitchen, a Tuesday night for my mother.  Winter flirts with spring as she sends a photo of the Monkey Bread recipe across the Atlantic. It reaches me and my dry bones in the wet grey of Ireland. I am looking for anything sweet—  

She sends a good night text when I send Good morning, alongside a picture of Rian and Jonah climbing over my groggy body. We laugh countries apart. Day or night, it is winter-dark wherever we are. I send her a video of the boys licking my face as if they are dogs, and we laugh counties apart. Our well-wishing is a promise of rising, be it the sun, the bread. I think of the day ahead of me filled with Hot Wheels, dropping off the boys at school, picking them up, snacks, spills, a likely tear or two—author unknown.  

During the past few months as an au pair, I’ve grown closer to my mother. She sends me suggestions for sneaking veggies onto the boys’ picky tongues, fun games to fill our long days together. I can’t help but wonder if she feels this too, comradery despite the distance. 

For breakfast, Rian, Jonah and I eat Weetabix at varying points of brick and mush. I eat mine first, quickly. I have always been a fast eater; I tell them both as they gape and giggle at my empty bowl. Their two small hands have yet to pick up their plastic spoons. I let them drive trucks at the breakfast table, the Hot Wheels whirring and turning before each bite. As they eat slow, I blame my own speedy consumption on growing up at a table where we fought for seconds. But, when I bring this up to my siblings, they all agree. I was the only one fighting. You would eat anything, they say. It’s true, I eat anything and anything fast. I am always hungry.  

With cereal, I am especially efficient. I want some resonance of crunch. If I’m eating soggy cereal, it might as well be oatmeal. Both Rian and Jonah wait for their Weetabix brick to swell with time, soaking up all the milk in the bowl and doubling in size. Other than Weetabix, Rian and Jonah seem to eat nothing but crackers and jam and cheese. Was I ever so childish? 

After I drop Rian and Jonah off at school, I clear the bowls from the breakfast table. At this point, the Weetabix is unrecognizable. Much closer to oatmeal than it is to the wheat-brick it once was, I scoop it into the food-waste bin, tapping the spoon on the side to avoid touching the slimy, swollen waste. A child’s plate after they’ve eaten is always so soggy, no matter the meal. It makes me wonder if the Clean-Plate-Club was more of an effort to avoid interacting with half-eaten, fully-soaked and drooly meals rather than an effort to avoid wasting food.  

* 

The breakfast table, now clear of all things breakfast, becomes my desk while the boys are at school. I bring down my laptop and art supplies, a journal and stationery from my room on the third floor. At the moment, I am working on translating some of Nuala Ni Dhomhniaill’s poems from Irish to English. Like everything else, I am a novice. I am slow, picking and choosing Irish words and their English translations like pieces to a puzzle. Of course, I can’t find them all, the puzzle of my small Irish dictionary renders itself incomplete.  

The Irish word dubh is black and sounds like dove. Rian and I learn the colors together : glas, we point to the grass; dearg, the toy car; bui, the sun. He laughs when I get the colors wrong, when there is a moment he knows something and I don’t.  “Bhí áthas orm” means I was happy.  

Mary Ruefle thinks about the first translation and says, “it was when a mother heard her baby babble or cry, and had to decide in an instant what it meant”. Rian and Jonah are not my children and are far from not being able to talk. Together still, we find a language to speak to one another. Together we have words we do not understand. When I am tired, I do not play hide and seek. When Rian is tired, he asks to watch Cat in the Hat with Mike Meyers. When Jonah is tired, he falls asleep on the winding road home from school.  

After writing, I clear the table and prepare the surface to begin making Monkey Bread. The empty table with nothing but flour and water reminds me of winter days with my own mother—the island in the middle of the kitchen, my sisters and brother seated on top of the granite, and me, just a little too old to be standing on the table, seated on a swivel chair. We were many needy hands, and she, radiating patience, gave us something to do. Sometimes just filling a bowl with water, other times cookie cutters with nothing to cut. We each took a turn kneading the dough, picking at the pieces that stuck to our hands, licking them, sticking them back. 

My mother is a private woman. This privacy bears no reflection of the unconditional, mothering me in unmotherable times. I was not an easy child. She is a wonderful mother. Anyone who has met her can see how much she loves to care. She remembers everyone’s birthdays and every New Years when we were young, she would make rosemary-walnut bread for our neighbors. 

I do not know much about her life before being a mother: I know she loved theater and while she loved theater in college, she smoked filterless Camel cigarettes. I know while she smoked filterless Camel cigarettes and loved theater, she did not know my father but met my father when she moved to Chicago after leaving Virginia, somewhere she had lived her whole life. I know she worked at an OTB when she met my father and had a roommate who smoked too much pot and stole from her. I know on the second date she went on with my father, she knew she was going to marry him. I know my father knew he was going to marry her when his roommate walked in on the two of them, sobbing on the couch watching the end of Old Yeller. And I know before she got married, she developed a stomach ulcer so bad she could only eat unflavored chicken and rice a few months before the wedding. I cannot imagine not eating. I cannot imagine only chicken and rice, surely I cannot be her daughter.  She was already so thin. And this is what I know – nothing about how she felt about leaving a whole life in Virginia to become a mother in Chicago. 

I’ve come to love my mother’s secret life, the part of her I will never know. Her secrets I appreciate as hers, the more childcare experience I accrue.  I look at old photographs of her with her perm and bright eyeshadow and imagine her youthful becoming. In my mind, her secrets grow reckless alongside the idea of her past life—young and beautiful and wild. I grow to love the mystery around her as I realize just how precious privacy is, my own interrupted while small fists pound on the bathroom door after a moment’s separation. Rian laughs when my American accent utter the words underpants, and I try to too as I discover he’s curiously sifted through my laundry yet again. In this realization, I am in no way claiming motherhood, but I mediate on the teachable moment: to mother is to take up your secrets like the hem of your skirt, as you forgo all privacy, baring your legs to the world. 

*  

Far from my mother, I return to the dough. I knead in more flour to prevent any sticking to the table. Pushing it down into the table, the dough picks up a missed scrap of Weetabix from breakfast. Instead of picking it out, I knead it in. I add more flour. The dough becomes more resilient—pushing back at me and resisting my touch. The young bread becomes a teenage self: stubborn and resilient. I continue.  

All alive: the yeast, my small sweat from kneading, the spider on the windowsill. For a moment, my weight on the table, I am exhausted by all this life and growth. The doubling. I think of Jonah, a baby when I first moved in. How I memorized the bumps in the road to avoid waking him in the back seat. How he’s doubled in size, leaving his shoes behind quicker than a molting hermit crab, like the shells we painted when we were young. After kneading the bread that will soon be monkied, I put the dough back in the bowl and on the windowsill to rise.  

In my family, we are private about everything but the body. When I was eleven years old, my sister famously announced to everyone at the dinner table that I had started to grow hair under my arms and between my legs. Of course, like any vulnerable, pubescent pre-teen, I was furious. But I wasn’t surprised. Once during a playdate, a neighborhood girl shattered the glass door to our bedroom. Instead of replacing the glass, the door was removed and became a string of beads. To this day, my childhood bedroom door remains a curtain – some suggestion of what we could call our own.  

* 

The difference between privacy and a secret is a delicate balance. Sometimes, the two can be confused the way baking powder can be mistaken for baking soda. Both baking powder and baking soda are rising agents—they help cakes and cookies become light and fluffy in the oven. Both privacy and the secret come from the body taking up space, the necessary task of filling out the pan. They are both organic as well as chemical.  

Before using baking powder, bakers used yeast whenever they needed something to rise. Back then, the yeast was obtained from brewers and distillers. Exposing dough to open air also allowed for wild yeasts to ferment; however, it also provided the perfect breeding ground for contamination. And so, to avoid contamination, baking powder was invented. Privacy acts a similar barrier—quieting the wild yeast that might breed conflict or miscommunication. Like baking powder, baking soda yields a  lighter, fluffier cake. However, baking soda is the ingredient to be used when the dough already has an acidic element—something like honey or lemon or chocolate. Baking soda becomes useful when there is already something indulgent to hide. It’s prevents the acidic secret from souring and ruining the whole cake. A secret hides, privacy keeps. 

There are times when privacy becomes the secret, when you add both baking soda and baking powder to the cake. When I got pregnant at 18, it became a secret. It was no longer about the body but about something deeper—something like the consequences of a hunger satisfied. Something like what happens to a body after listening to what it needed. I frantically googled ways to “naturally” terminate a pregnancy: black kahosh, heavy doses of vitamin C, overexercising, starving yourself. I read horror stories of private traumas, young women bleeding out and the aftermath of expensive hospital bills. And finally at 18, I made the decision to use the money from summer babysitting to pay for my abortion.  

I never told my mother. I never told her because she is a private woman. She is a private woman who raised a private woman who was not going to raise a private anything. At the time, I told no one but a friend who picked me up from the clinic. My friend, like me, learned to drive in a big red Ford Expedition. We each had two sisters and we each wanted to be kissed, again and again; hungry for wild life we thought we weren’t already living. She knew someone once who had an abortion, she too could keep a secret. She told me once in private during English class.  

I bled on the carpet while I played Sorry! with the two kids I babysat that summer. That summer, Sorry! was all they wanted to play. We chose our favorite colors and moved around the board. I apologized for the blood I left behind, my words heavy with the weight of what went unsaid.   

* 

I pick up Rian from school before Jonah. Holding his hand, then racing to the car, I beat him through the parking lot. It’s important to let kids loose sometimes, just like it’s important to let them win. I tell him about the Monkey Bread at home. It’s all a game, balance that is. “Monkey Bread?” he giggles, his voice chiming with curiosity. “What’s that?” 

Rian’s excitement can hardly ever be contained. He is the most enthusiastic kid I have ever met. Eager as he is curious, Rian loves to learn. He asks me about my tattoos, about my brothers and sisters, about America. I try and answer with an unmatched intensity; however, with weary maturity, I inevitably fail. Who am I to speak of a whole country, my whole body? Our entire lives?  

When we walk into the creche to pick up Jonah, he announces to his brother and an audience of other three-year-old’s, “Jonah, grab your coat. We are going to make Monkey Bread.”  

Jonah is dressed as a fire fighter. He is always dressed as a firefighter and I must not have had the energy this morning to make him change before heading out the door. “Come on now firefighter Jonah,” the childminder coos,  “Your Mammy is here.” 

The childminder at the creche is new. She doesn’t know I am not Jonah’s mom. It’s happened a few times where someone mistakes me for the boys’ mother. The first time it happened, we were at the library. We were at the circulation desk and I had just handed the library card over to Rian who shyly, yet confidently, handed the card and his book selection over to the librarian. After she scanned the card, she said to Rian, “Now make sure you hand this back to your mammy, you don’t want to loose this.” 

“Oh, I’m just the childminder,” I quickly corrected her as I put the card back in my wallet. I did not have the energy to explain “au pairing.” She nodded her head, dismissively, smiling. 

I don’t remember the next time the mistake was made. Possibly at the park or at the shop across the road. I don’t remember where we were but I remember not correcting the statement – just allowing myself to be something of a mother for a moment, trying it on like a luxurious fur coat in the mirror. The coat felt natural and warm, held and swallowed by its luxury; by that idea of motherhood, the one I politely discard in the privacy of my room after the end of a long day. 

* 

On one of my many trips into Dublin, I stumbled into an art show at the National History Museum. The show, (A)Dressing our Hidden Truths, was a series of installations responding to the harrowing legacy of the infamous Magdalene Laundries and the Mother and Baby Homes found throughout Ireland. One piece in particular caught my eye. It was a series of 9 glass casts of christening robes hung from the ceiling. The robes themselves were glistening, as if they’d just been dusted with snow. They appeared cold and weightless—stone ghosts haunting the gallery.  

The Bon Secours Home in Tuam, Galway was just one of the many Mother and Baby Homes in Ireland. These homes were institutions for unwed mothers and their children, owned and operated by the Catholic Church.  Often times the children were separated from their mothers without consent and subsequently placed into foster care or given up for adoption. The home in Tuam operated between the years of 1925 to 1961. Between the years of 2010 and 2013, Catherine Corless led an investigation of the home after she obtained the 798 death records of children with no indication of a burial. Corless and a team of historians discovered an alleged famine burial cite to be the unnamed tomb of the children, the bodies of all 798 children buried in a septic tank.  

I don’t pretend to know the death of a child, I don’t pretend to know what it is like to have child at all. I am far from a mother. However, I cannot help but think of an alternate life in which I didn’t. Anyone who’s had an abortion knows a nothing-child. As I sat in the gallery and wept, I thought of that nothing-child, to nothing-child. I sat with what it means for my body not to be my own, for the surrender of what is private to be externalized. A shameful secret shed. The christening dresses hovered in front of me, unbaptized yet fossilized. How heavy a grief becomes when you are mourning something so incomplete. My nothing-baby would be Rian’s age. My nothing-baby isn’t anything but would be, an idea that metastasized throughout my body. My nothing-baby is a secret I am trying to make private. By which I mean something less guarded but equally personal. My nothing-baby saved my life. I would not change my nothing-baby for anything but the opportunity for more of a life to call my own.  

* 

With the boys now home, we begin our afternoon routine. I prepare lunch, heating up leftover lasagna in the microwave, then picking out the onions (or at least the visible ones) for Rian. Rian changes into his pajamas, Jonah remains a firefighter. After they leave their unfinished lunch plates, Rian and Jonah retire to the den, Hot Wheels in tow. I commence the ritual clean-up, scraping the plates, wiping down the table, loading the dishwasher. I think of my mother as I prepare both the kitchen and my patience to bake with children. 

“It’s Monkey Bread time!” I yell from the kitchen. The boys drop their races and sprint to the table. I’ve set up stations—in part for small in hands, in part for the recipe. In one bowl there is brown sugar and cinnamon, another for butter. The third bowl holds the doubled dough. I punch down the bread and lift it from the bowl onto the table. 

“Jonah, you are going to be in charge of the butter, Rian you are in charge of the sugar. I am going to hand you dough that you’ll need to cover in butter, then sugar. Make sure you get the whole ball covered!” 

The assembly line begins. I roll the dough into small, one-inch balls, plopping them into Jonah’s bowl where he swirls them around in butter. With some assistance, the buttery ball is then carried from Jonah to Rian where Rian, between licks of his fingers, covers the ball with cinnamon and sugar. For awhile, we work together, lining the Bundt-cake tin with a buttery, raw, sugary, mess. Of course, the repeated task grows dull before the task is completed. The boys jump at the opportunity to wash hands in the big sink. I let them pour too much soap into the water. They splash and giggle as I finish off the bread, pouring the remainder of the sugar and butter on top of the dough. The dough rests a second time before I place it into the oven. While the dough rests, the boys retire to the couch and I join them, snuggling between I gaze up at the ivy climbing the stone wall outside. I run my fingers through Jonah’s thin, buttery hair. Rian rests his head on my shoulder, awkwardly but with such intent. They hold me tight, our breathing in sync. I am far from a mother but closer to a child than I have ever been. My entire day, their entire life: our bellies tight with fistfuls of finger-licked cinnamon-sugar, a feeling, if not me, I hope they will remember. 

* 

Once it is cool enough to eat, Rian, Jonah and I pick the loaf apart—steam rising between each piece. The whole house is full of butter, sugar and cinnamon. The bread is sweet, the caramelized bits of sugar even sweeter. Like me, the boys now eat fast. Jonah holds fistsfuls of the bread in each hand. I tell him to slow down, worried he might choke.  Rian asks why it’s called Monkey Bread and I tell him it’s because we look like monkeys while we’re eating it. I make some monkey sounds, scratching my head. The boys laugh. I send a picture to my mother. Monkey bread! She responds enthusiastically, as though the picture needs no explanation. Of course it doesn’t, she sent me the recipe. 

---

Madeline Simms is a creative with midwestern roots. Currently based in Madison, Wisconsin, she is a recipient of the 2023 AWP Intro Award in Fiction. Madeline has received support from Sundress Academy for the Arts and the University of Alabama. Her work is forthcoming in Indiana Review and appears in Poet Lore, Quarterly West, and elsewhere.

Ryan Davis (b. 1989 Cincinnati, OH) is a NYC based painter and visual collage artist and HS visual arts teacher. His work is inspired by the natural world and an enjoyment for working with wood to build objects.