“Good morning!” I said to the room. Five heads swiveled toward me. A chirpy chorus ofMorning, Mamacame in reply.
I made my way around the table, kissing each perfect cheek, ruffling each perfect head. All my children, even the boys, wore their hair long. The girls looked just like me: freckled, narrow faces, soil-dark hair, expressions prone to penetrating seriousness. Catch one of us in a pouting moment, and you’d be forgiven for summoningimages of some sixteenth-century martyr on a hunger strike. As for the boys, they looked like Caleb: ruddy cheeks, big toothy smiles. When they were all walking in a group (and they often were; the boys worshiped Caleb) they made me think of a trio of politicians in lockstep, scouring the land in search of babies to kiss.
I rarely paid attention to the differences in the children. Both the girls and the boys spoke similarly, laughed similarly. Their clothing was a rainbow of neutrals. The same pile of olive and tan and ocher had been tumbling down our growing family tree for over a decade.
It’s amazing how long good cotton can last.
I walked over to my two boys, Stetson and Samuel. Stetson was eight years old, a full year younger than Samuel, but as of last summer the boys were the same height, same weight. With their shoulder-length hair and the way they seemed to do everything—run, play, do chores, shovel food into their mouths—in jerky, awkward-limbed unison, they reminded me of a pair of dressage ponies.
I rested a hand on either head as they ate their cereal with little-boy gusto, felt their skulls move around beneath my palms like possessed bulldozer levers. “What’s on the docket for today, boys?”
“Needa builda new enclosure for Sassafras,” Stetson said, mouth full.
“Mmm,” I said. “Very important. Papa will love the help.”
“Papa said I could use the nail gun.”
Samuel shoved Stetson, knocking the spoonful of cereal out of Stetson’s hand and sending it clattering to the floor. “It’smyturn to use the nail gun.”
“You’llbothuse the nail gun,” I said. “Nanny Louise … ?”
She nodded, wiped the pulpy juice from Jessa’s cheeks and chin, then got up to clean up the mess.
People refused to believe my babies were as amenable as they appeared online.There’s no way this is their actual life!!!!,the Angry Women would write. (That’s what Caleb and I called them. The Angry Women.) To which I would reply: absolutely nothing, of course. A mother’s main task is to protect her children from theworld. There was no need for some hateful witch in Manhattan to see how physical Samuel got with his brother (and even his sisters, sometimes), no need for them to witness Stetson’s daily tantrum over arithmetic (I loved that boy, but he had not been gifted with a standard helping of brains). If the Angry Women found out about any of my children’s failings, they’d go crazy with bloodthirst. They’d also be devastated. None of them realized it, of course, but they needed me as much as I needed them. It was a symbiotic relationship. I was a shark, and they were five million tiny fish, nipping at the nutrients along my belly.
Little idiots. They were desperate to eat me. They had no idea I was the one who was keeping them alive.
How does it feel to know that millions of people around the world know intimate details about your children?
“I show only very selective moments of my children’s lives. And besides, none of them haveanyaccess to screens—have you seen the studies, by the way? Of what screen time does to children’s brains? If you ask me, my children are much better off in this household, where they occasionally show up in videos for my account, than in some other household where they’d be staring at an iPad all night. I mean, really.” Sympathetic cluck. “It’s an epidemic. So sad. You should look intothat.”
“You’re up early,” I remarked to Producer Shannon as I poured my coffee.
“Couldn’t sleep,” she said. She was frowning at one of the knobs on the camera, twisting it one way, then the other, a grumpy expression on her face. When Shannon first showed up at the ranch, she was nineteen years old, a Barnard dropout with pink hair and a nose ring who was willing to do professional work at a student rate. Now she was twenty-one. The nose ring remained; the pink hair had been abandoned in the name of her natural brown. I wasn’t sure if that was an indication of any personal identity shift so much as a practical acceptance of the realities of living an hour away fromthe closest city. Not exactly many options when it came to qualified hair colorists near a five-hundred-acre farm.
I paused, then said delicately, “Are you having those dreams again?”
She looked at me. “Who told you about that?”
In the dreams, Shannon stood on the nearby hillside, watching the farm burn to the ground. The house, the chicken coop, the gardens: all aflame. Car-size balls of fire raining down from the violet heavens. As the fire spread across the fields, she would run—or try to run—while the barn collapsed, the animals screaming in the rubble. Sometimes she could see us in the distance, waving to her. Saying something. And sometimes—when the dream lasted this long—she could see beams of light shooting down from the heavens, shining grace onto my children and Caleb and me. Saving everyone but her.
“Nanny Louise is worried about you,” I said—which was more diplomatic, I thought, thanNanny Louise is sick of being startled awake in the middle of the night by screaming.All our farm employees lived in a set of rooms above the stables, next to the homeschooling classroom.
“I’m fine,” Shannon said. “It’s no big deal.” She leaned past me to plug in a battery charger. For a moment, we were silent, standing side by side in the small corner of the house where we spent nearly all our waking hours together.
You might just have the most beloved kitchen in America, these days. Can you tell us a little bit about it?
“Oh, gosh—where do I even start?”
Through the camera’s discerning eye, the cooking space was perfectly cluttered: a half-filled mason jar of water here, a flour spill there, a few forgotten flower stems strewn across a worn-looking cutting board. It looked like a space where a mother worked; like a kitchen in the real world, only obviously better than anything the real world had to offer. People think they want minimalism, they think they want a house absent of stuff, when in fact a perfectlyuncluttered home makes them want to kill themselves. A space must always look lived-in for someone to want to live in it. This is a completely obvious notion, when you take a moment to really think about it, but most people don’t take a moment to really think about anything. Most people are morons.
Another bonus of this area of the kitchen was that it was right next to a long row of windows, so the light, once the sun rose, was a perfect soft-bright at any hour of the day. Just standing near that kitchen corner made me look and feel a good six years younger. God-given plastic surgery, I called it privately, though I wouldn’t dream of saying something like that online. The Angry Women would eat me alive.
Have you ever had any work done?
Laugh, laugh, laugh.
“God,no. I’m sorry, no offense to others whohave,but me? Personally? I would never.”
