I had never been a Mallomar child. Long before my beta cells retired, I’d been relieved to award the fondant flower to the loudest friend. I liked Total Breakfast Cereal, plain graham crackers, and raisinless scones. Cookies suggesting sweetness were more than sufficient, especially when shaped like wombats and invented by my favorite genius.
“They’re not really cookies. They’re barely biscuits.”
My mother would not award the word casually. She couldn’t see what I saw: camels and aliens, butterflies and fat hearts. Zero grams of glucose contaminating the peaceable kingdom. A jar of blackberry jam to caulk Sweet n’ Low’s gaps. A non-stick pan of rebellion.
I turned a tiny star over in my hand, formulating a five-star review.
“I love them. They don’t even need jelly.”
“They’re not sweet, and I don’t know why they turned out so white.”
My mother had conducted experiments since the insulin began and the gingersnaps rolled away. Ill-begotten brownies became the bread of bitterness. (Lesson learned: aspartame can’t take the heat.) Sugar-free apple jelly beans formed a bunny trail to the bathroom. (Who knew sugar substitute would parade so flamboyantly through intestines?) Untrustworthy cookbooks spiked my glucose. (We were up until 3:00 A.M. on the phone with the endocrinologist, dueling ketoacidosis with clear fluids and diatribes against “safe” syrups.)
And now there were the Christmas cookies. She researched ratios of baking sodas and benign sweet chemicals. She talked to flours and extracted innocent flavorings. She pulled out the full congress of cookie cutters, no small senate when you are smitten with your only child.
We shaped the dough of devotion while Mariah Carey assured us that we were all she wanted. We made dutiful gingerbread personnel and Santa Clauses, but quickly moved on to the Eiffel Towers and Saturns that were more to our taste.
It was not yet Thanksgiving, but my mother believed in staying ahead, eating your asparagus first, guaranteeing we’d be on our feet when the last minute came.
I knew better than to debate the woman who had informed, not asked, the endocrinologist that she would be sleeping on the hospital floor for the duration of my hospitalization. I would not battle my Girl Scout troop leader, who read me chapters from a psychedelic textbook on experimental psychology. I trusted her more than I trusted my newly diagnosed body, and yet –
“I want to bring them to Girl Scouts.”
Her eyes met mine.
When the endocrinologist said that I should not eat after 8:00 P.M., no matter how hungry, my mother had obtained vintage teacups and inaugurated a new sacrament. We would fill daffodil china with all the chamomile it took to anesthetize a belly against the memory of graham crackers. Each cup had the name of a different poet on the bottom, and we toasted Wordsworth and Longfellow with Celestial Seasonings.
I now knew that my mother had eyes the color of tea.
“Okay.”
The creatures and starships would be waiting for me in a tin with Victorian sleigh riders after school on Friday. Sat beside the reliable single can of Caffeine-Free Diet Coke. My freckle on the continent of Kudos bars and Ecto Cooler Hi-C’s.
Michele grabbed a chocolate-covered granola brick and poured herself chartreuse sugar-water.
“Eddie said I have eyes like a cat,” Jocelyne announced, the kind of breaking news that could pierce a heart. I was the one who got him to stop crying by singing Pete Seeger songs.
The day that I was diagnosed, I had crushed three Juicy Juice boxes and a sloppy peanut butter sandwich down my throat as a last supper.
I had never liked Hi-C. I had never wanted Hi-C so much as at this moment.
Michele had hair the color of autumn’s peak, and Jocelyne made the boys interested in girls, and Diana won every award. They could eat anything they wanted. I wished I could beam us all to my grandmother’s kitchen, a banana-scented otherworld where Sicilian cookies were born. I would load their arms with cuccidati and struffoli until they swam in rainbow sprinkles.
They could win Seller of the Year for our Thin Mints and Samoas. (I had been the lonely advocate for our Trefoils, poetic shortbreads next to all that chocolate-coconut prose.) They could have the Casio keyboard and the tie-dyed sweatshirt and all the top prizes from the Girl Scout Pentagon. (I gave them my blessing to outsell me in every flavor.)
My mother pulled a jar of raspberry preserves from her purse, the same place where tissues and emergency glucose tablets lived. She pressed it into my hand and smiled, watering me with chamomile. “Just in case you change your mind about the jam.”
This was a time to be firm. Like the day I declared myself a vegetarian. Like the night I cut my waist-length hair to my chin. Like the Anonymous Was A Woman tee shirt gifted to me on my tenth birthday with the admonition to always speak my truth.
I knew all the lyrics to “Study War No More.” I got to go home with the Girl Scout troop leader. I had a mother with eyes the color of tea.
Jocelyne had half a Kudo in her hand, covered in caramel graffiti.
“Try one of my mom’s rhinoceroses.”
“What are they?”
I was an only child, but these weren’t my only cookies.
“They’re sugar-free.”
Angela Townsend is the Development Director at Tabby’s Place: a Cat Sanctuary. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Chautauqua, CutBank, Lake Effect, New World Writing Quarterly, Paris Lit Up, The Penn Review, Pleiades, The Razor, and Terrain.org, among others. Angie has lived with Type 1 diabetes for 33 years, laughs with her poet mother every morning, and loves life affectionately.
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