If she’s old enough to bleed, she’s old enough to breed. The words repulsed her. They were such an animal assessment of an acquaintance. How could a boy who had been a cohort turn so suddenly into an assessor, a predator? Mag is much older now, and she sees news frequently about cyber-bullying among teenagers, and she thinks: Wow, if that innocuous garage party phrase so affected me, a relatively resilient individual, how devastating and damaging must the current cruelties be? Words can harm. Words are worse than sticks and stones.

Mag’s primary tormentor was her mother. Her mom fed her false judgments along with the solid food she pushed too early, the toilet training she forced prematurely, the cuddling she declared Mag outgrew by age three. Her mother taught her that she was lazy, and unsensible, and not good looking or feminine enough. These were not true assessments, but what did Mag know then? She was a bright child and a little suspicious after awhile. She began resisting and that fueled her mother’s impatience with her imperfections. By the time Mag was six, mother and daughter were fully engaged in nonverbal competition.

But of course they had to keep getting along. Mag was clearly too young then to leave, and except for the tension between her and her mother, the family was well-adjusted and happy enough. So the child endured the mother and all the attempts to improve her. Without those attempts and the name-calling, Mag might have thought herself okay. But at eight her mom began describing the merits of rhinoplasty, to the extent of promising/threatening an adolescent nose job. By the time Mag was ten she knew about the contact lenses she might acquire in high school; soon after that she was thoroughly trained in how to minimize the look of feet she never realized were growing too big. And at 14, right before she (finally) had that first period, Mag’s mom was “this close” to taking her to a doctor, to find out what was wrong.

(So was it cultural pervasion or was it her mother? Mag’s diary reveals that she commenced her very first diet just two weeks before that period flowed.)

Mag laughed. She’d reached the point in her mom meditations where they went from quasi-tragic to glad. She’d come to understand that one can’t grow up without experiencing hurt. No one gets through childhood unscathed. And usually it’s the parents who do the most or the earliest damage; they’re there, and they get no breather. Parents need time-outs more than kids do.

The truth is, Mag was hurt but not so much that she can’t remember. Why, she has friends who lost a sibling or a parent in childhood and were “protected” from the event or otherwise not allowed to exhibit their feelings, and those friends, now rule-following adults, have no clear memories of their youth. Mag knows grownups who were so deprived as children, of material goods but also of affection from their overworked and over-anxious parents, that their world view now is hyper-rational and without room for emotions or creativity or spirituality, and their memories are absent or warped. And Mag understands there to be other categories of childhood-survivors who credit nothing but fundamental religion, and have no truck with science or accurate recollection.

She chuckled a little more as she got up from her upholstered chair and went to the kitchen. Earlier in the day she had acquired a fresh bag of apricots, not yet opened or refrigerated. But she still harbored the damn Life. She had liked Life cereal forever. When she was a teenager and fully resistant about breakfast, Life was the only food her mother could get her to eat before school. She still liked the cereal, with milk because that was the way to unlock the sugar in it. But she still didn’t want breakfast, so Life was a sometime late night treat, and she seldom stocked the stuff in her pantry. A few weeks earlier she had grabbed a box off the grocery store shelves, registered shock at what it now cost, and impulsively purchased it anyway. That night she poured a bowl with nice anticipation, anointed it with just the correct level of cold skim milk, carried it to her chair, and dug in.

It didn’t taste right. Not spoiled, but lacking that slightly sweetened crisp oat taste she craved. She finished it, but without any satisfaction. The next morning she examined the box.

Maple and Brown Sugar Flavor? Good grief, why? The original is near-perfect. The newer cinnamon flavor is understandable. But there’s no need for any other variation under the same name. And the packaging! Now that Mag was looking closely she could detect the slight color variation between the printing on the bad box compared to the good, but there was no way she wanted to pay more attention to packaging. The situation reminded her of those times when she purchased a book she already owned, either because of a change in cover art or, sneakier yet, a new title. Yeesh.

And then she laughed a third time, louder and most sincerely. With a sweet smile on her face, Mag removed the cereal in its waxy bag and dumped it into the compost bin. She folded the box flat and placed it on top of the paper recycle pile. Then she opened the new bag of dried apricots, carried them with her to her favorite chair, and ingested them one by one.