mom's gone.

whenever my mom would go to her conferences, which happened around once a year, a sense of quiet desperation would hang in the house. the two years that we lived in wyoming, lindsay got to go along to the conferences, which gave her a sense of spiritual as well as biological superiority over candyce and me. we didn't mind so much that she got to go, because "conferences" sounded boring, just like a long long church day with louder music. but we envied her so much because of one thing: she got mom, and we got stranded.
which is exactly it felt like. living in a mobile home in the middle of barbed-wire fields with no mom for a week felt like you could do anything and nobody would care, which was awful. we loved our dad but he was the funny parent and the last resort when we were really bad parent, and he was the dad. he tried hard, and me and candyce knew it, but terrible things still happened.
the first year, we started off mom's absence in the usual way: we cried our eyes out. but dad had a few bribes up his sleeve and took us to the grocery store (the only one in town) and let us each pick out our own box of sugar cereal. my mom was an extremely health-conscious person, much to our dismay. we never had soda or sugary juice or crackers with orange cheese in the middle or those pretzel sticks that you dipped in frosting, and the only time we ate chips was when people in our church gave us 12 bags of nacho cheese doritos, which we hated by bag 3 but had to keep eating because we couldn't waste.
but whenever my mom left for a period of several days, me and my sisters were allowed to get our own box of sugar cereal, cereal that was so sugary it made our stomaches hurt and reminded us of cartoons on saturday morning and helped us get up in the morning because even though there was no mom to kiss our heads, there was a bowl full of sugar cereal waiting to be eaten. we always got horrible kinds, me and candyce especially. cereal in the shape of chocolate chip cookies and cinnamon rolls, cereal that turned the milk to chocolate milk (which we also never drank), which was like a double treat, and cereal that we picked out ourselves and that nobody else could touch, because it was special. because mom was gone.
this year, the first year in wyoming, dad bent over backwards to stop our sniffling, because mom was going to be gone for a whole week: he let us pick out t.v. dinners to eat. we had never seen anything so exotic in our lives--there were little compartments for all the different little foods! and there was always, always dessert! and there were t.v. dinners just for kids, kids like us with no moms, with penguins on the front and brownies with rainbow sprinkles (which i loved) and corn and chicken nuggets in the shape of other things like dinosaurs, which was so cool.
this kind of exciting food would get me and candyce through the long, boring day of being good and doing chores without the threat of moms punishment. we amused ourselves the best we could, and longed for the time to come where we could eat our exotic t.v. dinners. i even think my dad let us actually watch t.v. while we ate them. it was the best time ever, and the best brownie with rainbow sprinkles ever, and dad was the best dad ever because mom would never let us do this.
and then it happened.
the next day, me and candyce came down with the flu like we had never experienced. we threw up our beautiful t.v. dinners, the food no longer neat and compartmentalized, and we threw up our sugar cereal that was supposed to make missing mom easier and we threw up things that we couldn't even remember eating, but it just kept coming. my dad came home at lunch time and immediately went out and bought us some 7-up, which we couldn't even appreciate as soda because we couldn't keep that down either. we laid on our beds in our room and shivered and missed mom more than we ever had.
our poor dad. he was ill prepared to care for 2 little girls with serious cases of the flu, and his only cure (7-up) didn't seem to be working. and so he resorted to depserate measures. he called the church ladies.
every day and for most of the nights when he was busy pastoring, my dad had different church ladies take care of us. we hadn't lived in cody that long, and so candyce and i didn't know any of these ladies, we just knew that they were old, they had a different smell about them, they sat on the couch and watched t.v. shows in the middle of the day, and they were definetly not mom.

it was a traumatic week, but we got better before mom and lindsay got home. we begged mom not to go away again, and we tried to convey how terrible the week was without her. the church ladies watched t.v. in the middle of the day! and gave us meatloaf when our stomaches hurt! but she just laughed and kissed our heads and checked out foreheads and told us we were fine and that we should go play outside. we sighed, disappointed that she didn't realize that we almost died without her, but secure in the fact that she was home again, and everything would be back to normal. which it was, except for the fact that i didn't eat chicken nuggets again for a whole year.