Sing a Song of Sixpence: Lessons from the Poem Book

There was a dusty orange book of children's verse from the 1930s my Mom and I picked up one day at a thrift store when I was about 3 years old. It would prove to be one of the best investments we ever made. "The Poem Book," as we came to call it, became our favorite book to read from at bedtime and it soon became a tradition that continued after my sister was born two and a half years later. Poems with repeated lines, or with nonsensical lyrics, or those with quirky visual appeal quickly became our favorites that we would ask to have read to us, or that we would ask to read ourselves.

I used to laugh at the absurd idea of baking birds into a pie every time my mother read the nursery rhyme, "Sing a Song of Sixpence" to me out of The Poem Book. However, there was some bonding that strengthened each time we would share this poem together. I recall her swooping down her hand, with a loving smile on her face at the end of the rhyme, parodying the swoop of the blackbird, and then catching my nose gently between her thumb and forefinger and "flying" off with it:

The maid was in the garden,
hanging out the clothes,
When down came a blackbird
and pecked off her nose!

Mom's dedication to supplying us with literary food continued into the kitchen where she made everything from scratch. There, my sister and I continued to see how we could make recipes jump from the page, just like poems, that we could create and savor together. Almost every weekend, we would help Mom make one of her famous pies, breads, or cakes, from recipes passed down to her from her Croatian mother. Although she was a hard-working laborer and contractor who owned her own home decoration business, Mom would invariably, though exhausted from a hard day's work, continue to work into the kitchen when she got home. I guess perhaps she still was holding onto the collapsing worldview she grew up with of the conservative mid-twentieth century American poor working class, encapsulated in the common saying, "a woman's work is never done."

Ironically, she was married to a man, my father, who, for thirty or so years, relinquished his traditionally male responsibilities in order to stay at home while his wife ran herself into the ground running the household in every affair. Not only was he financially and practically unsupportive; when she wasn't working outside the house, he made her time at home a living hell by ridiculing her, throwing temper tantrums that would last for hours, and sometimes entire days, forbidding her to engage in even simple non-threatening pasttimes that might have otherwise given her small moments of happiness, such as visiting a fireworks display. Baking pies and caring for her children were about the only joys she had, and he would make fun of her for these things, as well.

As a child observing Dad's abuse and my poor mom's crying face, I wanted to give Mom everything she deserved. I envisioned a future wherein we could experience only the small happy moments: at bedtime when she read from The Poetry Book, or while she taught me how to roll out the dough for her family's famous pie crust.

Today, she still attends her religious services with dried paint in her hair and on her nails, indelible reminders of her gruesome hard-working lifestyle; sadly, she still also comes home to her belligerent and psychotic husband who has made her feel as though she is worth nothing more than a "mule," as he has at times called her, belittling her intelligence and erecting himself as a superior artist, who has inherited the right to control and use those who are lesser than him. Although his subjects used to include my younger sister, who is now 21, and I (27), he no longer has any control over his children, as we have moved far away from and have removed contact with him. As adults, my sister and I now realize, we can choose freedom. More than anything, though, I want freedom for my mother.

So now, "sing a song of sixpence" with me. Recognize the tangibility of that childhood happiness, of the wisdom in those nonsensical children rhymes. Try one of my mother's pies, which, like those poems, still waiting to be lived, transcend time, and seek to repair abuse. Taste empowerment. Eat a pie.