Smack Dab in the Middle of Maybe

“The cricket turned her warm brown eyes on me and cocked her head. I swear she saw inside me and asked the same exact question I’d been asking myself for days: Just how far will you go to get your mama back?”

Cricket frequently anthropomorphizes Charlene. Often, Charlene seems to be talking to Cricket, giving her messages or telling her things that she needs to hear. In this way, Charlene offers Cricket the maternal or guiding voice she seeks.

“I couldn’t stop Mama from leaving, and I couldn’t stop Daddy from dying, but I could sure do something now.”

Cricket feels helpless in the face of things outside of her control, like her father’s death and her mother’s abandonment. She focuses on something she feels like she can control when she tries to find a way to make her mother come home and stay for good.

“‘Walking is for other people,’ she always told me.

‘What people?’ I would ask.

‘Those people. People who don’t see things the way we do. We’re meanderers, Cricket. We pay attention.’”

Cricket’s mother has instilled in Cricket the importance of Observing the Beauty of the World. Mama has taught Cricket to observe and pay attention to small details, and they are skills that serve Cricket well on her search for the Bird Room.

“With only me left, it was like there just wasn’t enough weight to hold Daddy to this earth.”

Although she does not examine this thought very closely, Cricket feels somewhat responsible for her father’s death. She already feels like her mother left because of her actions, so she reasons that her father died because Cricket didn’t have the “weight” to keep him after her mother’s disappearance.

“After Grandma died, Mama used to say a lot of things she might not remember later. She sprinkled them around like salt and pepper on a ripe tomato—things she wanted to do, things she meant to do. But she never, ever broke a ‘no matter what’ promise.”

Following Grandma’s death, The Impact of Mental Illness becomes much more obvious in Mama’s behavior. Cricket does not fully understand the signs of her mother’s illness and holds on to the hope that Mama will not break a “no matter what” promise.

“Charlene kept up her rhythm, but she didn’t try to hop out of her box. Maybe it was enough just to know that somebody else was out there. Yant, yant, YANT, yant. I pretended it was calling for the both of us.”

Charlene’s calls to her family echo Cricket’s own silent calls to her mother. Like Charlene, Cricket has to take comfort in the knowledge that her mother is somewhere out there until they can be reunited for real.

“It was a wonder that time marched on like normal for anybody or anything else. It seemed to me that church sign should have been gone, faded back into the woods, eaten clear through by termites and rot.”

Cricket feels like the world should have stopped when her father died and her mother left. This is a very common sentiment in grieving people; it seems unfair that the world should continue on as normal when something so terrible has happened.

“It wasn’t her fault. That was just Mama’s way. As soon as I proved the Bird Room was real, Mama wouldn’t need to go off looking for birds anymore because I would have found them.”

Cricket does not really understand The Impact of Mental Illness because no one has ever talked to her about it. She thinks that proving that the Bird Room is real will fill a need in her mother and make her stay forever. Mama’s reasons for leaving are more complicated than looking for birds, and what she needs is proper treatment for her illness.

“If Mama could prove the Bird Room was real, she’d prove she wasn’t crazy.

After all these years of not finding it, had Mama started to doubt? Maybe she needed to prove something to herself, too.”

Cricket reasons that it must be hard for Mama to have people question her sanity all the time. She wonders if part of the reason Mama left was to prove not only to everyone else but also to herself that she doesn’t experience mental illness.

“I thought about all the fish I’d eaten at the fry, around Mama’s table, and even at Aunt Belinda’s. I’d never once thought to thank the fish. This time felt different. It was personal between me and that fish.”

When Cricket has to catch fish to feed herself, her relationship with eating animals changes. She finds a new appreciation for the beauty of the world around her and for the animals that provide for her.

“You know what I think happened, baby? That mama bird gathered up every pretty thing she could find for that nest. She guarded that egg. She fed the baby bird all the food she could find. Till one day, that baby bird spread its wings and that mama bird knew, she just knew, that baby could fly.”

Mama’s words here foreshadow her feelings about leaving. She justifies leaving Cricket by reasoning that she has taken care of Cricket and knows that Cricket can “fly” without her.

“I couldn’t believe what I’d just said to my mama. The mama who built me waterfalls, who read me poetry, the mama who called me an artist, the mama who took me places no one else would ever think to go.

I’d just told her I wished she was somebody else.”

Cricket loves and is devoted to Mama, but she also feels the impact of Mama’s mental illness keenly and sometimes wishes Mama would just be like everyone else. However, she realizes that the things that make Mama wonderful are also tied up in the things that make her difficult. She feels guilty for asking Mama to be normal because if she were “normal,” she would not be herself.

“When I woke up the next morning, even the light outside looked different. It was brighter and greener, and the air coming through Miss V.’s propped-open porch door smelled of every fresh new thing the rain had sprouted. I’d found Mama’s room.”

Finding the Bird Room makes Cricket see the world differently. Just as the world seems brighter, so too does the future; Cricket is optimistic that by finding the room, she will fulfill whatever need her mother has that keeps her from staying. A parent’s needs are complex, and it is not a child’s role to meet those needs. Feeling responsible for a parent’s wellbeing is an enormous burden on a child. Without proper adult support or explanation of her mother’s mental illness, Cricket doesn’t know it’s neither her job nor within her ability to fix her mother.

“Were all those things I loved about Mama just signs of some craziness I should have had the good sense to spot? Mama would wake me up to have a midnight picnic in the yard. So what if sometimes she’d pin a blanket over the window to keep out the sun, take to bed, and draw her legs up tight against her chest?”

Cricket struggles to reconcile the things she loves about Mama with the fact that Mama also has episodes of depression. She worries that there is no part of Mama that is not tied up in “craziness,” even the parts of Mama that she loves.

“When Mama said she’d give me the moon to watch over me, was she thinking about leaving, even back then? Was she like that mama bird, getting ready to fly off and leave me and the nest behind?”

Mama’s promise to give Cricket the moon takes on a complicated meaning in hindsight. Cricket worries that Mama was planning on leaving for a while and cannot help but feel abandoned rather than comforted by Mama’s words. If her mother’s leaving was premeditated, Cricket is less able to blame Mama’s running away on mental illness. If she planned to leave, Mama also chose to leave, and without understanding what exactly motivated her mother, Cricket feels rejection that compounds the pain she already feels.

“When I was out in those woods, the plants and animals seemed to me like separate things to eat or stay away from. I thought they were no more a part of each other than I was a part of them. But on those pages, those woods and plants and animals fit together in a rhythm.”

Bob’s paintings of the woods make Cricket look at the plants and animals in a different light. Like Mama, Bob could Observe the Beauty of the World in a unique way; his paintings show Cricket how aspects of nature are not separate from one another; they fit together perfectly.

“Maybe sometimes you need to go through the uncomfortable to find your way to the beautiful. It takes some adjusting in the way you look at things to really see them. Sometimes you need to squint and sometimes you need to open your eyes wider and sometimes you need to look at things from the other side.”

Cricket realizes that Bob wanted people to find his paintings only if they could Observe the Beauty of the World as he did. The clues he left behind were meant to help someone adjust the way they see the world so that they could appreciate not just Bob’s paintings but also the world around them.

“Your mama’s more than what those neighbors think, and you know it. She’s a person like anyone else. She has her struggles and her strengths. Your mama loves you. Leaving you must have been the hardest thing she ever did. She must have had a mighty good reason to do it.”

Miss V. acknowledges the complicated Impact of Mental Illness on Mama and helps Cricket see that while Mama is not perfect, she loves Cricket. Mama’s Familial Love and Devotion to Cricket is there even if she cannot always show it. Miss V.’s generous interpretation of Mama’s desertion is an attempt to soften the rejection Cricket feels.

“Around me, the woods had changed. The sun lit on new white blooms everywhere. Even the dewdrops dotting my pant legs were the color of spring.

Mama day was here!”

The day that Mama is supposed to come back, Cricket feels like spring has arrived. The new white blooms and rejuvenation of spring symbolize her hope for the future and a new beginning for her and Mama.

“Charlene let out a soft yant, yant, and in that moment, I saw my mama the way Charlene probably did.

It was like looking at a stranger.”

Charlene often helps Cricket come to a deeper understanding of the world. Here, Cricket once again anthropomorphizes Charlene to help her sort through her feelings about Mama. Seeing Mama through another’s eyes, or as a stranger, allows Cricket to decide not to go with her to Memphis.

“I felt like a soda can that’s been shook too hard. Everything swirled in different directions inside me—loving my mama and being mad at her for leaving me. I couldn’t choose what thought to hang on to. I was hating myself for not being able to change things and a tiny bit proud of myself for coming to know it, and scared of what it was that I was about to do.”

Cricket feels deeply conflicted about Mama and her own decision not to go to Memphis. She does not yet know if her decision is the right one, but she is proud of all she has accomplished and of having learned that she can’t change her mother.

“Here was a tanager not afraid to take chances. A tanager not afraid to stand out.

A tanager that flew wherever its hope feathers took it.

Bit by bit, all the things spinning around in my head started to take a blurry shape.”

Cricket compares herself to the shadow tanager and realizes that all the decisions she has made up until this point have made her stronger. Like the tanager, she has been following hope—hope that she could get her mother to stay for good. Although she has not succeeded in this goal, she has learned a lot about herself.

“What those neighbors said about Mama wasn’t who my mama was. And it wasn’t who I was, either. I was my own, whole person. And I could decide what it was I wanted to do.

Everything I’d thought about doing had Mama right at the center.

I’d taken a lot of chances to find my mama. Maybe it was time to start taking chances on me.”

Cricket realizes that both she and her mother are more than other people’s perceptions of them. Now that Cricket understands she can take control of her choices instead of waiting to react to her mother’s choices, Cricket can start investing in her own life.