Laura Childs Gill
After Apples
When I was a kid, apples were one of the fruits I enjoyed, and I liked them every kind of way: whole, sliced, with peanut butter or without, on a small plate or in my hands. Pink Lady. Granny Apple. McIntosh. Red Delicious.
I live with two kids who don’t eat apples.
When I first moved in with B. and his kids, I was confused about their eating habits. It wasn’t just that they didn’t eat apples—they didn’t really eat any fruit. I knew vegetables were a tough sell for kids, but fruit? Apples? I was baffled.
I have been writing about apples for months, and every few weeks, I look up the same question: can you grow an apple from an apple seed? The answer is always the same: not really. You can grow an apple from an apple seed, but you will not produce the same type of apple. Instead, you must graft the apple tree. Grafting is not what I think of when I think about apples. When I think about apples, I think of Johnny Appleseed and see the seeds falling out of his pockets. I hear the song: “Oh, the Lord is good to me, and so I thank the Lord, for giving me the things I need; the sun and the rain and the apple seed!” When I hear it, I hear the joy, the childishness, and the myth we built around him: “and every seed I sow will grow into a tree!”
I started writing about apples days after Roe V. Wade was shot down in court. I was thinking about bodies and desire and what women are allowed to want: to naturally reproduce children, but not do so wildly—as in: no seeds spilling out of pockets. By all means, do what comes naturally, but only if that is bearing a child. And yet, even to bear your own child is also not so simple. The apple does not simply fall from the tree.
The month I started writing this essay, we were a year into trying to conceive but hadn’t yet, and I felt split in two. I lived with two children; I wanted my own.
* * *
Apple trees are built to deliver children mysterious and undecipherable—which is perhaps why they are often depicted as dangerous.
Take Snow White: in the original version, Snow White’s mother gives her a poisonous apple, and she falls into an endless sleep. In the Disney version, they changed the mother from being her biological mother to stepmother, assuming audiences would not take well to a “real” mother’s fear of her daughter’s beauty. In both, the apple is a sign of danger and a symbol of desire; the apple is poisoned because the mother wants what she cannot have.
Then there’s the almost too obvious to even mention: Eve and her apple and its danger. Her temptation to eat the fruit is linked to a longing for knowledge—the original sin.
And then there’s the teacher and the apple perched on her desk. The teacher is not identified with the apple because she wants more, the teacher is aligned with the apple because she controls its knowledge. She is not to be confused with Eve! God no. She is not tempted by the apple—she’s not tempted by anything!—but instead she is the chaste guardian of it.
She’s a part of me, too. Most days. The teacher. The one with the apple on her desk. An acceptable version of a woman. Those who can’t bear, teach. Or those who teach, can’t bear. Isn’t that the saying?
This is how one story about apples goes: My father used apples to quit drinking. He was an alcoholic, and he lived in Ireland where his mail was delivered to a bar. At some point, he decided to quit drinking, and he ate an apple every time he wanted a beer. No AA. No therapy. No crisis of faith. No rock bottom. Just apples. Green apples were always what I pictured, but I am not sure if they were. I only know what I’ve imagined: him wandering the streets of Dublin with a bag of apples and eating them like candy to stave off desire, long before I was born.
Eating apples as a way to restrict oneself from something is a fantasy I’m attached to. Last summer, a man on the radio said he lost weight using apples. He ate an apple whenever he wanted another kind of snack, and it worked. He lost thirty pounds using apples! This man was on the same app I used when I started eating more and more apples—I did not, have not, will not lose thirty pounds, but I do eat a whole lot of apples.
Part of my desire to lose weight was to conceive. I remembered a friend of mine said her doctor told her to lose five pounds when she was trying to have her second child. It sounded absurd at the time—this woman was already as healthy as she could be, and five pounds? What was five pounds to an embryo? But it had stuck with me: to have a baby meant to shed some weight. And so, every day, for over a year, I was eating an apple between most meals. It worked. Losing weight, I mean. I lost some of it.
The kids, their father, and I live in Miami, less than fifty miles from the Everglades where an inedible kind of apple grows. The apple is referred to as the swamp apple, and it looks more like a pear. The last time we went to the Everglades, I tried to capture the fruit in a photograph. I wanted to remember these apples that grow in water full of salt, snakes, alligators, orchids, and sawgrass, and I wanted to have the picture to prove it. But the apple was hard to capture; its green was the same green that surrounded it. It blended right in.
I grew up in the northeast where my mother would make homemade applesauce at the start of fall. The apples she used were not store-bought apples for eating; these were wilder apples from trees around family property. When she made the applesauce, she always kept the skins on and she cut the meat away from the core with a kind of gentle forcefulness—a kind of secure grace.
My mother still makes applesauce. She has a big cone-shaped strainer with small holes and a round wooden stick. Every fall, she gathers the apples, she cuts the pieces, and she places them into boiling water. Once boiled, she put it all into the strainer over a large bowl. She then presses, and their bright insides ooze. The color is pink, and I like eating it fresh.
When I told her about the kids and their eating habits, she suggested applesauce. Everyone likes applesauce, she said. No, I said. I couldn’t imagine it.
I have a hard time describing what role I play in my household. I say, I live with my partner and his two kids, and then later, in conversation, people will refer to those kids as my stepchildren, and I will feel strange. When people say it, I feel a stop in my chest, a kind of block. Is it because I want them to be my children or because I know they aren’t?
When I first moved in with B. and the kids, those same parents would tell me how lucky I was. One friend who was struggling to get pregnant couldn’t get over my good fortune. She didn’t say it, but what I heard when she spoke was her sometimes overdoing it with the tone of her voice—the pitch of it at a higher octave: “you got to have kids without any of the work.”
These were people who were trying their best to make me feel not just comfortable in my new life but also celebratory of it. I was both with them and not; I was lucky, and I was grateful. I am still. But living with the kids did not replace the longing I’d been too scared to mention: I wanted to have my own child, too.
In the late 90s and early 2000s a few movies came out centered around “keeping the baby.” One was Juno, another was Knocked Up, and another was about two friends who decide to have a baby together and then fall in love. In each of these films, the baby is the salve to a greater problem. In Juno, the baby is adopted into a kind family that Juno is enamored with. In Knocked Up, it is the centerpiece for the relationship to inevitably bloom. In this, the baby creates their love.
I was young, questioning, and political when I saw Juno, and it disturbed me. Juno decides first to get an abortion. The camera follows her past the screaming anti-abortion protestors to the receptionist with long, sharp nails. The camera zooms on the tapping nails—tap, tap, tap—and Juno turns and walks away. She decides to have the baby.
I raged about Hollywood’s representation of abortions at the dinner table. I was convinced the religious right had been behind the movie—it was a perfect subterfuge, the way the messaging had infiltrated through what was meant to be a hipster film about two lost kids and a pregnancy.
I was young and naive and confused when I saw it, enough to believe the biggest choice was whether or not to have a baby.
Years ago, I worked at a school where I shared an office with a woman who loved to pick apples. Every fall, she had to pick apples with her wife and their two kids. Apples meant fall, apples meant harvest, apples meant the change of the season, and apple picking meant a consistent relationship to that change.
When we worked together, I was falling in love with the person I now live with, but I was also married. I never told her. I used our office to stay late into the evening, hop on video calls, send messages, write lengthy emails, cry, and stay at work until I couldn’t any longer. I never told her because my coworker seemed very committed to married life. Her wife was such a great cook. Their boys were happy at school. Her wedding had been the most beautiful day. In the fall, they always picked apples.
A year later, she fell in love outside of her marriage, and it shocked me. It shocked her too, but her commitment to apple picking remained. She now lives with her new partner and between them, they have four kids. In the fall, they all go to the orchard, pick the apples, and take the photographs. Like me, she left Washington, DC, but instead of going south, she went north, where there are more apples to be had, gathered, and eaten.
Since starting the weight loss app, I’ve brought apples to school, and the symbolism is not lost on me; there I am, a high school teacher eating an apple and often with an apple perched on my desk. I usually eat one in the morning when I am ready for lunch but have already had breakfast; I also eat one most afternoons right after lunch when I wish I could eat another whole plate of food. Before I was trying to lose weight (and before we were trying to conceive), I would eat a piece of pizza, but I now choose the afternoon apple.
Sometimes my students eat the apples I bring. In the beginning, I enjoyed the exchange. In particular, one student, Richie, always asked about the apples and if he could have one. It charmed me because Richie was a huge mess in so many ways: he never had his uniform, was always late, sometimes hungover, and nearly failed an elective that is famously impossible to fail. I thought it was sweet that he wanted a healthy treat. But over time, it started to grate on me. Couldn’t he, just maybe, one time, bring in an apple?
The apple doesn’t fall far or the apple does fall far: that is the only way people can think about children. Either they didn’t fall far or they did fall far. What of all the babies who didn’t fall at all? Are they no longer apples? Are they some other kind of apple? One that never made it? The kind we never get to eat?
The other day, I was telling my students I lived with two children during half of the week and one said, “We didn’t know you had kids.”
I had said, “Well, I don’t in a way, but I kind of do! I live with them part of the time.”
One of the students asked: “Do you get community service for that?”
In baby apps, they use fruit to show you how far along your baby is. I haven’t made it further than a blueberry. Or was it a raspberry? I never made it to the apple. At least not yet.
My mother’s best friend eats the entire apple: the core, the seeds, the stem. She says she always has, and she doesn’t understand why everyone doesn’t do the same; it’s all edible after all. This same woman had her tubes tied when she was in her early twenties. She knew she didn’t want kids, and she says never regretted the decision. She has been married three times, and she always has two, sometimes three, basset hounds around her at all times.
She’s wrong about the seeds, it turns out. They do have poison. But only if you bite into them. If you swallow them whole, you can have as many as you want.
Over the many years I’ve known my mother’s best friend, I’ve only heard her express her frustration at being childless once. It wasn’t when everyone initially had kids. She said she rode the wave gracefully. Now that all her friends were either grandparents or obsessed with becoming them, she was annoyed. They were done. They could live their life as they pleased, and yet they were restricting themselves. She rolled her eyes as she said it. It wasn’t just the progeny but the progeny of the progeny—it wasn’t just the apple and the tree but the next apple and its tree.
When she said this to me, she was looking to relate. She assumed that because I don’t have a child of my own, it was unlikely I would have a desire for one. She turned to me as if in confidence, as if thinking and knowing or wondering if I’d chosen this path. When she said it to me, I was upset, not just because I wanted to be pregnant and wished I could be an obsessed mother and then a grandmother too, but also because I live with two children who do shape my world.
I think about it now and no longer feel offended; I am simply struck that whatever your choices, there’s no way around the question of apples and their trees.
I find it hard to read essays I used to gobble right up. These were essays by women about being artists and writers and having children. Some of them chose to, others did not, and most of those essays centered on the choice.
In “The Grand Shattering” by Sarah Manguso, she writes about how she never wanted children, even while pregnant. Then, after having a child, she realized the error of her thinking. By the end of the essay, she asserts having a child is a shattering—one she wants to both write about and read about, exclusively. She says she wants to read work from authors who chose to open up their bodies to that particular pain and love: the only art that interests her is written by and for people who can love something like their own child—which is to say: have their heart ripped open and pieced back together again.
When I first read the essay, it affirmed something within me I hadn’t even yet really affirmed in myself: I did want to experience that pain, that love, that heartbreak, even if I was not yet ready.
Now I read it and realize a million missing pieces and see thousands of missing people: want-to-be-parent-writers who never became parents, writers who became parents and stopped writing, step-parents, aunt parents, uncle parents, grandparent parents, farm parents, apple parents, teacher parents, love parents, dead parents, flower parents.
Another friend of mine described having children in the same way as the writer. He said it felt like his heart was outside of his body, like his nerves were always on alert, as if his whole being was sensitized in a new way. Everything hurt, he said, and everything was beautiful.
Another friend said to me: everyone who wanted children, who truly wanted them, would have them. They would just make it so that happened for them in their life. As if it was easy.
How long does an apple tree produce apples?
I did the blood test they tell you to do to see if you’re ovulating normally, and the phlebotomist had to stick the needle in twice. I am scared of having my blood drawn. I’ve fainted before. I always tell them this, as a way to help them help me with my anxiety. This time, it didn’t work. My panic fueled hers, and for a week afterward, my arm was covered in a giant, bright bruise, spreading from the elbow into the forearm. She said it was my fault; I didn’t drink enough water before, I was too stressed out. Had I had coffee?
What I heard her say was: how do you expect to have a baby if you can’t handle this?
When I fell in love with the children’s father, apples symbolized a lack. In our lexicon of emojis, the tomatoes were our symbol for love. We signed most emails with three tomatoes—our way of saying “I love you.” But we were also not allowed to love one another, and so it followed that for years, we would often try to control it with words, with images, with anything we could. One day, I suggested we try—for the first of many futile times—to be friends. B. wrote me an email, and signed it with three apples instead of tomatoes, and I wailed.
I wailed because I was hungry. What we’d found in one another fed a part of myself I never knew existed. I was full of desire, more than I’d ever felt, and I was terrified—not just because I wanted a person who already had their own children, but because I wanted a person that much at all.
* * *
It’s strange to have a want you can’t control. Sure, we can’t control anything, not really, but every day I want an apple and I eat an apple, so there are things I want I can have.
Perhaps it is even stranger to want what you have but also desire something else, something different. What does it mean to want your own children when you already, in a way, have them? Does that make you some kind of a ravenous, never-satiated, always-hungry, bordering-on-gluttonous woman? The scariest kind of woman you can be?
Virginia Woolf had an apple tree outside her window. In her journal, she writes about the apple tree often. She enjoys watching it grow, and her husband is usually out there, picking through the apples and carrying them back to the house. Sometimes, the sound of his gathering annoys her; other times, she enjoys the distraction. She writes about seeing the apples full and witnessing them rotting; she writes about watching them before they were even born:
I am writing this at 10 in the morning in bed in the little room looking into the garden, the sun steady, the vine leaves transparent green, and the leaves of the apple tree so brilliant that, as I had my breakfast, I invented a little story about a man who wrote a poem, I think, comparing them with diamonds.
I’m back on the weight loss app. It’s not working this time. I eat the apples. Of course I eat the apples. But my body is not budging. It is taking a stand. It is not interested in shifting down or shifting up or being held to any kind of standard. It is laughing in my face: it says, you can’t have it. You keep trying and it keeps falling through your fingers.
The other day a student of mine said, “I’ve noticed you always have apples.” I said he was right, and another student said, “But how can you eat so many apples? There are only three types: red, yellow, and green.”
“No, no, no,” the first boy and I said in a kind of chorus, “there are thousands of different kinds of apples!”
Lately, though, I’ve been getting rid of more and more apples. I am less likely to keep them as they start to shrink. I have also noticed a texture on the outside I don’t like; a rubbery one, or is it more like plastic? I am becoming more discerning with my apples, and some of them are small enough to throw down into the disposal. Others go right into the trash.
* * *
On mother’s day, I looked for poems about the type of mother I am, and the “Poems About Motherhood” section of Poetry Foundation only had poems for: “newborn days,” “watching them grow,” “children on mothers,” “mourning a mother,” and “losing a child.”
I think some would actually say I count as someone in the final category, but others would say no. No. Of course not. I would have to agree with the latter. I have lost an idea of a child and there’s no category for that either.
I shared a draft of this essay with B., and he pointed out I had made a mistake. In the draft, I’d said the children never tried my mother’s applesauce. The anecdote was a great ending to the section about my mother and the fresh applesauce and her assertion that they might like it. If the kids didn’t eat it, then there would be a point made about distance, and about how my mother struggled to understand my role in these kids’ lives, too.
But it actually wasn’t true, he said. The kids did eat the applesauce, and then I remembered: they did try it, and the girl even asked for more. She became obsessed with it in the way she becomes obsessed with food items: for a forty-eight hour period, long enough for her to get sick of it, or, perhaps more accurately, get sick of the attention it brings—the excitement all adults have in the face of a child eating something healthy.
I was embarrassed I’d rewritten the story that way; I was uneasy about the fact that I did not remember the truth about the applesauce. It made me wonder about my own attachment to narratives—about who and what and can be a mother. Perhaps I am missing out on what I have all the time.
On my birthday this year, I didn’t eat any apples. I brought an apple in my purse just in case, but I knew the day would have some food, or more food than I was used to, and it did. My students brought in all kinds of sweets. Donuts, cookies, and cake. The apple stayed in my bag.
It was my 39th birthday, and I had this feeling that it shouldn’t be my 39th birthday. Or I should have done so much more if it was my 39th birthday. I should have given birth to children and a book, definitely the book, at least the book—the one I worked on at the graduate school I went to in my thirties when I was not having a baby but going to school to write the book I don’t have. There should be more fruit.
The reality is I do have two children and a book. They just don’t look the way I thought they would.
* * *
I wonder about the poem Virginia Woolf’s invented man wrote. The one about the apple leaves, the one comparing them to diamonds. I wonder who the man was and what kind of life he’d led and whether or not he knew he was looking at an apple tree when he saw those leaves. Was he a man of cities and buildings, a man who barely knew an apple from a pear? Or did he know those same leaves would sit atop a circular apple, and if he did, did he know what kind? Or was his focus less on what would become but instead on what was there: those leaves so brilliant, so green, so glistening, so bright—just like diamonds.
Every month, I churn through the cycle: I plant hope for something I don’t yet have next to acceptance for what I do. The thing about time is it does change you. You can’t eat apples twice a day every day forever, and the people near you, the people with you, graft themselves into your being.
This spring, the kids and I spent spring break together. We were on the same school schedule, and we had long, free days. In the past, these days used to scare me. I didn’t like letting them do whatever they wanted, but I was also so terrified of the inevitable rejection when I’d make suggestions: a trip to the beach, a walk, a trip to a museum.
This time, something shifted. This time, I felt less scared, and this time, I knew enough not to suggest an activity solely focused on what I wanted to do. They wanted Jimmy John’s, and we centered our days on making it to Jimmy John’s.
The first Jimmy John’s was in Coral Gables along Coral Way, where chain stores are housed in old, beautiful buildings and banyan trees line the streets. On our way inside, a man was just getting off his shift, and hopped onto his bike, nearly hitting us. I forced a laugh, giggling in the way I do with them sometimes, trying to assert my relaxed, “isn’t life a silly journey?” personality which doesn’t always land and is rarely convincing. The boy has told me more than once I am one of the more anxious people he knows. The girl often tells me I am “helpful,” which I always hear as “hopeful” when it first leaves her mouth, wishing it were the case.
The second Jimmy John’s was near the plant store where B. asked us to buy native plants labeled with the image of butterflies and the shape of Florida. We picked Walter’s Viburnum and Simpson Stopper and Milkweed. The girl sat on the cart as the boy pushed it, and we piled plants around her, ones with tiny, round leaves because B. told us they were calming. When we got to the car, we pushed the plants forward and together.
Their order at Jimmy John’s is always the same: bread and cheese. The boy always asks for the biggest one possible, and the girl gets the kid’s version of the exact same thing: white bread with provolone thrown right on top. The first time we went there together, I was surprised. This is it? I wondered. How could this be it? The kids were excited for me to try it, though, telling me it was all about the bread. The bread is so good, they said, and so I tried it, and the bread was good, but it was not that good. I feigned enjoyment in the way I feigned so much in those early days: hoping to keep enough of myself at bay so as not to rattle the system.
On our trips, I noticed I neither faked enthusiasm nor dismissed theirs. Something had changed even though their orders did not. We sat quietly while we ate, and then I asked if the sandwiches were good. Yes, they said, emphatically, they were so good, turning to me to ask, “Aren’t they so good?”