By MT Cozzola

WHEN I WAS THREE YEARS OLD MY MOM SAID, “If you don't start shaping up we're going to have to let you go.”

I knew a couple words at that point, like “mommy” and “bye-bye,” but I wasn't exactly verbal. Also I didn't get figures of speech like “shape up.” I only knew the shapes book my dad used to read. “Can you find the red triangle” when he’s pointing right to it and Nanny Jenny is packing her bags muttering, “Can you find your fucking spine?” But Dad turns the page and says, “Not now.”

So it's not like I ruined the carpet unintentionally. I think any adult would see that. I just thought the book made Nanny Jenny angry, and I loved Nanny Jenny, and she didn't take her lighter from the ledge in the powder room. I knew how to make the lighter make a flame because unlike my mom Nanny Jenny took me with her everywhere, and you have to amuse yourself somehow when you have a nanny who spends most of her time sticking her head out the powder room window.

I tried to set the shapes book on fire, but the coating that made the pages easy to clean also made it hard to burn. So I set the toilet paper on fire instead. It wasn't the whole house that burned, just part of the bathroom. Then the smoke alarm went off, and Mom came screaming from her computer room, and by then I'm lighting anything soft on fire, like dish towels.

It was hard to keep getting the flame to come on. I was in tears. I wasn't enjoying myself. I missed Nanny Jenny. They didn't even let me say goodbye to her. Dad just kept reading me that stupid book, and Mom held the door open and raised her eyebrows at Nanny Jenny. Nanny Jenny walked out and Dad kept reading until the end of the book. Then he went in the master bathroom and shut the door.

Mom told me, “Behave yourself,” and went in her computer room and looked out the window. Nanny Jenny was sitting in her car across the street on the phone. Red triangle, red triangle, I hated that book, so I went in the powder room and tried to burn it but the toilet paper was easier and then the alarm went off. Then the sprinklers went on and flooded Mom's carpets. Then she sat me back in my playpen and called the nanny finders.

They brought three more. One I ran away from, one I flushed her makeup down the toilet, and the last one I screamed whenever she got near me. After she left, that’s when Mom said, “If you don't shape up, we're going to have to let you go.”

One word I did understand was “we.” It meant the person talking and at least one other person or a stuffed animal. But what we? It couldn't mean her and Dad because they were never even in the same room together. And it couldn't mean her and me because she was talking to me. And the third nanny was gone. So I thought maybe she meant my stuffed bunny that Nanny Jenny had got me that first day before Daddy even met her. It was my favorite thing and I didn’t like to be separated from it. But I wanted to be helpful, like Nanny Jenny taught me. So I handed it to Mom and said, “We bunny?”

Mom took the bunny and tossed it out the front door. When I went out to get it, she locked the door behind me. And that’s pretty much all I remember about my childhood.

Cover photo credit: Barbara Berndt