THE DATING CUCKOO by Cheryl McGuire
A thought blew in out of the blue one day while I was mucking stalls, suggesting I had the dating habits of a cuckoo. I stopped pushing manure and contemplated. I knew nothing about the dating habits of cuckoos, though the word cuckoo rang familiar at the core of my screwball, dork nature. I have rarely traveled a straight line anywhere.
“Why doesn’t Cheryl just go along like everyone else?” I heard my sister say through the phone a day later when I told her about my cuckoo thoughts. “Grandma said that about you. You never went along with anything normal.”
I sat silent on the phone—I saw her point. Even as a child, I saw little advantage to normal. Every activity was up for grabs. The commonplace a mere starting point to be eye-balled for new possibilities. I had been born with a dingbat’s sensibilities. The hoadydoh was an impossible configuration to follow.
“I’m not talking about when you were a child,” my sister said. “It’s when you moved in with your boyfriend.”
Living together was fairly commonplace in 1970, the free-love decade. What was uncommon was to admit it. Most girls lied to their parents about their roommates. I wrote a letter to my family and spilled the beans, seeing dishonesty as betraying the revolution. I presumed the hushed aftermath meant all was well and continued on my merry way. Then I received a letter from my seventeen-year-old brother who never, ever wrote anything to anyone. His short missive announcing his support of my decision to live by my beliefs shot across my bow like a cannonball, warning me of the fallout my letter had caused as it ricocheted through the family. My step-dad stopped talking to me for months and left the house whenever I showed up. When his unwed niece got pregnant, he relented. My mom, sister, and other brother never brought the subject up, but their faces and their silence said everything.
Not until my recent conversation with my sister did I learn how my Grandmother felt. She never let on.
Ornithologists say cuckoos are an extremely diverse group of birds. As are humans. Most cuckoos are monogamous—though not all (which reminds me of two of my husbands). The common cuckoos flock about neighborhoods like a band of thugs. The males are shameless rakes and wanton ne’er-do-wells that can’t remember where to hang their hats. The females become disgruntled femmes fatale.
This behavior has destroyed all domesticity in the flock: the females forego their own housekeeping by taking over the nests of other birds, pushing out the eggs and laying matching camouflaged eggs of their own. They abandon their offspring to the upbringing skills of others.
I can see their point: what female wants to keep house for a male who can’t remember where to hang his hat?
Like all populations, bird and human, the good is mixed with the bad. Contrary to the common cuckoo, the ani cuckoos are gregarious chirpy fellows, pure in spirit—little social wonders that build communal nests and help one another with the housekeeping chores of nest-building, incubating, feeding, and protecting. They are the neighborhood peace-keepers that often, unwittingly, raise the offspring of common cuckoos.
I’m not so much the dingbat I failed to recognize the benefits of the notion it takes a village to raise a child—Tom Sawyer and I are birds of a feather—why whitewash your own fence when your wits can engage another fellow to do it for you?
Monday my neighbor comes over to feed and bathe my brood, and I head next door to help another neighbor with her laundry. Suddenly, the hum-drum life of a homemaker has variety. We get out of the house. We can check in to see how the neighbors live and how we stack up. We can gossip and tittle-tattle (for those so inclined). We might even start to whistle while we work.
I wonder . . . if I volunteered for all the laundry duty around the neighborhood, could I forego the grocery shopping?
One thing is certain, however, I was born a naïve bird, whatever make or model. I learned about love the hard way. My nature inclined me toward the communal environment, sure enough, but something about me attracted the ne’er-do-wells. I’ve served plenty of time mothering dysfunctional broods and immature men: the angry tyrants, beachcomber deadbeats and malingerers. Seems the snake-oil salesmen and smooth-tongued Lotharios—all the flimflam men—flew to my door.
My excuse? Somehow my egg rolled across the tracks to another neighborhood, where it hatched and left me fending for myself, and I have learned. There is something here to ponder, I feel it in my hollow bones. Destinies zigzag for all us cuckoos.
Grandma was right.
