Henrietta

I remember very little from the years between 1973 and 1980. There’s a simple reason for this, but one that omits a large part of the story. In the years between my birth and our unintentional immigration to the East Coast, I was busy learning how to eat, how to walk, how to use the bathroom, how to dress myself, and how to talk. I was learning about the world that surrounded me, and about my place in it. I was learning what kind of a person I was, and what kind of people had brought me into this world.

In the first decade of the 20th century — a decade variously referred to as the ’00s, the naughts, the oughts, the aughties, and the naughties — the big buzzword in psychological circles was resilience. Resilience was the word used over and over again in the days following the Boston Marathon Bombing of 2013. It’s a word that contains within it a kind of boundless optimism often lacking in the discussion of trauma, PTSD, and recovery from same.

“Resilience” is a word my own mother pulled out during a rather uncomfortable conversation in the drawing room of my partner’s parents’ house one Christmas Eve. I’d asked my mother to tell the story of the chickens who lived in a pen behind our house in Sunnyvale, California — the non-fictitious town of my birth and early childhood. I was fascinated with these chickens, as I was with all animals. I could pet the rabbits in their hutch on the other side of the back yard, and their fur was the softest thing I’d ever felt. I was sure that the feathers of our bad-tempered chicken Henrietta would also prove soft and pettable, and with the boundless optimism of toddlerhood I was sure I could win her over just as I did all the grown-up humans I’d encountered.

Henrietta had other ideas.

As soon as I opened the door of her pen, she began running after me, making evil chicken noises I’d never heard before, her wings akimbo and her sharp little beak ready to peck at my fat little toddler legs. We began a breathless circuit of the back yard. I screamed as loud as I could for my mom, keeping one or two chicken-steps ahead of Henrietta and her wicked beak.

This is where the actual events of the day have probably become blurred by countless retellings, and also by the dominant narrative of my childhood. As Mom tells the story, she stood at the kitchen window and laughed and laughed at the sight of a three-year-old girl being chased by a chicken. My own memory of the event from this point forward is a blurred mix of terror and bewilderment. Where was my mother? I could hear her laughing, but she wasn’t there to protect me. In the mind of a toddler, being pecked by a chicken looms as large and horrific as being mauled by a grizzly. It is perhaps the first time I felt alone and abandoned in the face of terror.