The Love Berry

On the Target Mom cliche, shopping, the third place, strawberries, names, and naming.

“I’ve thought about spending some time conducting an informal survey and talking to other Target Moms to see what we have in common, what we care about, and what, if anything, we’d be willing to do about it.  I’m marginally qualified to manage (but probably not to conduct) that kind of research project.  I’m at least as qualified for this as I was for the other things I did and actually got paid for.

Maybe this is my calling.  I’ve always wanted a calling.  Some people feel they are called on to explore the workings of our universe or the make-up of DNA… 

I am focusing my imaginary research on women.  I only use the term “mom” because we can use the kids as an excuse to go to Target more often than women without kids.”

- Confessions of a Target Mom 

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When I was little I remember going into stores with my mom. I held her hand as we moved across the cosmetics floor, looking in on all the displays—eying lipsticks and rouge and foundation in perfectly-sized containers that snapped shut like clamshells. Some days I tried on costume jewelry. Some days I crawled under coat racks. Some days I watched my mother as she unbuttoned and re-buttoned in many mirrors in many changing rooms. I always averted my eyes when we neared the mannequins, whom I was told had eyes. Not real ones, but the kinds flies have. Faceted and compounding, fractals of fractals.

My mom often tells the story of how at one point at one Macy’s at one mall, I did a cartwheel to impress a boy of the same age—popping my arm out of its shoulder, out of its socket. There was a rush of tears, a rush out of the store, a rush to the hospital, where my arm hung limply at my side—like the long petal of a dying flower. 

I think about Aoife now and how she will soon be one and then two and then the age I pulled my arm out of my socket–doing a cartwheel to impress a little boy.

How I so hunger to be in a store with her.

And, without her.

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Admission:

I don't really know literary devices, or what I mean is: I know of them—their names and how to pronounce their names, but I often forget how they are defined. For instance, I know of the word anaphora, but I need Google to tell me this device is a succession of lines starting with the same phrase.

The same goes for elegy and antistrophe, mono-stitch and epigraph. Even allegory.

Still, I’d like to think I know a good beginning line when I see it. 

In Hemingway’s A Farewell To Arms, the first line unfolds as one of the better known in history—panning from the intimate to the immense:

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains…  

I think here I can take a cue in opening a story. Here is how the story of mothering—my mothering—can begin:

In the late fall of that year we walked in the aisle in the women's section that looked across to the purses to the baby carriers to the Hallmark cards, electronics, food… 

What I mean is:

Early in my pregnancy, I rarely left the house, and then later in my pregnancy, I rarely left one room, and eventually, at the very last—anxious, depressed, and physically ill, I rarely left a single bed.

After giving birth, though, I became desperate and wanting to touch—or be close to touching others.

I especially wanted to go to one fluorescently lit superstore and did so frequently— wandering aimlessly through its maze of plus-size clothing and maternity wear racks; its baby aisles full of box after box of diapers, binkies, lotions, and pump parts; its food section chockfull of protein flapjacks and protein powders and multi-colored protein bars—which fourth trimester TikTokers told me I needed: to maintain my milk supply, to lose weight, to (effectively) be a mom.

There, I wanted it all, and fingered it all—the plastic and the polyester and the silica and the cardboard and the alumina holding bubbly water and things called “natural essences.” And, in feeling the materiality, in shuffling through the gleam, in seeing other people—real people—around me, a certain sadness only new moms know would slip away.

When I would leave the shiny and scuffed floors of the superstore to go back home—to my baby, I’d turn over my shoulder to admire the superstore’s bullseye. 

A bright, almost pulsating red. 

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It started small. A little red mark on the crown of Aoife’s head. We thought it was a bruise or possibly a stork bite but learned at her four-week checkup it was a hemangioma–a benign tumor found mostly in preemies, mostly in girls.

The hemangioma, we were told, would grow rapidly. The vast tangle of capillaries and cells would fatten and pattern—replicating and replicating and replicating, a vascularity pushing up and out of her skull. Then, as quickly as it had started, the growing would slow and the growth would involute—a scientific term for sinking and shrinking, lightening, fading away.

Though distracting in their redness and size, because hemangiomas are mostly found in infants and very small children, they are rarely called tumors—a term which can signal illness malignancy, aberration. Instead, there is a softer, gentler, sweeter term used—hemangiomas being called strawberries.

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In the early 1990s, Starbucks adopted the idea of the ‘third place’ as it positioned itself as a company—this positioning (being a place that is neither the home nor the office but something entirely different, new, and needed) becoming a successful platform: at a time when the suburbs were devoid of public meeting spaces and people had come to live more closed-off lives, Starbucks re-invited them to engage together outside of home, of work. 

Now, several decades later, Starbucks prizes ‘pick-up’ orders versus ‘dining in’ and the franchise tucks their many outfits under the vast wings of Targets. Now, several decades later, it is Target that is becoming the place beyond the home and office—not just a place for fast fashion and cake pops but a beacon of blinking red calling, especially to women, especially to mothers—both freshly postpartum and veteran caretakers. The big box retailer giving rise to a new identity, or meme, or cliche. The Target Mom.

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The Cherokee story of the first strawberry goes like this: 

At the dawn of time, first man and first woman lived beside a river. They had everything they needed and lived happily until one day: a quarrel. The first woman was so upset with the first man and his accusations, she decided to leave him while he was still asleep–setting off toward the east, toward the sun. 

When the first man woke up and saw that she was gone, he initially waited for her to return, but when she did not come home, he went to find her—discovering her tracks nearby, along the valley.

The sun was now high in the great big sky and seeing the first man and the first man’s worry, the sun took pity on the first man, and decided to help him by slowing the first woman in her tracks–decidedly lighting the woman’s path to create a gleaming aisle.

At first, the sun shone his light on huckleberries to entice her, but she was not enticed. Next, the sun shone his light on a bramble of blackberries to entice her, but again, she did not stop. The sun then decided he needed to create something entirely new–spreading the first patch of strawberries over the ground and overwhelming the woman’s senses with fragrance. 

Soon she was drawn to the brightly berries. She stopped and tasted them on her tongue. Luxuriating in their flavor, she—in that moment—remembered her husband and happier times. She sat with the berries contemplating what to do, eating them slowly–one by one. During the time she sat thinking and—while thinking—eating, the first man caught up to her. It was then she forgave him and gave him a share of her strawberries. 

Today, the strawberry—curved to a point like a miniature heart—is known as the love berry. 

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In Matrescence, author Lucy Jones speaks about how being in shops and supermarkets postpartum reminded her of being a child and shopping with her mother: “...the smells of each aisle, of magazines, bleach and pastry. I got a mild buzz from buying a packet of seed or a cookie, which broke up the monotony of caregiving. I would walk slowly around admiring piles of coloured, beautifully folded towels, all clean and neat and perfect…”

She goes on to acknowledge that in being in stores while in the throes of motherhood, she found a hole. Not a real hole but a figurative one: “The more I wandered the shops, the more a craving for people—for relationship with others, for ecologies of care—set in.” 

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Across Pinterest, Target Moms find their people—claim their ecologies, pinning slogans to their many boards.

I am a mom. Target-ing is my favorite verb.

Not all who wonder are lost. Some are just moms. In Target. Hiding from their children. 

No one goes to Target because you need something. You go to Target and let Target tell your what you need. 

Across the web, Target Moms pledge their loyalty to their favorite store, evolving—even elevate it—in meaning. 

In one blog post, a woman admits that Target is a wormhole into an alternative dimension of "I need everything in this place. Everything." 

Another woman and divorce lawyer tweets “People who aren’t used to being in Target: There are rules. Stay in your lane. The left lane is for passing only. Enjoy the popcorn. If the mom in front of you is smelling candles, be patient. Your turn is coming soon. Smile at everyone, this is our church.” 

A separate blogger who pens exclusively from the perch of Target Momhood at TargetMomBlog.com writes, “I don’t mean to imply that all of today’s moms love Target, but there are a lot of us who do.  It might be interesting to look at who we are, why we all love Target and what that means – or could mean – in broader social terms.”  

The broader social terms:  

The first place – the home and the people you live with.

The second place – the workplace, where you may actually spend the majority of your time; for many post-Covid, see the first place.

The third place – a spatial "anchor" that caters to community life, fosters interaction; for all, see disappearing.

Also, the broader social terms:  

We are a country bereft. 

We are women with no net of care or community. We have no place through which we can escape our children, skirt our responsibilities, release ourselves from our fears, or feel heard, seen, connected, communing, creative.

In the 80s, we were given Macy’s for our children to cartwheel in.

Today, we have Target and its glass case of cake pops.

Also, many virtual spaces.

On the subreddit r/TrueUnpopularOpinion, a Redditor posts a comment tagged as ‘Possibly Popular’ on the third place in one such third place: “Capitalism preys on our need for community, by destroying third places, then selling us solutions, like phones, digital spaces, in home entertainment.”

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In a workshop I take virtually, I receive much-welcomed feedback on a poem that is a running catalog of joyous things. Through the comments, I learn there is interest in the moments in my poem where I mention my baby, but the group feels caught in the current of my long and winding list—a list of things and places and loves, mostly outside of my having a baby. There is interest in me picking a moment of the poem and free it from the poem’s known engine, let the moment fly out—fly away. Or, put differently: it would be nice for the cassette tape to jam, its tape to ribbon—making a singular instance bloom, blossom, detonate, explode. Like a vast tangle of blood vessels, moving out and out and out. 

In reading this particular comment, I realize that some days I simply want to step away from my screen (my second place) in my home (my first place) and into a trite third, let every principle I’ve held unspool from the engine of my body, my self blossoming and blooming and detonating mindlessly on the floor of a Target. 

I imagine I can rewrite my poem to be more about this, and less about my baby–

….sometimes I remember eating cold cheese babka in a cemetery sometimes I remember a dirty pelican in a parking sometimes I remember lyrics and lyrics about jimmy sometimes I remember I am no longer young that I have a baby I have a baby and I love my baby and my baby's soft lashes and her thighs and her thighs’ many folds and also I love forgetting my baby and being away from my baby when I am away I love being away I love going alone to and being alone with gleaming aisles and clothes racks and changing rooms and glass cases and own glass case in particular I love the case of glass with its shriveled pastries and crumbs and pink-and-brown cake pops I love the snotty children finger-painting dirt over it and their tired mamas in line ignoring their fingers and the painting and also I love the line in front of the case the standing in the line and moving through the line the being with others in the line and just being and I love coming to the fore and pulling down my K95 to smile and order I love to order speak nod wink laugh and I love the barista and how she laughs I love that she laughs with me and laughs at me laughing and also I love her hands how her hands move when she grinds and pours like she has ground and poured ten million times and also how she uses measuring cups to make an Americano over ice pumps two pumps of sugar-free vanilla foams a little pumpkin foam and pours coffee and ice vanilla and foam into a plastic cup with a plastic lid with a plastic lip I love that lip touching my lip my lip to be of lips and also the first sip a sip that is so delicious like plums in an icebox or reading about plums in the icebox so very sweet and so cold… 

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I contact my cousin Jen through a digital solution sold to me then find time to chat using another solution sold to me. She is someone who should be part of my social cloth, my IRL community, but she lives hundreds of miles away with the rest of my mom’s family in Oklahoma.

Last week, my mom and I asked Jen if she would be willing to give my Aoife a Mvskoke name. 

In our culture, elders give names to babies, children—the names evoking traits or desired traits, aspirations. My own Cherokee name coming from my Great Grandma Toney, my mother’s name from my Great Grandpa Toney, my sister’s name from my mom's uncle, Ira. 

From a box within a box on a phone and several states away, Jen meets Aoife, gifts her her name. One for her sweet nature and her also her birthmark.

Kepalv, meaning strawberry. 

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It’s been a long week spent in my first place which has become my second place—a week spent writing emails and writing copy for emails and emailing copy for new websites and developing new names for old companies, just meters from my bedroom, just feet from my baby playing on the floor.

I text a friend—also a new mom and also one of many friends I haven’t physically seen in years—that I need a break. I’d like a vacation, I tell her, a mini-escape or just 24 hours at a hotel or maybe 12 hours in bed or just 45 minutes in Target or just having a Target. On an island with no big box stores, I feel something is missing.

I follow up my text with a bullseye emoji. The emoji looking a little like a kind of berry, feeling a little like love.