Mama Say, Mama Saw

Maybe I should dip mine in chocolate milk, too.

How can it be that my hair, despite the fancy salon cut and myriad of high-end products, consistently looks like this:

While Nova's hair, which we regularly wash with bubble bath and cut with ten-year-old scissors from Sally's Beauty Supply, looks like this:

I mean really.  What gene pool did THAT come from? 

That's where you're wrong, Bear

Nova has this book called "The Way I Feel Today," based on the TV show Bear in the Big Blue House, which used to run on the Disney Channel.  I have to admit, we have never watched the show; I didn't even know it was a show, I just picked the book up at Goodwill last year because Nova seemed to like the pictures.  (Lest that make me sound like a better mother than I am--the kind of mother who is anti-televison--heaven's no!  I could tell you every guest star on Sesame Street for the last two seasons, and rank them in order of preference: Neil Patrick Harris, yes!  Tina Fey, yes!  James Blunt singing "Triangle," yes yes yes!  We are however, a family who has begrudgingly decided it is more important to pay the car insurance than it is for Mama to get her Showtime fix.) 

Huh?  What?  Who's rambling?  Oh!  Anyway, the book.  Well, the moral is, "Feelings change all the time."  I am totally on board with that.  My feelings change so fast that sometimes one does not even clear out all the way before the next one is shouldering it's way in. It's like an emotional fire sale in there, with everyone piling in at the same time to get their piece of the action.

No, my problem is when Bear tells Treelo: "You couldn't be happy and mad at the same time."  OH REALLY BEAR?  Let Mama tell you about a little thing called AMBIVALENCE.  Why, just this morning I felt MAD at Nova for peeing in her pants, and at the same time I was HAPPY that I had succeeded in making her feel bad enough about it that she almost cried.  Last week I gleefully threw the dog headfirst into a snowbank after she ran away from me and I had to hike through the neighbor's yard in a foot of snow to get her.

Bear, don't even get me started on happy and sad.  That's the story of my LIFE.  Yours too, Treelo, you freaky little monkey-frog.  Me, you, and everyone we know.

My poor mother

Let's get this started on a high note.  Hey--guess what!  My mother died.

Yeah, she died almost twelve years ago (Twelve? Really?), but this is not about that.  This is about how I am presently learning a whole new side of her, a side that I could only understand after I became a mother myself, two and a half years ago (Two and a half? REALLY?), and because I cannot talk with her about these new revelations, I am writing this.  I keep finding myself in situations with Nova that remind me of something from childhood, situations that now, on the other end of them, I can only say, "Oh god, my poor mother."  You know?

For instance: I remember an afternoon when I was seven or eight years old, bounding into my parents' bedroom where my mother was lying face-down on the bed trying to take a nap.  I was in such high spirits that I jumped onto the bed and started bouncing up and down in a goodwill effort to share my joy.  She ignored me for as long as she could, but then I started in singing as well, and she snapped.  I don't remember what she said, probably nothing harsher than "Knock it off!" but it was enough.  I slid off the bed and out of the room like a scolded puppy. 

What I remember feeling at the time was shame.  It was the feeling of thinking I was doing something good only to find out I was doing something bad.   

But now through the lens of motherhood, I see it like this:  My father had probably been away from home for days, transferred by the telephone company to work who knows where, leaving my mom at home with three young children.  I am sure she had been cooking for us, cleaning up after us, making our school lunches; in general, working her ass off for us without a word of thanks.  When my dad was on transfer, she was a single mom and we were three ungrateful kids.  I imagine a scenario where my dad had finally come home and my mother, exhausted, escaped to the bedroom for a few desperately needed minutes of quiet time. 

Then I came lumbering in like a goddamn wild monkey.  It is a testament to her grace and sweetness that she did not sock me in the jaw.

Of course, I understand that I was a child, that I had only the best of intentions, and I also imagine that after snapping at me, my mother felt the horrible guilt that we all do when we momentarily lose our cool with our kids.  I am sure she would be heartbroken to know that 25 years later, I still remember that day because of the confusion her reaction caused me.  I wish I could jump ahead 30 years and ask the adult Nova what I did to her as a child that traumatized her so I could act differently now. 

But I also wish I could go back in time to that young mother who, out of sheer exhaustion, scolded her oversensitive, thoughtless child and tell her that it is okay.  Everything will be okay.  I want to tell her that she is a good mother, a great mother, a mother so skilled in every aspect of mothering that I will find myself, after she is gone, trying very hard to emulate her with my own daughter.  I would thank her for taking the job of being my mother so seriously, but I would also tell not to feel bad for yelling at me.  She was doing the best she could, and better than I can do most days.

I would also tell her to--at all costs--for god's sake, talk the eight-year-old me out of perming my bangs.  Yeah, only the bangs.  I know.  I KNOW.