What Does a Mommy Say?
One morning I was at Costco with my son, who at the time was pretty small — the stage when we were still going over animal sounds constantly. He was animal sounds years old.
“What does a doggy say?” I asked.
“Woof!” he said.
“What does a cow say?”
“Moo.”
I was giving him the easy ones.
“What does an elephant say?”
“Flurg.”
OK, well. Probably. Who knows what the hell elephants are saying. Snarf. Pleeef. Whurrr. It’s loud and rumbly, so yes, that passes.
We went through all the standards: Owl, cat, sheep, goat, mouse.
One runs out of animals with fairly recognizable sounds pretty quickly in this game. And on that day I did. So I said something I immediately regretted:
“What does a mommy say?” I asked.
There are a few moments in parenting when your veins go a little icy with fear: when you’re at the park and you lose sight of him for a second, when a ball rolls into the street and she starts to run after it, when you just barely catch a toddler before he falls and cracks his front tooth on the concrete, and when you realize that you’ve just asked your kid to rate you as a parent. Please don’t answer that, you internally beg. I will give you candy!!!
In that moment, I was certain he was going to say: Stop that! or No! or Would you please just GIVE ME A SECOND?!
This time, fortunately, the boy showed me a bit of mercy.
“I love you!” he answered. That’s what a mommy says.
My heart melted into the rest of my internal organs with love and relief. How glad I was that his first answer was this one. Because, though that was the best, most first-bornest answer he could have given, it was not the only correct one.
Parenting brings out sides of you that you never bargained for. You begin to do things and say things that you used to swear you’d never do or say. You begin to use all the dumb empty threats your parents used to use, and you bribe your children with candy, and you let them stare at the iPad all the way through dinner at the restaurant, and you sometimes let them eat the grapes they’ve just dropped all over the floor. All the things you swore you would never do, because you are not like that.
This is not all your fault, nor is it always bad. As a college kid, I nannied for a family for about five hours at a stretch, twice a week. During that time, the boys’ mother would do things like go shopping and run errands and maybe sometimes get lunch with her friends. In a secret part of my heart, I used to roll my eyes at her.
I mean, she seemed just a little bit spoiled.
Then I had children. And now every single time I remember thinking that about her, I have a good long laugh at myself and fantasize about how great it would be to have some newer version of college-me come over for two days a week so I could go to Target in peace. You change, without realizing it. Your perspective, your demeanor, your beliefs, your personality, and even your very nature are all like ripples in a running stream. These qualities are not stagnant. Just because you are an idealist one day doesn’t mean you’ll always be.
The problem is that your self-awareness sometimes does get stuck.
Recently, I did some training to become a tutor. We’d been working through some role-play, in which he pretended to be an annoying high-school student who didn’t want to be tutored and I pretended to be a zen-cool tutor who would be nurturing and patient and wise even through all this kid’s bullshit. Obviously I was not pretending very well, which is one reason why I am not a well-paid actress and instead am a less-well-paid writer and, now, ACT tutor.
“I think you have to work on being more zen-cool,” he said. “You’re letting the frustration show on your face.”
As criticism tends not to, this comment wouldn’t let me go. In the past, I have prided myself on my zen-coolness, although I never would have called it that. I probably would have said that I’m patient, or that I’m an optimist, or that I am generally a pretty happy person. I’m easy like Sunday morning, Lionel would sing about me. At least I was. Or at least I thought I was.
I didn’t realize all the frustration was showing on my face.
I wonder sometimes if I am becoming mean mommy, or distracted mommy, or constantly annoyed mommy. I didn’t realize how much I wondered it until that day at Costco, in those few moments before Miles answered me so sweetly. I am not the mother of my dreams. I am not even the mother I thought I would be when I was a babysitter in college.
Does this mean I may someday become that stereotypically intrusive mother-in-law that my friends and I joke about now? Or the old woman at the grocery store who lovingly, if infuriatingly, tells young mothers to “enjoy every moment” even while their toddlers are throwing tantrums? I hope not, but I see how it might sneak up on a person. I see how the ripples might startle you out of the illusion that who you are one day is who you’ll always be. This is, at turns, completely terrifying and wonderfully freeing: we have the capacity for transformation; people grow, sometimes healthily and sometimes not; we are not the self we imagine, nor are we completely the self we project.
And so we look for ourselves daily, and find glimpses of ourselves, sometimes, in the aisles of grocery stores.
Katie Savage is the author of Grace in the Maybe.
