savagemama

Last weekend I saw what looked like a bite on Lucille’s shoulder. She was sitting on my lap facing forward when I first noticed the two thin red stripes.

“What’s that?” I said.

“I didn’t do that,” Eliza said. I wasn’t even really talking to Eliza. I was talking out loud, to the air, a little shocked at what looked to be a painful mark on my two-year-old.

“I didn’t think you did anything babe,” I said. “But, well, do you know what happened?”
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I joke around that my friend and I were separated at birth because he really is like a brother in so many ways. He’s generous and kind, he’s fiercely loyal and he’s the person in my life most likely to flip someone off in traffic. Like I said, he’s my brother from another mother.

We have quick tempers, he and I. We’re the ones who have to fight to keep our composure when put on hold for 20 minutes with the cell phone company, the ones who will have a word or two with the head labor and delivery nurse if necessary, the ones who run long distances to keep our heads cool.
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Eliza stood in a mud puddle Sunday and covered her legs with creamy brown muck. She was wearing a T-shirt, Spiderman underwear and, in that moment, matching, thigh to ankle, mud pants.

“Look it, Mama,” she said.
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I have never been one for zoos. Even as a kid I was never really into them. I think it was the process more than the animals that I didn’t care for: elbowing my way through other kids, excited and often screaming, to see a lone polar bear pacing behind a glass enclosure. I felt overwhelmed by the crowd and lonely for the creatures everyone had come to see. I found my eye would wander to the corners of the cage, where a scene painted on the walls met the concrete floor made to look like an African savanna. I would look for the chink in the armor, the holes in the logic, the places where you could see the real story behind the fictional one the zookeepers were telling. And well, I’ve never been much on fiction.
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