savagemama

When I turned 26 my friends Mark, Jess and I drove from Eugene to Bend, Oregon to spend a day on the South Sister. I took my new puppy Imogene, and Mark made us all bacon in the morning before we drove to the trail head. We spent a hot day hiking the cinder trails up to a lake where we went for a swim. We didn’t make it to the top, as I recall, but no one cared. I remember remarking that I felt my age that day – beyond the antics of my early twenties, somewhere on my way to grown up, on the downhill slide to 30.
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At my house these days it’s all potty talk all the time. Vagina-penis-poopy-butt all strung together punctuated with giggles on either end.

Today Lucille started to sing a song she learned in summer camp. The song goes “I have a little turtle, his name is Tiny Tim.” But as Lucille began, stopping to laugh uncontrollably, she sang, “I have a little penis, his name is Tiny Tim. I put him in the bathtub to see if he could swim. He drank up all the water, he ate up all the soap…” then there is something about a bubble in his throat.

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Let’s be honest, no relationship is perfect. But when it comes to our children I think we mamas hold out some unreasonable hope that our relationships with them will be. We hope that they will look to us for guidance, that we will inherently understand them better than anyone else, that we, because we are their mothers, will have the answers when they need them.

I’m coming face-to-face lately with the reality that these hopes are, to some extent, fiction. Eliza and I are not on the same page. It feels like most days we are not in the same book or, for that matter, on the same planet.
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September in the South is hurricane season. There always seems to be a storm brewing off the coast somewhere and no one is ever really sure if it will make land fall or spin out trying. So we watch the nightly news and listen for names like Irene, Ophelia, Philippe. We track the progress of storms along the Atlantic seaboard and if one of these turns from tropical storm to hurricane, we start to think about a hurricane party.
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