savagemama

Lately Eliza has been suffering from a series of maladies. A broken arm, a broken leg. She hobbles around on sticks fashioned as crutches and wears her arm in a makeshift sling. She tucks one leg into her shorts and steadies herself on the wall, the stairs, the kitchen chairs as she tries to make it in this modern world with a peg leg. While her bones are actually still in tact, you wouldn’t know it by watching her limp across the yard with the aid of a snow shovel under her arm. I can hear her coming — clang, clang, clang — hopping on one foot, stopping to rest because the trek from the swings to the tree house is just so exhausting when you have a fresh tib-fib fracture or was it a crushed ankle this time?

Yesterday I stepped over the shapes of kindergarteners traced in chalk on the sidewalk outside of her classroom. As I studied them I began to be able to make out the shapes of the children in Eliza’s class. Then I saw one drawn to look as though someone had had an above-the-knee amputation and I knew that was my girl.

“Look Mama, that’s me!” she said as we passed the shapes on the way to the car. “My leg stops at my knee and my arm stops at my elbow!”

She bounded off toward the car, my little amputee, thrilled that her chalk outline represented the maimed child of her daydreams.

At home, she wears ten or so socks on one foot to affect the look of a cast and she’s gone through so much toilet paper trying to create one that last week I broke down and bought her an Ace bandage. She’s wrapped it around every part of her body and begs to wear it to school. I’ve held my ground on this front but she wears it everywhere else.

“Is he okay?” strangers ask because inevitably she’s wearing her bandage under a pair of little boy denim cargo shorts that hang down past her knees.

“Oh, he’s fine,” I say. “Just fine.”

We went to Utah last month and on the car ride down Eliza tied the arms of one of her long-sleeved t -shirtstogether and made herself a sling for her right arm. She wore it the entire trip. In the car, to the hot springs, in the tent at night. I think she even wore it into her first slot canyon. Her faux broken arm was such a constant on our trip that normal things like buckling her seat belt became a negotiation. When we’d insist, she’d raise her arm, cloaked in that grubby skull and cross bones shirt and say, “But mom, my arm.”

In preparation for our trip Seth had, of course, been listening to one of his podcasts. I suppose he chose Canyons of the Colorado by John Wesley Powell because we were headed straight for that river. As we passed one stunning desert landscape after another Seth would share tidbits of Powell’s journey.

“He’d get out of the boat and climb to the tops of these canyons to take measurements,” he said. “All with one arm.”

Somewhere along the way Eliza caught on that this Powell character lived a long time ago and did some pretty amazing things in desert country. But, really, all she cared about was that he did it with one arm. By the end of the trip we were calling her John Wesley Quackenbush and she beamed at the honor.

It’s a little like living in a David Sedaris essay around here these days with our own little one-armed explorer. Next thing you know she’ll be licking the neighbors gnome and the light switch covers at school. But for now she just looks like she’s returning from the Civil War battlefield, just as Powell did, with a hastily wrapped bandage around her ankle, her arm in a homemade sling, ready, it seems, for her next adventure.

This essay originally appeared on mamalode.

One evening last week I was sitting at our family desk trying to figure out why Firefox had rendered my Mac hopelessly inept. Nothing seemed to be working as it should. I opened help windows, Googled the equivalent of “what the %@!” and lamented out loud that the whole reason I buy Macs is so I don’t have to deal with stupid things like this. I was more than a little frustrated when I heard Lucille calling for me from the bathroom.

“Mama?” she said.

“Wait just a minute,” I said.

A few minutes passed. “Mama?” she said again.

“In a minute!” I said.

Eliza, having gotten tired, I think, of her sister’s pleading and my roundly putting her off, opened the bathroom door to see what was going on.

“Mom! Lucille trimmed her hair!” Eliza said.

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At least once a day someone asks me about the drive I make everyday from where we live, 25 miles north of town, to Missoula, where most of our lives take place.

“How long does it take you to get to town?”

“Does that drive get old?”

“Do you come in every day?”

“How do the kids handle it?”

I answer in rote fashion not because I’m irritated but because there are simple answers to most of these inquiries.

Twenty three minutes. Sometimes. Most days. Depends on the day.

Most of the time, these questions are coming from a good place. People are interested, curious and maybe a little intrigued by the thought of living out of town. But every now and then I have friend who digs a little deeper, who just cannot understand our choice to live in the middle of a cow pasture with falling down fences in every direction.

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Sometimes as a parent you have moments of clarity, moments of light. I’ve come to be thankful for these and take them at face value for the tiny miracles that they are. I had one such moment this week. I’m not even sure I could pinpoint the exact time this gift landed in my lap but I know it did.

For months I’ve been struggling and waffling. At times I’ve been wallowing and projecting my angst onto my husband who tells me quickly that I’m doing so but also onto my oldest child who has no words for such shenanigans yet. I’ve told Seth he’s the one in a bad mood, he’s grumpy, he needs to take a walk.

“Babe, I’m fine,” he says. “I think you’re the one who needs a walk.”

And by the time I stomp ten steps through the snow down our long driveway, I know he’s right.
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As a mother I know I’m supposed to kiss the owies, put the four hundredth bandaid of the day on dirty, sticky fingers and serve the oatmeal with strawberries in the purple bowl along with the Elmo fork. I know I’m supposed to read the cat book at least three times before bed, help Eliza write her name, Lucille’s name, our dog Imogene’s name and not protest when bath time turns into a bathroom soaking, all out water fight. These are things every mother does: the ass kicking, the kung fu, the back flips. But in summer in Montana we mamas do all this while hiking mountain trails, swimming in creeks and sleeping outside.

It’s a part of the negotiation, I’m finding, to raise children here. Even those of us who come from somewhere else spend our summers gently removing hooks from the mouths of rainbow trout, floating rivers, starting fires and reading our children to sleep by the light of head lamp looking at the stars through the roof of our tent.

It’s one thing to live in Montana it’s another wholly to be raising little Montanans.
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