dear monkey,

you behaved like a rabid banshee today at our local “paint your own pottery” establishment. you wanted to hold my cell phone in your glazy orange hands. then you didn’t want to wash your hands. then you had to tee tee but didn’t like the type of potty they had there. then you writhed around on a floor that apparently hasn’t been mopped since 1969.

there were Smug Old Women there (SOWs). i could taste their judgement. when i tried to elicit their sympathy by making a joke, they just shook their heads and kept painting football mascots on chip-and-dip platters. perhaps they were thinking that i shouldn’t have spanked you, or that i should have spanked you sooner. perhaps they looked disdainfully upon a far off world where four-year-olds think they are entitled to use smart phones. i don’t know exactly what they were thinking but i do know this: no matter how much they loathed me, i loathed me more.

you spilled green glaze on the floor, on your shoe, and in your hair. to my credit, your green apparel didn’t bother me. i cleaned it up, as well as the floor. i’m cool like that. the bird painted a yellow mustache on his face. again, no worries. i dig guys with facial hair.

in the car, on the way home, you tried to hit me with a red plastic guitar. and that’s when it occurred to me that if motherhood were a regular job, i’d be an idiot to keep reporting to work everyday.

but i’m your mom, and i love you, and i will report to work every single day.

there are going to be a few changes in the term “work,” however. we are never going to leave the house again. the floors here are clean, and there are no SOWs here painting colonal reb images on platters. there are places here, completely devoid of ceramics, where i can deposit the bird while i help you carry out the tasks of daily life. there is a time-out facility, otherwise known as YOUR ROOM, conveniently located on the second floor. and perhaps most importantly, there is a bottle of wine in our fridge.

love,

mom

i’ll admit that the first time i ventured a glance at a mother who clutched tightly to her child by way of a leash, i was overtaken by a single emotion: JUDGEMENT. and then, after i ranted to my pre-motherhood self about the fact that children are not animals, i made fun of this crazy, leash-toting mama, and all such mamas of her kind.

fate is a conniving little justice-seeker though, and many years after i unleashed this harsh judgement, i gave birth to… a bolter. here is the technical definition of a bolter for those who are not familiar:

bolter: noun, a recalcitrant toddler prone to sudden dashes, runs, flights, or escapes, commonly in areas of high vehicle traffic such as parking lots.

i diagnosed the monkey with this condition when i was no less than eight months pregnant with the bird and on modified bed rest. a leisurely outing to the cupcake bakery turned quickly into a 100-yard-dash across the black asphalt. the monkey was laughing. i was crying, partly because the event scared me to death, and partly because some aspect of me must have known that the purchase of a leash could be in my future.

when i was pregnant with my first son, a wise mama told me that being a mom would make me feel like my heart was living outside of my body. this turned out to be an accurate description. as psychologist janna malamud smith puts is, “there is an enlarged sense of vulnerability…created by becoming a mother — and accepting the intimate mission of keeping a dependent being alive.”

as writer francine prose describes, “all at once, we realize what hostages to fortune we are, how fragile and precious life is — our own lives, and those of our children. even the bravest of us may find ourselves transformed almost beyond recognition into skittish, nervous versions of our former selves.”

i’m thinking about purchasing the above-pictured leash for the monkey. (it’s perfect for him, right?) i’m certain that i’ll be on the receiving end of the kind of judgment i dished out so naively before… before my wild and reckless heart was living outside of my body… before i wanted to tie a string around it and never let it go.

[sources for this post can be found on the bibliography page on the sidebar to your right.]

[don’t forget to enter the billboard bag GIVEAWAY found in saturday’s post.]