A CAUTIONARY NOTE: As a mom, just when you start congratulating yourself on something, DUCK!!!!! Cause you’re about to get an emotional kick in the head...in fact, I’m pretty sure that it’s like a documented scientific law or something… I believe it's called: Sir Isaac Newton’s MOM'S FIRST Law of DooDoo's About to Hit the Fan.
So here I was on Thursday morning doing a little work in the office with Nugget at my elbow, and in walks my middle guy…who we affectionately call “Bubba” or “Bubs” for short.
“What’s up Bubs?”
“Ummm….Mom, did you see this,” he says holding a sweet little booklet from Nugget’s Wednesday night church class called “Jesus Can Help Us When We Ask”. “Cause, ummm..I don’t think you did,” he adds in a sketchy voice.
I take the little booklet and start thumbing through it, not picking up on the fact that Nugget has gone completely still next to me. He has written his little name on the front and the “J” is backwards (note to self…spend more time in handwriting). Each page is a day of the week, and is set up something like this: SUNDAY, I asked Jesus to help… HOW DOGGONE SWEEEEET! I go through each day until I reach Wednesday …which was yesterday…the day of my self-congratulatory party. AND THEN I SEE IT!!!!
Wednesday’s entry goes a little something like this: WEDNESDAY, I asked Jesus to help… “mom stop being angry” WRITTEN IN THE TEACHER’S HAND. WHAAAATTTTTTTTT!!!!?????? My eyes get as big as monster truck tires and I turn to look at Nugget. He has, what in all candor, can only be described as a doo-doo eating grin on his face.
“REALLY?” I ask completely flabbergasted… which he responds to by letting out a GIGANTIC belly laugh.
“Mom, it was kindda hard," he whines, "And I hadda think of something really quick…soooo….I just did that”. After which, not being a dumb boy, he ran out of the room and made himself scarce for the next ½ hour playing with Legos.
I sat there alternately laughing and being vaguely upset. I looked again at the page and noticed that in addition to this glowing endorsement of me, he had added a neat little stick figure picture of me with a bunch of connected mmm’s where my smile SHOULD be. So not only had he outted me as “angry mom” but he had given me a puss that was nothing short of alphabetically horrific (so much for telling me I was the “prettiest mommy on earth” at nap time yesterday… you, son, have lost ALLLL your stock points)
So there I sat, staring at this this orange crayon depiction of my “funga-face” (an Italian term, that I have no doubt slaughtered in spelling, which means ugly face) and the little black crayon letters spelling out my flaws (written by some poor soul at my church who now, by the way, thinks that poor Nugget has a mmmmmeaney mmmmmonster for a mmmmmommy). I wanted to be horrified, but I couldn’t quite muster it. I wanted to be hurt, but my healthy sense of the ridiculous kept me from pulling the ole “mea culpa, mea culpa” routine (an Italian Momm's plea of “oooh pooooor me, poor me”).
I went back in time and wondered how many times my sister or I had committed some equal or greater atrocity against our own mother. The only thing that came to mind was the time the Kindergarten teacher at our little Christian school (poor Mrs. Gilroy…I don’t think she was every the same after my sister's Kindergarten year) had to call my mom to tell her that my cherubic sister had brought maxi pads to class and displayed them on her little desk. She thought they were Barbie Doll beds. Oh, and there was that time that she put tampon tubes on the ends her fingers and came downstairs while mom was doing hair and said “Look at my fingernails, mommy”. Other than that though, I couldn’t really think of any time we had “outted” our mom. Maybe, as girls, we were just smarter than that (every recent study backs this up), or maybe we just knew that messing with Moni was a tactical error of EPIC proportions! (Note 2. to self: Up my game to prevent future incidents).
In the end, I decided that the feeling I was feeling was a feeling that I should be feeling…well..more. Which is a confusing way of saying that I felt guilty because I didn’t feel more guilty. Shouldn't I be swamped with fear that my little Nugget thinks I'm angry? I wondered why I wasn’t being swallowed by some sort of guilt-tsunami washing over me as I read the words “angry” associated with “my mom” in the perfect penmanship of a stranger (who I will have to see EVERY Wednesday and EVERY Sunday, so thank you for that sonny boy). I called my bestie to tell her about it and her guffaws grounded me and reminded me why I didn’t feel all that bad. Because, ultimately, sometimes I do get angry. Not like “Incredible Hulk” angry (with the exception of the microwave door that had it coming); more like “oh for the love of Pete” angry.
Although I would much rather laugh my way through everyday wrapped in a rainbow that smells like puppy’s breath, that’s just not in the cards…not for me… AND not for ANY OTHER mommy. Sometimes my mmmmommy mmmmouth does look like a series of lower-case m’s…particularly (but not limited to) when my 5 year old spills his lemonade, that I expressly told him to keep in the kitchen, within inches of my laptop and then cleverly uses my pillow to sop it all up.
BEHOLD...the wonder:
Like all kiddos, he is quick to remember the times where he fell down and scraped his knee, the time he was stung by a bee AND the time on Wednesday morning when mom lost her marbles when he accidentally spilled his lemonade near her laptop. Later, much later (somewhere in his late 20’s) he will also remember all the times we snuggled in bed reading books, watched endless hours of Veggie Tales and the time his mom almost asphyxiated herself wearing his yarn necklace to bed to show him how much she loved it.
Ps…Later that day, in a moment I’m not so proud of, I heard Nugget screaming like a banshee and called all the boys downstairs for an intervention. Apparently the big boys physically detained Nugget when he played “Godzilla” to their Lego city (yes…we play Legos alllloooot around here), and Nugget showed his displeasure by screaming loud enough to alert his grandparents 45 minutes away. After taking all the details in, I handed down a Solomon-like sentence that concluded with “Hey Nugget, maybe we should grab your little book and you can ask for help not screaming like a maniac every time you don’t get your way”. To which he replied, “Mmmmmooommm, enough with the book already.”
