After raising children all these years I’ve noticed a basic
universal truth: Mothers will do extraordinary strange things, that
no sane childless person would ever consider doing.
After raising children all these years I’ve noticed a basic universal truth: Mothers will do extraordinary strange things, that no sane childless person would ever consider doing.
And I’m not talking about things like walking over burning coals in barefeet or wiping off a dirty face with spit. Oh, nooooo. Don’t I wish.
For instance, things like searching through a local department store for an imaginary person: a person who, mind you, is invisible to everyone else on the planet but is your 5-year-old child’s latest best friend.
And she apparently likes to hide among the clothing racks. Granted, this isn’t too embarrassing except that you, an educated person, who used to discuss politics and economic policy, are then forced to walk around the Junior Sports wear department shouting, “Julianna Annabella Fellississima,” into all of the displays because your daughter refuses to leave the store without her.
And that’s not even the worst of it. You see, the really cruel thing is that no one ever warns you about these types of scenarios looming in your future. Mothers, as a rule, don’t know how low they will be forced to stoop until they’ve fallen over backwards. Now, at first this may seem like some kind of a conspiracy. But, really, would you have believed someone if they had hinted before you had children that someday you, who had graduated from college Suma Cum Laude and has a Master’s degree in Political Science, would be the type of person who crawls around on her hands and knees underneath a table at an upscale restaurant, desperately groping around for a half chewed, dirty pig eraser that’s your daughter’s current favorite toy?
Ha! Ha! You’d say. But that’s exactly the kind of thing that happens.
If you don’t believe me, just ask my friend Jenny, a highly successful executive, who found herself at the grocery store one day bending over the meat freezer in her Armani suit, frantically rummaging through piles of frozen bloody chickens and steaks.
“One minute my son was walking down the aisle playing with his new Power Ranger toy,” she explained to me over coffee, “and the next, he had thrown the most crucial part into the meat freezer.” She shrugged her shoulders. “I mean, what was I supposed to do? It was the Power Booster, for crying out loud. I couldn’t just LEAVE it in there.”
Believe me, no one understands this more than another mother. I don’t need to tell you that if a childless person sees a woman in the grocery store parking lot climbing over a row of empty shopping carts and mumbling aloud, chances are they’ll assume she’s an escapee from the lock-down ward of the local medical facility.
But another mother, mind you, will take one look at the haunted expression in the woman’s eyes and instantly know that somewhere in one of those carts is a brand new, red sequenced shoe (size 2) that was lost by a rebellious, 3-year-old girl with deep-rooted shoe wearing issues.
The good news is that once your kids pass toddler-hood your public image starts looking up again. I know this because you seldom see the parent of a teenager rooting around underneath the Anne Klein shoe display looking for a tire to a lost Hot Wheels car.
But then again, according to our kids, we just move on to a whole new repertoire of embarrassing things.
Which brings me to another universal truth about raising children: No matter what you do, you will never, ever be not embarrassing. So you might as well take a Zen-like approach and accept it. Either that or stay home for the next 18 or so years and learn to shop from catalogs.
Sometimes, with kids, that’s the best way.
