Chapter 23
Remember the little boy on television several years ago who said, “So you wanted to be a Mother! The words have come back to haunt me dozens of times in the almost twelve years I have been a mother.
So, I WANTED to be a mother—but somebody really did forget to tell me a FEW things! Who would’ve thought those precious little bundles who belonged to my friends could be anything but “little darlin’s”!!
It didn’t take long at our house for us to find out that all the sweet-smelling baby powder and clean, fluffy white baby cloths could be destroyed in a single second when out of nowhere a whole gallon of burp materialized from a four-ounce bottle of formula.
Sleep was a thing of the past—the perfect little angel everyone oohed and aahed over rather liked to be rocked.
There seemed to be a button on his bottom.
ANYTIME he was laid in his crib the button was touched, his eyes sprang open, his mouth started screaming and it was back to the rocker for another eternity.
Baby food—perfectly good and most of the time rather tasty—went in his little mouth and was pushed right back out. After multiple attempts finally it DID go down! In it went and WHAT it turned into before it came out was absolutely AMAZING!
Then they grew up a little and learned to tear up a military tank with an orange plastic screwdriver!
They learned just exactly what NOT to say when the preacher came to dinner—and SAID it!
And they accomplished the fantastic feat of wrapping adult grandparents around their chubby, dirty baby fingers.
The grandparents were the very same adults who gave US the midnight lectures— “Where have you been? You should’ve been home at eleven o’clock and here it is midnight and I don’t CARE if you had a flat tire excuse that excuse was in vented when Moby Dick was a minnow and I don’t CARE if you had to walk five miles in the rain because your boyfriend didn’t have a spare and IF you disgrace me one more time I’ll never be able to hold my head up again… ”
SO, I WANTED TO be a mother!! You betcha! Mother’s Day is just around the corner! And I know I’ll get construction paper cards that smell like a glue factory, look like abstract paintings of the local dump ground and mean—I LOVE YOU—in spite of all the lectures!
And after all, one must be a mother before one can be a grandmother—and I someday, in the very far distant future when I am maybe a hundred and ten, want to see if I am pliable enough to be wrap around a tiny baby finger.