Blunt Force Mama

Here is my latest column in Philly Mag, about slutty Halloween costumes. And a little about Harry Potter. And a lot about me being insane.

The idea was sparked when a mom-friend of mine said to me on the playground, “I want to keep my kids as young as I can for as long as I can.” Ever since, I think about that quote once a day. At least. I think of it even more so lately, because five-year-old Drew has taken to singing one particular song, over and over. And over. And not just at home. In the car. In the grocery store. On the soccer field, where it’s usually punctuated by a cartwheel. Always loud. Lots of vibrato.

This is the song: “I’m sexy and I know it.”

Okay. So I haven’t posted in over a year. I had another baby, ‘kay? Because that’s what you do when you’re almost 40 and can’t throw away the baby stuff in your attic…you have a baby. Right?

Anyway…if I hadn’t started writing a new column for Philadelphia Magazine called Suburbanista, this would totally have been a blog post. So…here it is…what happens when a no-cupcake-rule clashes with mothers-who-make-cupcakes. There was no blood shed…as far as a know.

Here’s the full article…

The first time our three-year-old Drew said it, my brain shot into immediate rationalization mode.

In line, I convinced myself. She means, “I’m gonna cut you IN LINE.”

Because, really, what could be a worse offense to a three-year-old? There she is, at daycare, waiting by the door to march to her classroom, beaming because she’s the “line leader” (which is akin to being God), and then…some other three year old cuts in front of her, dashing her hopes, her dreams, her chances of sitting on the all-coveted “rainbow square with the pink stripe” on the circle-time carpet.

Of course, I decided. That explains it. That explains why, moments ago, when I told her that we had to turn off The Fresh Beat Band because it was time to eat dinner, she said, “If you turn it off, I’m gonna cut you!”

I decided this in the roughly 20 minutes that Thad and I stood there in the family room with our mouths hanging open, not breathing, picturing ourselves in 10 years visiting Drew on Saturday mornings at Juvy.

I leaned towards Thad and whispered, “She means ‘in line,’ right?”

“Right,” he answered in his “no, your butt doesn’t look big in those pants” tone.

What else could it be? As far as we know, there isn’t a gang problem at Tiny Treasures Learning Academy. We don’t sit down as a family, with popcorn and Capri Suns, and watch reruns of Prison Break. We don’t even let the kids hold the plastic knives in silverware packets from fast food restaurants, which themselves are barely capable of cutting a McDonalds pancake, much less a mother who has wielded control of a TV remote.

Then it happened again: “If you don’t get me chocolate milk, I’m going to cut you!”

And again: “If you don’t read me six more books, I’m going to cut you.”

And again: “If you don’t get me a face-to-face with Justin Bieber and his people, I’m going to cut you.”

Friends came over for dinner. Because they don’t have children, they laughed very, very, very hard as we told them about Drew’s threat du jour.

“We think she means ‘in line,’” I told them. They looked at me as if I was suggesting that the only thing wrong with Linda Blair was that she had a touch of flu.

We sat down to dinner. It was just after New Year’s, so we were eating pork and sauerkraut–“Nature’s broom,” as my grandmother used to say. That meant that the adults had knives on their very festive New Year’s napkins. I walked in from the kitchen with the kids’ plates in my hand to find Drew sitting in her booster chair, holding one of the serrated knives, waving it in the air as if she were a Ginsu salesman. Or a serial killer. One of the two.

I grabbed the knife out of her hand and started to laugh in that exaggerated way parents do when their kids do something terribly unexpected and terribly bad, like threaten to stab dinner guests.

“Ha, ha, ha, ha!” I said. “Ha, ha, ha…she’s so…I just don’t…I mean…ha, ha, ha!”

The next morning, I asked Drew. Finally.

“When you say, ‘I’m gonna cut you,’” what do you mean?”

“With a knife,” she said, then paused before she smiled in her “silly mommy” way. “Nooooo. Not a knife,” she corrected. I felt relieved. We wouldn’t have to buy her a straightjacket after all.

Then, she clarified: “With scissors.”

You’re going to throw up. You’re going to throw up.

I chanted these words to myself, praying that the mere Statement of Fact might somehow alter the inevitable course of events about to transpire as the girls and I walked up the ramp to our very first ride at Storybook Land near Cape May, New Jersey.

We’d driven an hour and a half to get here, filled with the promise of storybook princesses and strange animatronic storybook dwarves that, upon pushing a button, would sing and dance and repeatedly bend over from their strange animatronic storybook waists. What more could we ask for? It was just a tiny, wooded amusement park that catered to kids under six. I assumed there’d be a train, bumper boats, one of those airplane rides you make go up and down by pushing and pulling on a metal bar.

Maybe a carousel.

Maybe a very small Ferris wheel.

But not this.

Lord.

No.

Not … The Turtle Twister.

I tried to stop the kids, but it was too late. They’d already slid into the deep cove of one of the green cars shaped like a turtle head. They left a space between them for me, my thighs instantly becoming one with the black pleather, which smelled of oil, funnel cake, and the ghosts of vomits past.

“What if we need to stop?” I asked the 16-year-old who, between texting about very important matters like how she wields the awesome power of making people puke on themselves, lowered the bar onto our legs and locked us in.

“Just yell,” she said, and then pressed the big red button.

Immediately, I flashed back: Haggarty Park playground, circa 1977, that metal merry-go-round, that neighbor girl pushing the merry-go-round, those very orange BBQ potato chips. All of it going around. And around. And around.

Compared with The Turtle Twister, that merry-go-round was a Lazy Susan.

“This is sooooo funnnnnn!” I yelled, laughing way too loud as our turtle swished uncontrollably to the left, trying to convince the girls that this was, in fact, fun, and not what happens when people die.

“Yaaaay!” 5-year-old Blair yelled and, because she is her father’s daughter, she meant it. The car, at the time, was in a tail-spin, rotating 14 times, 15 times, 16 times at such speed that the centrifugal force pushed us against the back of the car. I swore my skull had started to expand. I let go of the bar and reached my arms out in a T, bracing my hands flat against the inside of the turtle’s cheeks, as if my arms alone could stop the pain.

“Wheeeeee!” I yelled, thinking about only two things: The very orange BBQ potato chips, and Drew. Because Drew wasn’t not yelling “Yay!” She was not yelling anything. She’d folded in on her little 3-year-old self, crouching into my right side, surely wondering how a mother who claimed to love her could possibly allow The Turtle Twister to exist in what she’d just discovered was a cruel, cruel world.

“Close your eyes,” I whispered to Drew.

“Soooo fuuuun!” I yelled to Blair.

“It’ll be over soon,” I whispered to Drew.

“This is coooooool!” I yelled to Blair, certain that, since we’d been on The Turtle Twister for approximately 37 hours, barf was nigh. I calculated our speed, the spin, the likelihood of splatter.

Then I heard it…the clang of the engine turning off. The speed of the ride slowed. Our turtle did not. It kept twisting. And twisting. And twisting. Even when we came to a stop, the turtle refused to release us, twisting and twisting until the 16-year-old grabbed hold of the edge of its green turtle mouth and forced it to submit.

Blair didn’t want to get off.

I didn’t either, but for entirely different reasons.

Drew didn’t know what she wanted, not until the girl lifted the bar and reached in to grab her hand and help her climb out. Drew did not take the hand, but stared into her eyes, long and hard. She blamed the girl. I could see it. It was wrong to blame the girl. And I might have explained that to Drew, if I wasn’t so happy that she was blaming the girl, and not me. Blame that girl! Evil turtles! Evil girl! But blame alone wasn’t enough for Drew. She had a message to deliver.

“That,” she told evil turtle girl, “was not fun.”