Rev It Up
While we were getting into the car to head for swimming lessons this weekend, my daughter, Audrey, asked me, “When did you start doing Mama Says?” I explained to her that I’d sent out playgroup schedules with notes on them beginning about the time she was born, but hadn’t actually given the project a name and a regular format until she was almost two, in 1999.
“By that time,” she observed, “you were a full-throttle mama.”
Now, if I had been the one to coin this analogy, I probably would have said that on the parenting highway, I tend to drive defensively, and to avoid the passing lane. So how thrilling was this, to have my own daughter conjure up an image of a joyful risk-taker — a rebel, even — barreling down the open road of life with my man riding shotgun and our two happy co-adventurers strapped into the sidecar? If James Dean were a mother, I would be he.
Eventually, she explained to me that what she’d meant by this expression was simply that, by 1999, I had all the children I was planning to have and had pretty much figured out “how to be a mom” so that I could write about it. Maybe “journeyman mother” or “board certified parent” would have expressed more accurately her intended meaning.
Still, like many of the pearls of wisdom that fall so frequently and gracefully from her lips, I accept her clarification but choose not to discard the first impression which was, to me, almost like found poetry. To be a full-throttle mama — what would that mean? To qualify, would such a woman need to pop out of bed before the alarm goes off, instead of engaging in a daily, silent competition with her spouse to see who can tolerate the clock radio’s relentless beeping the longest? Must she be prepared to teach her children to rollerblade, kayak, and do a somersault off the high dive? Given a choice between cleaning the oven and cutting out paper dolls, would she always pick the latter? After all, it’s not a full-throttle housekeeper that she’s trying to be.
And there, of course, is the rub. None of us is permitted to be “just a mom,” even those of us who are willing and able to forego a paycheck of our own in order to stay home with our kids. We’re not — and can’t be — James Dean on a Triumph T-110, tearing up the asphalt as we teach, play with, discipline, amuse, exercise, feed and love our children, because to be so would also mean to forsake our other obligations as spouse, sister, daughter, bill-payer, dish-washer, citizen, and self.
This isn’t to say that we can never give mothering all we’ve got. Audrey’s image just needs to be adjusted a little. Life is really — as the gospel song says — more like a railroad: we’re the engineers of a train, and all of the roles we play are the box cars streaming out behind us. There’s a lot of stopping and starting, getting sent off to wait on sidings, switching around, adding and dropping cars. But when we have an open stretch of track and a downhill slope, what happiness to throw the throttle wide open, and to feel the whole train moving together, and gathering speed behind us.