to purr.
“You know when you’ve just had sex and everything’s all loose and easy and spent-like?” His mouth is four inches from the top of my head.
“Oh . . . um, sure.” I ransack my memory for this sensation and manage to uncover something vaguely reminiscent of it in a compartment marked SPRING BREAK: SOPHOMORE YEAR .
“Just channel that feeling,” he says. He scans the horizon. “Okay, here you go. That’s your wave, Raquel. You got it. Easy now.”
Duke jumps into the water, lines me up, and gives me a monster shove. The wall of water grabs me and then I am a speck, a nothing, merged with it as we hurtle into space. My mind sifts through the possibilities and chooses one. I stand up. No wobbles. I am easy. Spent-like. As if I’ve just had great sex. I even have the presence of mind to pull my dark blue swim dress out of my crack.
Next thing I know, the sky is gone and I am stuck in the dishwasher on power cycle. I feel the ocean bottom reach up and scrape my back raw.
Strong fingers clasp my arm and drag me up. I explode out of the water into the light, filling my lungs with sweet air.
“It’s a good thing you’re bald,” Duke says. “You’re really easy to spot.”
CHAPTER 8
Signs of Good Breeding
I love my kids.
Perhaps this is self-evident. Who doesn’t? What kind of egotistical harpy has children and then consigns them to the bitter trough of a loveless rearing? Often just looking at them is enough to send a spurt of adoration through my veins. The curve of their foreheads, the timbre of their laughs, even the shape of their insubordination thrill and mystify me. In their presence, I am no better than a drug addict, intoxicated by some unidentified maternal potion, without judgment or instincts for self-preservation. I am all good intentions and unappeasable need.
Or perhaps I doth protest too much.
There are times—I would not call them rare, perhaps infrequent—when I am convinced that my offspring thrive not because of but at the expense of, well, me. That they are the parasites to my host, feeding on my affection with the canny resoluteness of soul-eating aliens. That their ascent toward greatness fills my own place in the universe, snatches at the space left by my own dissipation, leaving me less and less nourishment as my aspirations wither toward their final puny end. (I always picture myself in a housedress at this point in the dark fantasy. The sort of worn, faded garment whose provenance is known only by Sicilian grandmothers and a few old-fashioned maids.)
Before you have kids, parents, especially mothers, will hasten to disabuse you of your romantic ideals of procreation and especially its compatibility with maintaining some semblance of what you currently refer to as life. They use words like “sacrifice” and “dependence,” “surrender” and “spawn.” They drone on about the horrors of maternal sacrifice and end with an abrupt “But it’s sooooo great” that resonates about as profoundly as the Bradley childbirth instructor’s prediction that you will feel no pain.
Nevertheless, there are varying definitions of sacrifice. The divergence on the subject of mom-child love is maddening. Once, when I was discussing this very topic with Ma, she told me without flinching, “You have one kid, you look into that little
punim
and you think,
Okay, this is it. This is the great love. This is where it ends.
What’s the husband next to love like that? You think,
God forbid something ever happens to this kid.
God forbid! Then you have the second kid. You’re surrounded by kids! Kids all over the place, turning the house into a war zone, playing their cockamamie music and blabbing on the phone. They don’t listen, because who listens anymore? Suddenly, the husband’s not looking so bad. You’re thinking,
As long as he’s around, we can always make more.
” Ma smiled as she bestowed this great gift. “
That’s
motherhood!”
I’ll be honest. My mother?
“You know when you’ve just had sex and everything’s all loose and easy and spent-like?” His mouth is four inches from the top of my head.
“Oh . . . um, sure.” I ransack my memory for this sensation and manage to uncover something vaguely reminiscent of it in a compartment marked SPRING BREAK: SOPHOMORE YEAR .
“Just channel that feeling,” he says. He scans the horizon. “Okay, here you go. That’s your wave, Raquel. You got it. Easy now.”
Duke jumps into the water, lines me up, and gives me a monster shove. The wall of water grabs me and then I am a speck, a nothing, merged with it as we hurtle into space. My mind sifts through the possibilities and chooses one. I stand up. No wobbles. I am easy. Spent-like. As if I’ve just had great sex. I even have the presence of mind to pull my dark blue swim dress out of my crack.
Next thing I know, the sky is gone and I am stuck in the dishwasher on power cycle. I feel the ocean bottom reach up and scrape my back raw.
Strong fingers clasp my arm and drag me up. I explode out of the water into the light, filling my lungs with sweet air.
“It’s a good thing you’re bald,” Duke says. “You’re really easy to spot.”
CHAPTER 8
Signs of Good Breeding
I love my kids.
Perhaps this is self-evident. Who doesn’t? What kind of egotistical harpy has children and then consigns them to the bitter trough of a loveless rearing? Often just looking at them is enough to send a spurt of adoration through my veins. The curve of their foreheads, the timbre of their laughs, even the shape of their insubordination thrill and mystify me. In their presence, I am no better than a drug addict, intoxicated by some unidentified maternal potion, without judgment or instincts for self-preservation. I am all good intentions and unappeasable need.
Or perhaps I doth protest too much.
There are times—I would not call them rare, perhaps infrequent—when I am convinced that my offspring thrive not because of but at the expense of, well, me. That they are the parasites to my host, feeding on my affection with the canny resoluteness of soul-eating aliens. That their ascent toward greatness fills my own place in the universe, snatches at the space left by my own dissipation, leaving me less and less nourishment as my aspirations wither toward their final puny end. (I always picture myself in a housedress at this point in the dark fantasy. The sort of worn, faded garment whose provenance is known only by Sicilian grandmothers and a few old-fashioned maids.)
Before you have kids, parents, especially mothers, will hasten to disabuse you of your romantic ideals of procreation and especially its compatibility with maintaining some semblance of what you currently refer to as life. They use words like “sacrifice” and “dependence,” “surrender” and “spawn.” They drone on about the horrors of maternal sacrifice and end with an abrupt “But it’s sooooo great” that resonates about as profoundly as the Bradley childbirth instructor’s prediction that you will feel no pain.
Nevertheless, there are varying definitions of sacrifice. The divergence on the subject of mom-child love is maddening. Once, when I was discussing this very topic with Ma, she told me without flinching, “You have one kid, you look into that little
punim
and you think,
Okay, this is it. This is the great love. This is where it ends.
What’s the husband next to love like that? You think,
God forbid something ever happens to this kid.
God forbid! Then you have the second kid. You’re surrounded by kids! Kids all over the place, turning the house into a war zone, playing their cockamamie music and blabbing on the phone. They don’t listen, because who listens anymore? Suddenly, the husband’s not looking so bad. You’re thinking,
As long as he’s around, we can always make more.
” Ma smiled as she bestowed this great gift. “
That’s
motherhood!”
I’ll be honest. My mother?
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