Covert Mom: 6’1″ Instead of 5’2″

By Mariah Mottley

With two kids in middle school, our tween drama quotient is high. Someone is always right, someone is always wrong, and someone is always crying.

Middle school hormones don’t bring out the best in the parents either. In just one episode this weekend, as I left to pick the little boy up from soccer I bickered with Sean, my husband, about the laundry. Our exchange ended with me looking him straight in the eye and telling him to ‘eff off.’ I left him and the girls in charge of cleaning the living room, and, I very much hoped, to pick up the dead vole the cats had left by the front door, before someone stepped on it.

I was barely to the soccer field when he texted, “I’m not going to make it. They are awful.” When I returned, Sean was facedown on our bed with the door closed, my seventh grade daughter similarly prostrate in her room; the fifth grade one sitting with her arms crossed on the sofa, staring into the middle distance, the unused vacuum beside her. I didn’t bother checking on the vole. So many hormones.

I roused my seventh grader and took her with me to GreenStar. As we were parking, she told me she thought she had grown and that she would be taller than me soon. We walked hip to hip, my arm over her shoulders, her arm around my waist, head tucked near my chin. For the moment, we were back to the child side of the “tween” poles of wanting to compete then cuddle. One needs to stay flexible. In another moment she would want to fight.

“If you’re taller than me, what do you win?” I asked. “Will it make you smarter and stronger than I am?”
She thought about that.
“Maybe,” she said. “I’ll be closer, at least.”
“What’s going to be good about that? Are you going to take my car? Wear my clothes?”
She pondered this.
“It would feel like a personal victory to be bigger than you.”

We passed the cider, then the Bragg’s soy sauce, the olive oil. We needed eggs. I steered her towards them.
“Honey, it’s not a question of if, it’s only a question of when. And when you are smarter and stronger than me, I will become your responsibility, just like you are mine now, regardless which one of us is taller.”

She picked up a dozen eggs. I steered us back towards the chocolate bars. Dark with caramel was what I was after.
“When you are stronger, I’ll need your protection. And your wisdom. You know how I help your grandfather back out of our driveway, and with his computer? Take him to the eye doctor? You’ll have to help me like that too, one day.”

Her lip curved sassily.
“I help you with your computer now,” she said.

The cashier put our things into a box, and we headed back to the car. I pulled her ponytail.
“You know,” I said. “I never got taller than my mom, but I was always stronger. I carried all the shopping bags, was always the one who loaded the car with the suitcases. She said I had an ‘unnatural strength’ that I’d inherited from my Dad, but I think she just didn’t like carrying things. Later, when she got sick, I was smarter than her too, ‘cause she got sick in her brain. It messed me up, being so much stronger and so much smarter than her. I… I never recovered from the responsibility. . . and,” I paused to put the box in the back of the car. “I want you to have more time, sweetie, before you have to take over for me.”

But she had already stopped listening, was in the front seat, finding the Liz Phair music on my phone. She likes angry girl music. I got out of my head and into hers, focused on the take home message I wanted her to have about her size and our power gradient.
“There’s no hurry, ‘K? You might get taller, but I’m tougher, and I’m going to give you a run for your money on the smarter part.”

She plugged my phone in to the dashboard, gave me a blank nod. I’d overtalked. I started driving as Liz Phair began to sing.
By the time we got home, I’d forgotten about the dead vole. Later, I stepped on it barefoot, bones and wet fur crunching under my weight. It burst like a jelly donut, or a large concord grape, spraying cold red guts between my toes and in the arch of my foot. I screamed continuously and at a high pitch, flapping my arms uselessly from the elbows and hopping. It was my turn to be upset.
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Originally from Manhattan, Mariah was educated in Massachusetts, Montana and Texas, often by failure. She lives with her husband and three children in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. Mariah can be reached at mariah@mariahmottley.com.