Happy Mother’s Day… Not!

Everyone warned me this would happen.  One day, when I least expected it, my precious little clone would lose interest in me and become more enamored with her father.  This Mother’s Day…  it happened.  Who knew her timing would be so impeccable?

I knew we were in trouble during our annual Mother’s Day photo shoot when she insisted on holding big carnations over my mom and I, making us look like bad versions of the Dr. Seuss character, Daisy head Maisy.  It was cute the first 45 snapshots, but when she refused to stop OR smile, things got ugly.  Right there in the middle of the Country Club parking lot she and I began wrestling over the two flowers like we were both seven.  The skirmish lasted less than a minute, when the unthinkable happened.  The heads of both flowers popped off in my hand.  Those things aren’t as durable as they look!

All the way home she fake cried, while peppering me with blame and insults over the floral casualties.  It’s pretty ironic given the fact that… THEY WERE MY FLOWERS TO BEGIN WITH.  Happy Mother’s day!  I guess it’s what we all sign up for when we agree to haul a human being around in our belly for nine months.  All humans are flawed by definition.  Did we expect it to get easier once they were on the outside?  Sunday afternoon, I decided to cut my losses and take my mom to a movie.

Looking back… the shift from my BFF to his has probably been percolating for a while now.  Starting out, it was like a game of two on one.  My husband and I were on the same team, and we didn’t quite know what to make of her.  As the years passed, she slowly began to realize that she and I were both girls, and he wasn’t.  It seemed like a novel concept to her at the time.  She’d dress up in my clothes, stumble around in my oversized heels, and dump my make-up all over the floor.  Despite the stains that are still embedded in my carpet, there was something endearing about the whole thing.

Lately, however, I’ve started to notice that old mom’s not quite cool enough to hang out with anymore.  Dad’s a better Nintendo player, a better grill cheese maker, even a better dresser.  Read between the lines.  This means he lets her walk out of the house in whatever she wants, regardless of how ill matched it may be, and for the record… there’s NEVER a hair accessory involved.  This is a huge plus for her since she prefers to brush her hair about once a week.

I’m just going to give it to you straight.  If a masked gunman breaks into our house tonight and she can only save one of us… I’m taking a bullet.  It kills me too because the day of the ultrasound, I nearly jumped off the examining table, jelly and all, when the technician told us we were having a girl.  I’m an only child, so my parents were equally ecstatic about the idea of helping raise another girl.

My husband, on the other hand, looked like he’d just been fired on national television by Donald Trump.  I kept waving my hand in front of his face, begging him to snap out of it, but his mind was made up.  For months, people would ask… “So what are you having?”  To which he would throw up his hands and reply, “Jennifer got her wish!  We’re having a girl.”  It was like he thought I’d somehow engineered the whole thing to mess up his life.

Fast forward seven years… and I’m suddenly the enemy!  I guess I should say “frenemy”.  Sometimes she loves me.  Other times I think she wants me to move back in with my parents so she and her dad can have the house to themselves.  It’s actually an idea I’ve toyed with from time to time.  I’d love to see that joint after a couple of weeks.  The yard would look fantastic, but they’d be up to their ears in cat poop.  Plus, the cupboards would be void of everything but a sleeve of saltines and a jar of Peter Pan… which the dog and cat would have to survive on as well.

I’ve also started to resent the disparaging way she describes my job to people.  On the way to school last week, she informed the carpooler that I “act stupid on television for a living”.  Excuse me? I can check my e-mails if I need that kind of insult.  Now, I will agree that OCCASIONALLY I might say something on-air that might somehow be misconstrued by some as stupid.  It happens, but there IS some news sandwiched in there between the dumb remarks.

After she said it, she must have felt a tinge of guilt, or at least concerned about her reputation.  She quickly followed up by saying, “But my daddy has a REAL job.”  The guy sells WHEEL WEIGHTS for a living!  I’m not knocking it. It puts food on the table, but come on!  She’s probably one of only a handful of females on the planet who even know what those are!

Every Mother’s Day our church does an annual baby dedication.  It’s truly adorable.  When the group paraded out on stage this year, I couldn’t help but remember that just seven years ago, our own family was standing up there, proudly introducing our bundle of joy to the world.  In the middle of my trip down memory lane, Dalton kicked me in the shin and asked for a Tic Tac.  When I looked back at those women smiling sweetly down at their daughters, I had to resist the urge to stand up and scream “Watch your back! She’s going to turn on you.”