Column: Savagemama

Gimme an E!: Channeling my Inner Cheerleader

By Jennifer Savage, 6-14-07

Lately I can’t remember what I eat for breakfast from one day to the next but I’m remembering strange phrases I had hoped were lost to me forever. High-V double pump, spirit fingers, how to spell awesome like a junior-high cheerleader.

When Eliza is fussy, I don’t instinctually rock her because she wiggles almost out of my arms. I don’t sing to her because the only songs that I know the words to seem to be alternative country ones with lyrics like “Ricky put the quarters on the table and broke while I pulled hard on the sorrow and smoke” or “cocaine cannot kill my pain.” So instead of exposing Eliza, at an early age, to broken hearts and addiction, I do cheers for her. Like short-skirt-and-ponytails kind of cheers. Gimme an E – L –I –Z –A kind of cheers. And, yes, it is more than a little alarming to me that this is my instinct, the first thing I pull from my bag of tricks in the face of a squirming, teething baby.

One of my favorites, E-stomp, stomp clap. J- stomp, stomp clap. S- stomp, stomp clap. Q- stomp, stomp clap, spells out her initials and usually gets her attention while we’re driving to Missoula from Arlee. If she begins to whine on our trip to town, I cheer, clapping on the steering wheel. She stops whining and I look in the rear-view mirror to gauge her reaction. She looks around, clearly searching for the lunatic that has suddenly inhabited our car. But she’s quiet and that’s the point of all this madness in the first place, distraction.

I don’t remember the first time I did this. I just know it’s become a part of our routine.

When Eliza is in her highchair in the mornings, impatient with how long it’s taking me to heat her breakfast, I spell out her name as best I can remembering vaguely how to form a “Z” by contorting my body. Like the muscle memory I experience when I run long races, that memory that leaves my body saying, “Ah, yes, we’ve done this before” just before it clicks into a groove for the miles ahead, my arms slice through the air, my feet stomp as though I have been out in front of the bleachers of my high school every afternoon this week. Gimma an E! L! I! Z! A! What do get EJ. Who’s the best baby EJ! Yeah!  I jump around the kitchen and she laughs. The microwave beeps and we’re all set to eat breakfast.

When I change her diaper. Eliza flops onto her belly and gets onto her hands and knees before I can even get her diaper off. When I turn her back over she screams as though I’m putting hot coals to her chubby feet. So I chant. You’re A-W-E, You’re S-O-M-E, you’re awesome, you’re awesome. TO-TA-LLY. She stares at me and for a few brief seconds goes limp. I wrap a fresh diaper around her dimpled bum and we’re off.

I’ve jumped around cheering since I can remember. I have pictures of me doing cheers in the street by our house when I was eight. When my dad met my stepmother, I thought she was A-W-E-S-O-M-E because she coached cheerleading. She even coached my peewee squad. Some little girls wanted to be princesses; I wanted to be a cheerleader. I loved the skirts, the pom poms, the order of two lines shouting in unison, the start, the stop of cheers, the pyramids we’d build all to the drumbeat of our clapping. I loved the thought of being tossed high up in the air.

Officially, I was a cheerleader through my sophomore year in high school. I went to football and basketball games and cheerleading “practice.” I wore my yellow pleated skirt to school on game days and tied my hair in ribbons. 

But soon after our coach issued our pom poms that year, I realized that my cheerleading would probably not extend much farther into my high school career. Somewhere along the way it lost its charm, I discovered running and couldn’t do both at my high school. Also, I was mid-tier popular. I wasn’t the most popular girl in school or the least popular. I was friends with a cross section of our high school population and not exclusive. To have stayed on the cheerleading squad I was either going to have to date a football player (no thanks) or start only associating with my seven other counterparts in short skirts. I thought football players were, by and large, stupid. I was into a sweet blonde haired, blue-eyed soccer player. So my junior year, I played volleyball. I ran track. I went to soccer games in the pouring rain to see that blue-eyed boy play and remained friends with a random assortment of people; the popular head cheerleader and the skater kid who introduced my preppy high school to tie dye, the poor girl who had an abortion at fourteen and the smart guy who eventually went to MIT.

Since then, my cheering has been reserved for small audiences, my poor college roommate on test days, my suite-mates in the dorms, and now my husband and daughter. Surprisingly, the cheers themselves never left me. Eliza can attest to that. Some days when I break into a Gimme an E!, she looks at me like I’m crazy. But most days, she giggles and I buy enough time with one of my chants to move us forward in our day. We mamas all have our bag of tricks, mine just happens to include pom, poms. It may sound as though I need to get a life since I spend part of my days jumping around her kitchen my kitchen in front of 10-month old, but I have a good life and cheering is one of those things I do to get by, to cope, to buy five minutes for a shower. And if a little GO! FIGHT! WIN! is all it takes, then I’m all for it.

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