Savagemama: Notes From a Pregnant Mama

Grandma Doesn’t Have an Inside Voice Either

By Jennifer Savage, 1-21-08

Lately I’ve noticed Eliza doesn’t really have an inside voice. I keep trying to encourage her to use it when she’s shouting one of the 10 words she knows throughout the day.

“Nilk!” she says when she wants her milk cup. “Nilk!”

“Inside voice baby,” I say trying to lower my own voice so she’ll get the picture.

“Nilk!” she shouts.

I called my mother yesterday to tell her that Eliza seems to have inherited her lack of volume control.

“She just shouts all the time,” I said. “I wonder where she gets that?” My mother just laughed. I’m pretty sure she was laughing at me. 

My mother has two volumes: on and off. These are also, incidentally, the two speeds at which she moves at life. Yes, at life. She doesn’t move with it or through it but at it with guns blazing, engines roaring.

She’s easy to find in public places because if I listen closely, I can hear her chatting with some stranger about something they read in the “smut” magazines (People, Us Weekly) she likes to read, or the price of a particular brand of shampoo. My mother doesn’t meet a stranger and she doesn’t keep her thoughts to herself.

She once sent me a birthday card that read on the front, “I’m smiling because you’re my daughter.” On the inside it said, “I’m laughing because there is nothing you can do about it.”

I’m not kidding.

I think she loves the idea that her only granddaughter has a few traits that remind her only daughter of her mother that lives far away.

I can hear her now.

“I told you. She looks just like me and she acts just like me!”

It’s true that Eliza does look a lot like my mother especially when she wrinkles her nose and looks as though she’s about to do something sneaky. And when they saw each other at Christmas it was like two long lost friends had found each other after years of being apart.

I’m really interested to watch how their relationship develops over the years. 

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