Column: Savagemama

Mama’s Gone Crazy

By Jennifer Savage, 2-21-08

Yesterday I sat in my car with tears streaming down my face listening to a book on CD by a hardened war correspondent as she talked of her friend in Baghdad, their time together and their bittersweet goodbye. She is a woman after my own heart living on cola and kit-kats, cigarettes and adrenaline, and scooping the major TV networks. I love listening to her tales of satellite phone mishaps, dodging information ministry officials and her tender accounts of the people of Iraq. She’s a little salt, a little sugar, a little whiskey on the rocks.

I have never wanted to be a war correspondent, specifically. An intrepid reporter waving the flag of high journalistic standards, maybe. Lately, I’d settle for relatively stable mama-writer but, these days, that seems about as illusive as carrying a DAT recorder through Baghdad.

This pregnancy has left me feeling as though I have the patience, filters and hormonal swings of a 16-year-old. And just like then I feel as though I have no control over my emotions, no frame of reference to draw from.

One minute I’m crying listening to Anne Garrells, the next I’m screaming at someone in traffic. Someone beeped their horn at me the other day in the bank line and I honestly almost got out to yell at them. I hollered (and then hung up on) a guy at the phone company the other day because our DSL wasn’t working and he wasn’t doing enough to fix the problem. I threw one of Eliza’s toys out the window one winter morning because I couldn’t figure out how to turn it off. “Please insert a book. Please replace the battery.” It kept talking and no matter how hard I tried to find the off switch or how deep I buried it in the toy box, it wouldn’t shut up so I hurled in out into the backyard. Seth found it two months later after more than a few snow/thaw cycles and the stupid thing was still talking.

“Did you put this outside?” he asked, knowing the answer.

“Don’t even talk to me about that thing,” I said.

And he didn’t.

I am not proud of these things. I realize I do not live in New Jersey but in a small mountain town where everybody knows everybody or almost but I seem to lack the ability to stop my outbursts or even, some days, see them coming.

Several people have suggested that this unrestrained pissed-off is due to the sex of my baby.

“Maybe you are having a boy!” they’ve said. I am not heartened by this assumption. Could it really be true that one tiny penis is causing all of this unmitigated rage?

I hope not.

The truth is we don’t know the sex of the little mango swimming around in there and we don’t want to know (sorry Mom!).  So I’m relying on a little theory that is probably closer to the truth. I’m pregnant. I chase a toddler around all day. She likes to stand on the coffee table and shout “NO!” I’m exhausted.

Seth has started to lurk around corners testing my mood before he enters a room. Like Imogene, he slinks around wondering if I’m going act like a normal human being or the crazy woman who moved into his house a few months ago. And at any given moment, I’m not exactly sure either.

Yesterday, I spent the better part of the day mentally wallowing in how much I love our life. I took Eliza for a walk up our street and got choked up at white mountains against blue sky, the pastures between here and there that will turn green again and the realization that I live here in this postcard with a man that calls our daughter “beautiful little thing.” This is the life I’ve always wanted and I get so excited thinking about the plans we’re making for the house, the garden, how we want to live and how we can show this world to our children.

But by the time Seth got home I was so tired I could only make a feeble attempt at dinner conversation before falling asleep on the couch at 8 p.m. He heard no declarations of love, no excitement in my voice.

There are a few consolations he has that are probably what’s keeping him from turning me out onto the streets. We have a happy kid who walks around our five acres with lots of curiosity and very little fear. He actually thought it was funny that I chucked that talking toy into the backyard because it had been driving us both crazy and the hormonal swings of a woman reverting to a 16-year-old do have their perks if you are patient enough to wait for them.

Also, I think he knows that the woman he married will return in a few short months and somewhere between changing diapers and filling sippy cups we can spread maps out on the living room floor, plot out places we want to see and how our little family of four can get there one day.

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