Column: Savagemama

Getting Back My Game

By Jennifer Savage, 5-16-07

Last summer a friend of mine had an epiphany in a grocery store in Salt Lake City. He rounded the corner of the dairy aisle, looking for his wife so he could tell her about it.

“Hey,” he said when he found her. “Guess what?”

“What?” she said seeing he was giddy with excitement.

“I got game!” he said. “I still got game. That woman over there was checking me out. I got game!”

He retold this story to us a few weeks later and we laughed at the image of our dear friend getting checked out in the grocery store by a “hot Mormon chick” as he called her. He can get away with this because he grew up Mormon, because he does have game and because he has no idea he does until a moment like the one in the grocery store. In his mid-thirties, fit, with a ponytail, he’s a handsome man and one of the most genuine people I know. So it was with only a small amount of ribbing that we joked about his game.

There’s a Lucinda Williams song that goes something like “I think I lost it, let me know if you run across it.” That’s how I’ve been feeling lately about my own game. It’s missing, on vacation to somewhere warm and sandy and, I’m convinced, may never return again.

I just took a look in the mirror. I have carrots on the collar of my shirt, a pear/raspberry combination smeared over my left breast and something gray, shaped like a guitar, on my sleeve. I have the dried milk of spit up on my shorts. It occurs to me that this is the same thing I wore yesterday and I haven’t had a shower for two days. The good news is that most of my hair is waded up in my hair tie which is an improvement from a month ago when the bad hair cut I got in January left the continental shelf of bang consistently in my eyes.

I’m afraid I’m turning in to that woman. That woman who walks around just plain dirty with a just plain dirty baby in tow. That woman who trades hip and sexy for fashion-tragic comfort. That woman, as we say in the South, who has “just let herself go.”

I think I used to be attractive. I’ve seen pictures. Me sitting on the hood of a 1963 Ford pickup wearing a tiny black tank top and a decent hair cut. In those days, I was in shape. I looked strong. I showered daily, sometimes even twice a day. I used product in my hair for Christ sake. Expensive product. Now, here I am covered in someone else’s regurgitated breakfast, lunch and dinner happy that my hair goes into a ponytail.

You may ask how I got here but to be honest I’m not really sure. I have a twenty-some pairs of shoes, red ones with heels, sweet Mary Janes, tall brown boots, but I wear either a pair of clogs or Chacos almost everyday. I have beautiful clothes that my parents who live on the East Coast send to me each year for Christmas but I wear a pair of baggy shorts and a faded tank top most days and top it off with a ragged gray sweater when it’s chilly. I used to care about what I looked like, back when I had game, but now I’m just lucky to get out of the house on the cleaner side of dirty.

My daughter, however, has hair accessories to keep her long curls out of her big blue eyes. She has flared pants with ruffles along the bottom of the legs and yoga pants that make her attempts at crawling look surprising like downward facing dog. She’s cute, she’s happy and any energy I have for putting outfits together seems to go in her direction.

The other day Seth said he’d looked for a sleeper for me, the one I’ve been saying I want. He said sleeper. He meant nightgown, he said sleeper. Admittedly this garment I’ve been asking for is not lacy or strappy. It’s an above-the-knee cotton concept that no one could really call sexy but it’s not a sleeper. Don’t get me wrong my husband is wonderfully supportive. He tells me I’m beautiful. He tells Eliza that her mama “is a good-looking woman.” And the fact that he was looking for the sleepwear I’d asked for is so precious it’s almost hard to talk to about but the “sleeper” mix-up has made me think about making more of an effort in the game department. I’m not a lost cause after all. I may have dark circles, sleep three hours a night and be unable to remember anything for longer than about fifteen minutes but I can still have game, right?

I’m going to start by taking more showers and washing the thin layer of baby juice off of me once a day. I’m also going to get a decent haircut even if it means facing the woman on whom I cheated when I misguidedly went to someone else and came out with the continental shelf. I suppose that’s what I get for straying. Then I’m going to walk myself down to my favorite little boutique and get a pair of jeans that fit.

In all of this I’m going to remember that mamas are hot and it’s time I started acting like it. But maybe the most important thing I’m going to do is try to remember that these baby days will be gone too soon and one day I’ll long for the sweet smell of spit up on my shoulder, the crust of carrots on my collar. And that my baby in her fashionable hair clips and yoga pants gives me open mouth kisses no matter how dirty I am or how far away my game feels.

Jennifer Savage writes about being a new mom on her own blog here on NewWest.Net. Read more from “Savagemama” at www.newwest.net/savagemama.

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