Column: Savagemama

Searching for My New Mama Role, Finding Madonna

By Jennifer Savage, 8-14-08

This morning Eliza heard a snipet of Madonna’s “Holiday” on the radio (on NPR no less) and started dancing in the kitchen. I spent the next twenty minutes searching for my one Madonna CD so she might keep bending her knees and moving her shoulders from side to side.

“More dance,” she said as I finally put my hands on the “Immaculate Collection” CD I bought so many years ago in college.

CD-silver with blue polka dots, it was unmistakable in the flip book that holds our music collection. One day we’ll get around to storing our music digitally – maybe when Eliza is high school – but for now we flip and take a bumpy ride down the bad music choices of days gone by. My one Madonna CD lives in the flip book—along with Dave Matthews Band (circa 1994), Indigo Girls, Lenny Kravitz and Al Green—that we only open in moments like these when I want to dredge up memories of middle school dances and sorority formals, or when I need to have a dance party with my two-year-old. 

As the Material Girl sings “…the boy with the cold hard cash is always Mr. Right” in my kitchen I can almost smell the dorms at the University of South Carolina on a hot May day when the air conditioners were struggling to keep our rooms cool but making very little difference in the stifling heat.

“Juicy dance,” Eliza says pointing to her seven-week old sister in a baby carrier strapped to my chest.

“Yes, Juicy dance,” I say spinning around barefoot.

Lucille Grace – Eliza calls her baby Juicy because, at two, Eliza doesn’t quite have her Ls – was born June 24 after a long labor. I pushed her into the world on a sunny morning. She settled into the curve of my arm and has been there ever since. When she curled beside me instead of inside me it felt as though she’d always been here, as though I’d always known her. We drifted off to sleep in that feeling of knowing, together, skin to skin warming each to the other after all we’d just done.

Lucille has spiky dark hair and blue eyes and, this week, she’s started to smile.

Our first few weeks as a family of four have been filled with sweet, breezy days under the cottonwoods in our yard and a few rough and tumble nights that have made me and Seth question whether we can do this.

I’ve found myself struggling with my new sense of self. Mama. Mama of two. Mama of two daughters. It all feels like a generous gift and an amazing responsibility.

They are going to look to me for answers. What if I don’t have them?

When I think of all I want to tell them, all I want to show them I get so overwhelmed I have to hold on to something – the door handle, the steering wheel, the freezer door – to make sure I don’t get swept away on a wave of new mothering.

Today that something was Madonna. 

“Yeah, you know it’s true, I’m really crazy for you…”

Eliza sticks her butt out and stomps her feet. Maybe one day I’ll tell her about those sorority formals or, better yet, about the 1980s, about Madonna as sexual revolutionary, give her a feminist perspective on the pop star, but not today.

Today, we’re just going to dance in our kitchen—me, Eliza and Juicy. Three girls in a material world. 

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