Super Mom
Chapter 1
I’m not sure how it happened but here I am – a real, live action Super Mom. Not the kind that someone manages to deliver all the kids to their practices and still bake a homemade apple pie, no, an actual super hero who just happens to also be a mom.
I didn’t get bitten by a radioactive spider or fall into a vat of nuclear waste. I didn’t go through mutant puberty or find out that I’m an alien from a dead planet….I mean, I guess I could be an alien and just not know it…..but I don’t think so. That seems a little farfetched – a baby somehow crash lands unscathed and James and Debbie O’Hara happened to find me and somehow integrate me into their Irish Catholic family of 6? That seems unlikely. Especially since I grew up in the suburbs and not on a farm where we could hide my tiny spaceship under the barn or my ever growing super powers in a cornfield. Nope. I was always just a normal, ordinary human.
Until this morning. At 6:57. At Target. Needing to buy a new pair of uniform pants for my kindergartner because he ruined his last pair during breakfast this morning. He had somehow ripped a hole in them large enough to stick his shoe in, which, now that I think of it, is probably how he started the hole in the first place. But Target doesn’t open until 7am. And school starts at 7:15 for my 8th grader. Across town. This called for an attempt at The Force. A nice little Jedi mind trick to open the doors and allow me into the store. “These are the pants you’re looking for.”
The thing is it was not my first attempt at moving something with my mind. I’d been trying to Force things for 30 years already. I was born the year that Star Wars: A New Hope was released in movie theaters so the year that I turned six years old Return of the Jedi came out in the theater. My dad took me to see it – a dad and daughter day – and they played all three Star Wars movies, one after another. It was life changing. My brothers had a Millennium Falcon and the action figures that went with it but I hadn’t seen the movies (this was WAY before DVDs or Netflix streaming) and they didn’t play with the Princess Leia figure. She just stood there on the ship while they played with Han, Chewy, Luke and even the droids. I figured that’s all she did. Wait.
But that day in the theater, my little sneakers swinging a foot above the sticky floor, my cheeks greasy with popcorn butter, hand buried wrist deep in a box of Goobers I realized that girls could kick ass, too. That she didn’t just stand on the ship waiting for her men to come home. This girl, this girl who was not much bigger than me, was brave enough to race across space, sneak a message away in r2d2 and then stand up to the scariest thing I had ever seen in my life – Darth Vader. That was it. That was the day. The day that I fell madly in love with my own girl power. I stayed awake for all 3 movies, never asked to use the bathroom lest I miss my hero do something badass and when I got home I marched right into my brothers’ room and swiped the Leia for myself. How dare they regulate her to waiting for a man? Leia rescued her man – several times! I couldn’t wait to grow up to be just like her.
And here I was. 36 years old. Mother of three. Maybe I wasn’t in my own space opera. Maybe I had put my plan of saving the world on hold for changing diapers and singing tiny humans to sleep at night. And maybe it wasn’t the same thing but in my own way, I was rescuing my kinder from ridicule by getting him into a hole-less pair of pants and still getting my 8th grader to school in time to avoid lunch detention and that was sort of heroic in its own way, right?
I parked the mom van in the first empty spot at Target, locked the kids in the car (don’t judge me), grabbed my bulging purse and quickly jogged over to the automatic doors. With every ounce of juice I had this early in the morning I concentrated my energy on the two doors like I had on countless occasions and imagined them sliding open to allow me entrance. Swish! “Oh good, they’re open early,” I thought to myself and made a bee line straight for the little boys section, thumbed through the uniform pants until I found a 5/6, slid it out the neat stack and hurried over to the register.
It seemed pretty quiet in here. No one was wandering around with a screaming kid in a basket, no employees chatting about their morning. Quite the ghost town.
“Ma’m?” a voice cracked behind me.
I jumped and turned around, clutching the pants to my chest like a khaki life saver, “Yes?” my voice cracked as well.
“How did you get in here? We’re not open for another 3 minutes.” His voice got stronger toward the end. The voice of an underpaid manager with a leg to stand on for once.
Oh no, he didn’t! He was perhaps 6 years older than my oldest. I had cds older than this kid! And I pushed 3 babies out of my hooha! So in my best mom-voice I said, “I walked up to the automatic doors and they opened for me. If your doors are going to open, I’m going to assume that you’re open for business. Now, can you get someone to ring these up for me, I’m in a hurry to get everyone to school on time.” Then I stared him right in the eye and thought in my best Obi-Wan mind voice, “you’re gonna ring these pants up for me – right now.”
“I’ll ring those up for you right now, ma’m. On Number 2, right over here.”
Yeah, you are. He rang them up, I swiped my card, no bag needed, thank you very much. And then, just for good measure I looked him in the eye and thought, “And you’re gonna be real nice to all the moms today; we have it tough enough.”
“Moms have it tough enough. Have a nice day!”
Wait – did I just jedi force this pimply faced kid to do my BIDDING??? No. Way. I must have said that out loud. Boy, I needed coffee.
Shaking my head, I got back into the van, tossed the pants over my shoulder at Grayson who was sitting directly behind me to avoid getting caught doing anything (like that worked!), and shouted “put your pants on while I’m driving. We’re gonna be late - again!” And then I sped off out of the empty parking lot, swerving around the speed bumps.
The rest of the morning went uneventfully, none of my attempts at silencing my children, changing the lights to green or mind forcing the cars out of my way in the drop off lines at school did any good. And when I finally slumped into my chair at work at 8:03 I considered the entire event nothing but lack of sleep and too many science fiction movies.
I work part time for the police department. I process paperwork, it’s not glamorous. I’m not saving anyone. The officers fill out their reports, I go through them, make sure everything is dotted and crossed and then shuffle it along down the line. I work from 8(ish) to noon Monday through Friday which means that I’m out in time to pick up Grayson from kinder at 12:13. I usually have to stay and chat with the teacher about whatever he has decided to put in his nose during the day, but then there’s still enough time to take him home, feed him and maybe run an errand or clean something (oh, I’m funny – clean something!) before heading out again to pick up Parker from 5th grade and then Quinn from junior high. I’m afraid that one day I’ll be extra late picking her up and her eyes will have stuck permanently in the rolled up position. If she only knew how many times I waited for toddler her to walk here or there at the pace of a turtle. Teenagers.
Right now, I’m in work mode. My desk is the only thing that I own that isn’t also owned in some way by my children so it’s very neat and tidy. There are no jelly finger prints, no toys in any of the drawers and no one whining. It’s like vacation. I switch everything on, pull yesterday’s reports from my inbox and sink into the oblivion of work. It’s really what keeps me going each day – these 4 hours of blissful, wonderful silence. I put my headphones in and let my ipod play on random. Ipod take me away……
I had been thinking about that kid at Target all morning – what if? I was stressed, it was early, I was starting to panic that people would think I don’t have it together. That maybe that mom who somehow always looks like a model and doesn’t seem to do anything in life except pick up and drop off her one child might start judging me……well, more than she already had. They say that’s how mutant abilities show up. Brought on by stress. But honestly, that was the most low stress I’ve been for 13 years! I’m a mother of three!
Maybe I DID get bitten by a spider. Maybe it was sometime in my sleep last night. You know they say that the average person eats 17 spiders in the lifetime – while they sleep. How do they know it’s 17? And are they secretly watching someone their entire life just to study late night accidental spider eating? That seems like a waste of scientific funds.
No, I don’t know what it was and it doesn’t matter. I just needed to figure out how to do it again. Which is what lead me here. To the shed behind our house that smelled of fresh mown grass, fertilizer and faintly of cigarette smoke – who was smoking out here?? If Abe had been smoking again I would kill him and if it was anyone else, I’d kill them too. Smoking – not the point. Focus. I’ll figure that out later. What I needed now was to test my super skills. I took a few deep breaths, relaxed my mind, became one with The Force and concentrated on the soccer ball I had placed 10 feet away almost to the door. Come on! Lift! Concentrate! …..Nothing. I got nothing. I tried again. And again.
I tried for 20 minutes which was about how long the cartoon was going to keep Gray busy while eating his peanut butter sandwich. It was a fluke, a trick of my mind. I was stupid. I opened the shed door and rolled the ball out with the toe of my sneaker, thinking how cool it would have been to have actually had a super power. Rogue, I always loved Rogue from the X-Men. She was so cool, so wounded and so pissed off at the world. When I was growing up I wanted to be her, too. I was pissed, too. What an idiot. Super powers. The Force. Stupid!
And I kicked the ball as hard as I could. It flew. No, really. It flew. Up and over our fence, the neighbor’s fence, the neighbor’s house, so high into the air that I shielded my eyes with my hand and still lost sight of it within seconds. What. The. Hell.
Then I realized that I was just standing there with my mouth hanging open, staring at the sky. I ran back into the shed and grabbed Quinn’s basketball, placed it on the cold winter grass and kicked it as hard as I could. It followed the soccer ball into the sky.
I AM A FUCKING SUPER HERO! That’s right, who’s a super hero? This mom! Right here! I did all the 8th grade dance moves I could remember, right there in my backyard, in the middle of November. The cabbage patch, the running man, the Roger Rabbit – I did them all and then I stopped. Holy crap….I am a fucking super hero.