Our children range in age from 10 to 30 and among us we have 5 girls and 2 boys. But we always have the best time talking about them and sharing our motherhood stories.
Isabel has two extremely precocious daughters who are in elementary school. I love the stories she tells about them. They are both so smart. The things they say make me think that both of them are smarter than your average bear.
Today Isabel related that recently she was very angry and yelling at the younger of her girls. After a while, her daughter looked at her and said something like "Mommy, some of the people inside of you are ugly and I don't like seeing them."Then the fun really started. We spent the next several minutes laughing uproariously while suggesting alternate names for Isabel's other personalities. My favorite was Carlotta and we laughingly suggested that next time she's angry she might remind her daughter that she doesn't want to see Carlotta.
Joanne went on to tell us about how her son recently went alligator hunting. A couple of weeks ago when she asked me if I had any recipes for alligator I thought she was joking.
She reported that the alligator skin is being tanned so he can have boots made, although it may be a long time before he can afford the custom-made boots. And, since she now has an alligator head in her freezer, she has set aside a specific part of her freezer just for her son's wild game. That way not only does she not have to eat it, she doesn't even have to see it. Let's just say that her son is a major contributor to the gun ownership statistics in Texas.We talked about how great it is when your kids finally get old enough and mature enough to stay by themselves for short periods of time.
Isabel reported that her girls are now old enough that she occasionally leaves them for very short periods of time like to run to the pharmacy. I told her a cautionary tale of my two children dialing 9-1-1 because they thought our neighbor's house was being burglarized. It turned out that they were having their windows replaced and the people "breaking in" were the contractors. We all still laugh about that and my neighbor says they absolutely did the right thing.I think the bottom line is that mothers don't have to keep a sense of humor ... but it helps. Mark Twain summed it up well.
"My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it." -Mark Twain
