You Can Never Really Escape Mama

The towheaded little scaper was about two, I would guess, barely old enough to walk. But, as boys do, he was trying to press the outer edge of the performance envelope. So he was running - actually running - away from Mama down the shopping mall, showing all the grace and speed afoot of a determined duck.

The runaway’s face was twisted with concentration, as he focused hard on trying to make all those miscellaneous feet and legs and arms do what he wanted them to do. And, after a fashion, they were.

The passing mall walkers, all of us grayheads in our 60s and 70s, watched and chuckled. Young Mama, aware of this new audience, was smiling, sort of, with that odd mixture of emotions that mamas have, part pride, part exasperation.

Pride, because her wild waddler was one cute kid and she was gratified that all of us gaffers were appreciative enough to stop and beam at him. Exasperation, because she had seen this runningaway number before, and apparently it no longer seemed so entirely cute to her as it did to us: Her little rug rat, despite being new at the sprinting business, was opening up a pretty good lead, pulling away from Mom and the stroller full of shopping bags.

She clearly knew that in a few more seconds, she would have to abandon the stroller and her mature, twentysomething dignity, race up the mall and chase down her fleeing cotton-top. So she was watching him windmill along with that wonderfully ambivalent maternal expression that says, “That’s my boy, the little so-and-so!”

To me, Mama looked awfully young to be a mother. But I thought, in another 30 years or so, he will be grown and gone; she will be out here, gray haired, mall walking and chuckling over some other mama’s runaway. I suspected it was entirely possible that she would be laughing, but with suspiciously damp eyes. I am married to a woman who does that when she sees babies and toddlers.

New mamas generally seem too young to be mothers. My Blonde Bombshell had our first at age 21, when we were in the Marine Corps. I was off on a short course at artillery school, so she went back home to Conroe, Texas, for the event. After she brought the new baby home from the hospital, she heard herself being discussed by the circle of her mother’s friends in the next room.

“Why,” marveled one matron, “Dottie is real good with that baby!”

“She sure is,” said another, sounding equally surprised.

“Yes sir,” another chimed in, “She takes care of it really well.”

The new mother was pleased by these experts’ opinion of her baby-handling skills, but she also was greatly amused. As she told me about it later, she laughed, “I believe they thought I’d probably leave it out in the rain, the way I did my dolls.”

No wonder a mama like the young woman at the mall gets a little exasperated, especially if she has a boy. After all the pain, work and worry she has lavished on the mutt, the average male child spends the first 20 or 25 years of his life mostly trying to run away from her, pushing off like the towhead at the shopping mall.

Her loving cautions, her play-it-safe worries, her don’t-go-near-the-water restrictions are bonds that cramp a healthy cub’s style, and most boys work hard to break away and run free. But I suppose that most of the mamas know, deep down somewhere, that most of us never entirely make it. The getaway may be geographical, but it never is complete.

Wounded soldiers hanging in the barbed wire between the lines, middle-aged men dying in wrecked cars, departing patients in the intensive care unit - these doomed souls do not, as a rule, call for their fathers or the regimental colonel or the president or the head neurosurgeon. At such crucial, frightening, terminal times, it is Mother that most men’s hearts reach out for again.

There is a similar but different string or two, a cord, really, between mothers and daughters that never quite breaks, despite the mixed up help-meleave-me-alone thing between female parent and female child. Well, maybe it’s not only the females.

There’s a chubby-cheeked little girl in a local nursery’s logo, a child with a floppy-rimmed garden hat, who mellows out my Blonde Bombshell every time we see it. The pensive little gardener in that sketch reminds me, too, that we used to have a couple of those around the house.

Sometimes - not always, mind you, but sometimes - we both wish we still did. Happy Mother’s Day, Moms, young or old or absent and especially missed today.

xxxx