Drama for Your Momma

What is Happening to My Life?!

This here’s a little ditty (totally true story) about our bonkers family.  In place of the usual image heavy dose of design inspiration, I felt compelled to share this.  Not to worry, this is not becoming a ‘mom’ blog.

what do you mean the glass shoe doesn't fit?!

The women in my family have a flair for melodrama.  As in we tend to be wildly exuberant and extravagantly theatrical.  According to my mother, when I was 3 years old, and in trouble, as was often the case, I would walk around the house with a bucket on my head and conveniently ‘pass out’ upon being reprimanded.  My 3 yr old reasoning hadn’t really worked out that the bucket did not, in fact, make me invisible simply because I couldn’t see them.  And neither did I technically know what ‘passing out’ was, but I was pretty sure if I suddenly fell over dead-ish like on the middle of the floor with a bucket over my head, they might just ignore the giant gob of purple jelly/silly putty ooze on the flokati rug.

I adore photo bombing with jazz hands when mom takes
pictures of boring planters

And then there was the infamous mall trip.  Mom was 8 months pregnant at the time and had taken me to the mall to buy a present.  Only the present was supposed to be a surprise, so she told me to sit still in a chair and wait while she walked away (ahem, AWAY! ) to purchase said gift.  Now I will definitely never be in the running for mother-of-the-year but I am fairly certain that leaving a very inquisitive 3 year old sitting alone in a chair in a large department store is recipe for disaster.  And disaster it was….

I promptly walked away, in the direction of all the bright, shiny, and sparkly things.  In fact, I went confidently in the direction of my dreams, which is to say, I went shopping on my own.  It was a long, drawn out, and terrifying fiasco for my mother, but I was having the time of my life.  Not only did I browse the department store, but I window shopped the entire mall.

I was found safe and sound, but not before my mother had to leave the mall WITHOUT me.  You see, my 5 yr old brother was being dropped off at the bus stop.  So in a Sophie’s Choice moment of hysteria, my mother chose my brother.  Because the prospect of a 5 year old alone on a street corner is way creepier than a 3 year old alone and missing at the mall.  And this is why I am riddled with abandonment issues and anxiety – sort of, not really, well, I have these issues but probably not because I was ABANDONED at the mall.

But before you go getting all judgy, it was the 70’s and there were far fewer weirdos roaming around and we lived a mile away from the mall so the bus stop was literally right down the street.  Plus, two really sweet high school girls had noticed me walking around by myself and had taken it upon themselves to ensure that no Jack Tripper the Ripper would walk off with me.

When the two girls asked if I was lost, I emphatically stated that no, I was not.  I explained that my mother was buying me a present and that I was shopping while she was doing so.  In spite of my calm demeanor, the girls felt that they should follow me anyway.  And they did, all the way to the candy counter at JC Penny’s on the other side of the mall.  What happened to those awesome candy counters in dept stores?!  Which is where mall security found me – sitting atop the counter being hand fed bons bons and clearly not in any distress whatsoever.

It is rumored that my great grandmother, an uneducated village girl from Asia Minor (a time of fluid borders in Greece), laid herself down on the railroad tracks with her four little children, in protest to the draconian manner with which my great grandfather ruled the roost.  Twice.  To say that the women in our family have a flair for the dramatic would be a gross understatement. 

ooooooo, I am so scary and I can shoot poisonous blue fog out of my armpits!

The point of which is to demonstrate that it is completely understandable and normal that in response to misplacing her water bottle at the Derby de Mayo party, my 4 year old daughter grabbed her hair and shaking her head, decried, ‘what is happening to my life?!’

And I get it.  After a day spent frolicking with her cousins, smashing pinatas, ingesting copious amounts of sugar, and receiving obscene amounts of birthday gifts, who wouldn’t be incensed at a missing water bottle?  What is happening to her life, indeed.  The horror.

I can play the sweet card too, Momma

kisses, mrs. V