Mom? What Does It Mean When—?

The Day My Mother Became A Freakin’ Genius

By Paula ShabloPublished 3 years ago • 6 min read

Paula and Mommy

When I was a little girl, my mother was the smartest person in the world. She knew everything. She taught me to love reading by being a good example and I was reading at a high level before I even started first grade.

She taught me how to mix primary colors to make secondary and tertiary colors so that I had access to more than the colors that came in the small box of crayons. And when I showed some aptitude for art, she made sure I got the 64-color box for my birthday.

She sang with my father in the evenings. During the day she taught us all the silly songs, and we sang those on road trips until Dad begged for story time.

But then something happened. I became—

Oh, dreaded era—

A teenager!

I don’t know about anyone else, but I was a bit of a smart-ass in my teens. I knew everything there was to know about everything at age sixteen.

Okay, that’s an exaggeration, of course. I didn’t really believe I knew everything. I was just sure I knew more than my mother.

This, because the world had changed since she was my age, and she just couldn’t understand what it was like to be a teenager in this crazy new decade. (For reference, I was a teen in the 1970s. Mom turned twenty in 1957; what could she possibly know?)

Everything was new—clothing, music, hairstyles. Kids were more mature—of course! Nothing I was feeling could possibly be what she felt at my age.

What could she know about young love? She was married! That was different.

“Oh, Mom, you just don’t understand.” My mantra; old people could never understand—they were too old to remember that stuff, and nothing was the same in the old days, anyway.

This, from a nearly straight-A student! (Screw Algebra!) So smart, and yet so dumb.

The dynamic took a swing back to “smart Mom” after I was married and carrying baby number one. I had questions. She had answers.

Just as they had when I was a child, most of my questions began with “What if?”

As a writer, I know perfectly well that “What if?” is the very best question.

“What if aliens are real?”

“What if the horse stomps the snake flat instead of running?”

“What if Gary uses a sheet to parachute off the garage roof?”

Okay, that last wasn’t a writer question. That was five-year-old me asking a question instead of just tattling that Gary was about to do that very thing, because I was worried he might die, but I was also worried that if it worked he might kill me for tattling. Naturally, Mom was smart enough to figure it all out in seconds and ran out to stop the neighbor kid from committing suicide by stupidity.

Now the questions were, “What if my water breaks? What if the baby isn’t moving? What if I can’t do this?”

She assured me that I could do it, and she was right. Not only did I manage to get baby number one into the world, I went and did it again three more times. I was pretty good at it, honestly. No drugs, no epidural. Popped them out with minimal muss and fuss.

Giving birth was the easy part. The hard part was taking a new baby home and having no idea what to do with him for twenty-four hours a day.

I was a professional babysitter from the age of eleven, so I thought I had this down.

I did not.

Those were three or four hour stints. Parents came home and I left and lived my childless, carefree life.

While I was in high school, I took care of my baby brother after school, and Mom did a short shift of work at a local store. I had the baby for a few hours every afternoon, so I became knowledgeable in the arts of diapering, singing lullabies and even how not to completely freak out over a poo-poo finger-painting on the bathroom wall. I didn’t spank or even yell, but he was forbidden to move until I had it cleaned up. Poop dries pretty quickly—another lesson. Eeeww! But we both lived through it. (He’s still not forgiven, and he’s over forty!)

But again—three or four hours, and the grownups took over.

I was not prepared for twenty-four-seven.

I was a night owl married to an early bird. I should have known from the start that we were doomed. The guy was an early-to-bed early-to-rise poster child. I was a raving insomniac, and had been since early childhood. The baby slept two hours and then stayed awake for four hours or so before going back to sleep. He almost never cried, but he didn’t want to sleep after eating. He was immediately interested in everything going on and wanted to be cuddled and sung to.

I wasn’t sleeping at all. I liked it that the baby was awake and alert. When he did sleep, my damn “what if” question was “What if he doesn’t wake up?” I watched him sleep.

Mom had told me to sleep when he slept, just to make sure I was getting enough rest, but I was scared that I wouldn’t wake up if he needed me.

When he was about two weeks old, I fed him and put him in a semi-seated position on my lap to burp him.

My first experience with projectile vomiting about sent me to my grave.

I mean—it shot across the room and into the seat of my husband’s easy chair. I had never seen anything like that in my entire life, and I was almost nineteen!

The baby grinned up at me like he’d won the lottery. I shot out of my chair and called my mother in a state of absolute terror. My baby was dying, and he was smiling about it!

Mom came straight to my house, looked my son over and made a few feeding suggestions to reduce gassy stomach issues. My baby was perfectly healthy and happy and was in no danger of dying—he just might be hungry after blowing his lunch across the room.

Also, when you have a gassy tummy, nothing makes you smile more than getting rid of the air, even if launching lunch is the solution. Relief makes you happy. And—

“When was the last time you slept?” Mom asked.

I admitted that it might have been in the hospital, before I came home with my little bundle of joy and fear.

“I was always babysitting, Mom!” I wailed. “I thought I knew what I was doing!”

Mom laughed, but not unkindly. “It’s a whole new ballgame when you can’t just leave after a couple of hours. You’ll get the hang of it. You’ll be great.”

“I’m going to be terrible!”

“No, you're not. But, Paula," she added, "you need to rest.”

She sent me to bed and stayed at my house until I woke up—about sixteen hours later.

If you are a raving insomniac, sixteen hours is unheard of—unless you’re sedated. Heavily sedated.

I woke up in a state of panic not unlike the sensation of falling into the cold ocean from the deck of the Titanic; I was that sure my whole life was over. But when I walked into my living room, there was my husband, sitting with my father, and my wonderful mother, rocking my son—all the picture of health and peace.

In that instant I knew that I had the world’s smartest mother, and that I couldn’t fail with my child when she was always just a phone call away.