A Mother's Day Anecdote

This week is thesis week for me; I am rattling off my first full draft and sending it to my thesis chair by Thursday. So, for the sake of time, I will simply relate one charming anecdote and be done with this week's post.

Last week I had the delightful experience of welcoming students into my office for conferences. Because we suffer from such an abbreviated term in the spring months, I don't have time to meet with each student over early drafts of each paper (as I am, crazy or not, wont to do in other semesters). I gave students the option of sending me at least one early draft of one paper before its due date so that I could read and respond to it in detail. I actually had several students take the initiative with this first (and shortest) paper - a handful of conferences passed my desk over this past week.

Because my class is both an evening class as well as held during an abbreviated term, I find that I have more students who just want to 'get the thing done' than usual. I bear them no ill will; I resisted this course up until the very last undergraduate breath. I only evaded its horrors by taking an extra upper-division writing course as a senior during my very last semester at this esteemed university.

Among these reluctant rhetors, I have several part-time students that might more appropriately classified as full-time moms. One student who sought to confer with me over an early draft was just such a one; she even warned me beforehand that she would likely be bringing two toddlers in tow. This was no imposition to me. Besides the occasional terror of being handed an infant without warning, I find that I behave just fine with children, even small children of indiscriminate cleanliness and temper. I also have reason to believe (unless my swelling uterus and ultrasounds lie) that someday I may need to have children in tow on various daily errands. I was more than happy to oblige.

She came in on a sunny Friday afternoon, two rosy-cheeked babes at her hips. One was, I believe, around one year old while the other (as her persuasive essay informed me) was two and a half. She sat in a chair next to my desk and swaddled her chubby one-something in a green quilt, which he smacked happily between his slobbering gums for most of the conference. Her two-something child scrambled into an empty seat next to her and moved through various stages of tapping, clapping, leg-swinging, waving, humming, singing, and innocent question-asking as we conferred over her persuasive essay. She would occasionally break to shush him, which I thought a little unnecessary as he was by no means distracting. I am not one of those people who thinks that little children must always behave like very short adults. Occasional song and dance is to be expected, if not encouraged, in the shorter variety of our species.

Though I do not yet have children of my own, I have learned that the behavior of the small child may resemble the non sequitur to the inexperienced. Random violence as well as unexpected shows of affection can be expected in those smaller persons. For example, when I was a very young person I once ripped four walls free of their mounted wall hangings simply because I wanted to see if they would come off. It didn't cross my mind that such an act might actually be disagreeable to my friend's mother, to whom the walls belonged, and who also brought me directly home after I had dismounted each piece.

I am also reminded of an instance related to me by my husband from his younger days. Once upon a young boy's summer, he and a friend had been eating something requiring a butter knife down in the basement of his friend's house as they played video games. After eating said food, my husband and his friend proceeded to thrust said butter knife into the fibers of the couch, puncturing the various cushions like an oozing, bloated carcass until friend's parent came downstairs and (with perhaps the same sense of the non sequitur) told that miniature version of my husband that it was definitely time for him to go back home.

So, I was far from surprised when the young toddler made an urgent leap from his chair, a silent look of wonder and dismay unmistakably etched across his rosy cheeks. Though I knew of no cause for alarm, I figured this was a wall-hanging moment, or perhaps a knife-in-couch moment that could be illuminated only by some deeper childish wisdom that I could not, as of yet, account for.

Imagine my surprise when my student stopped, mid-discussion, and immediately thrust her open palm between the young swain's bowed legs. She held the little boy firmly at the crotch, just as one holds a flat palm against a spouting faucet. Though she asked it as a question, her response to his behavior was undeniably a demand: "Can you just hold it? Hold it!"

It was then that I realized: this young person is urinating in my office. And, like a hand against a spouting faucet, my student's open palm did little to stop the steady urinary flow. I was likewise powerless. I have no convenient place to store unplanned urine in my office (though I am six months pregnant, I'm not quite so desperate yet). Also, as earlier mentioned, I do have some anxieties about taking charge of small baby-type persons when I have not been sufficiently warned. So, I did not immediately offer to hold her other child who simply sat, plump and cooing, as his mother unswaddled him single-handedly and girt his brother's loins with the green quilt he had so recently gummed to a slobbering mess.

I was somewhat unsure as to whether I should laugh or offer sympathy, and though we'd talked through most of the points I had meant to bring up concerning this early draft, I still had one or two suggestions to make. This I did as she clamped the green, oversized diaper-quilt to her toddler's nether regions. After running through these points, I asked if she had any questions.

She said no.

I thanked her for coming in and wished her good luck in the revision process. She proceeded to thank me for my time and, with a slobbering baby cooing on one hip and a toddler waddling and clutching his new green girth at her side, she left my office.

I was left to do nothing but contemplate the joys of motherhood, work on my thesis, and scour the supply closet for a small bottle of spot remover.

I wish you all a Happy Mother's Day.