Our 8 year-old boy is still very cuddly, but we know it won’t last for long. Sometimes, when we are watching cartoons on a weekend morning, he says, “E-Mom!! Stop smothering me!!”
I believe it is my divine right of motherhood to be the quintessential overbearing Jewish mother. I realize now that my mother, and her mother before her, were just trying to stuff a lifetime worth of love and concern into the few years they actually had control over their children’s lives. And because, when I look at my child, all I want to do (when I don’t want to throttle him) is hug him and tell him how adorable he is and how much I love him.
So, today, when he said those awful words (“stop smothering me!!”) during our cartoon marathon, I reminded him of my divine right to smother and added, “you can’t spell smother without M-O-T-H-E-R!!”
With my new-found appreciation for the cartoon, “Phineas and Ferb” (today they went on a boat for a three-hour tour, a three-hour tour . . . .), I started imitating the show’s evil doctor, Heinz Doofenschmirtz, who invents “-inators” to do evil things to the entire tri-state area (no joke), and proclaimed myself, the “SMOTHER-inator”.
Yes, yes, yes, I know. Any sane person would not admit to this.
The downside of vacation is that I’ve missed your blog – but now I’m home and caught up on 40andoverblog and the world is right. And we know so well that our mother so lovingly put the ‘mother’ in ‘smother.’