by Blue | Speaking of moms: Man. Why is The New York Times doing these columns anyway?
A third grader's mom discusses her feelings of anger and jealousy and a mix of other things I don't want to think about too closely when she discovers that some little third grade girl has written "I [heart] Oedipus" (<not his real name) on a bathroom wall. When the son finds out, he is--to the mom's relief--devastated.
“Someone wrote my name on the girls’ bathroom wall,” he mumbled. His little shoulders sagged with the weight of being in the third grade.
“How does that make you feel?” I asked.
“Horrible.” He pushed his hair out of his eyes then came to me. His lunch pail banged into my backside while he leaned his head into my belly...
Every week when I got to school, I stepped into the “I love Sarvis” stall as if it were a sacred chamber. Eventually, the bathroom wall became a metaphor for my own love for Sarvis: industrial, resistant, indestructible. One day I went in and traced the little girl’s writing with my finger. I traced my son’s name and the original heart, which was dented in places....
And where some child wrote, “I love Sarvis,” I would like to use a knife, a screwdriver, or even the little piece of metal that holds an eraser to a yellow pencil to add to the graffiti. “More than you ever will, little girl,” I’d carve into that metal wall. “I love Sarvis more than you ever will.”
I wouldn’t even care who found out that I did it. (NYT; The Tiny Hand that Robs the Cradle)
As an additional twist, Mom is a teacher at the very school where this occurred.
THE first time I went to see the graffiti my gut was already twisted up. My son’s class was small, only 34 children in the whole grade split between two classes. I knew all the girls and tried to picture who among them had the foresight and nerve to take a writing implement into the girl’s bathroom in our tiny rural elementary school — the school where I work — and declare her love for my 9-year-old son on a metal stall divider....
“I’ve grilled all the suspects,” the principal assured me, “and I can’t get anyone to confess.”
So I tried my own approach: greeting the girls in Sarvis’s class with different facial expressions, first accusing, then questioning, in the hope that someone would crack. Whoever Graffiti Girl was, she was impudent: a little child who obviously shouldn’t be allowed to say anything about love. She didn’t know Sarvis the way I knew Sarvis, no matter what the bathroom wall proclaimed.
All of this I communicated by shifting my eyebrows at the girls or by smiling knowingly or by standing very close and looking straight down into their unblemished, unwrinkled, unconcerned little faces....
I started using the vandalized stall exclusively. After a few weeks, I even started thinking of it as Sarvis’s bathroom. I was haunted by the comment a friend made following the birth of her second son. “He’s very cute,” she said, “but I’m worried. It seems like sons, no matter how much you love them, just grow up and leave you to marry someone you hate.”
Um. He's in the third grade. The little girls are his fellow pupils and Mom's students. Puppy love is supposed to be cute.
If I knew this mom, I'd urge her to get a pet or something. She needs to spread it around a little, not concentrate it all in one place.
I'm so grateful for my mom's amiable distance and generally preoccupied air. She always made me feel that our relationship was about me and not her. When I was a child, I never felt I had to protect her from me.
Jezebel sees this off with sufficient force and clarity in a piece titled "The Single Creepiest "Modern Love" Essay Ever."
One reader said "I thought this essay was a joke at first but the fact that it wasn't at all funny convinced me otherwise."
The mom was thinking, I imagine, "I'll publish this in The New York Times because that's much less embarrassing to my son than the inside of a bathroom stall. Someday---maybe not today, but someday---he'll read it and know how much his mother loved him."
If I knew the kid, and therefore had an emotional stake in his welfare, I'd say, "Yes, I'm afraid he will."
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