Blogs
I'm just a mom, not a supervillain
Knowing that your kid thinks you can move mountains is a good feeling.
They believe in us more than we used to believe in ourselves after six shots of Fireball at a college party, and that's saying something. No matter what problem comes up, they think we can fix it, whether it's making their ouchies better with the healing powers of our kisses or ridding their room of monsters with magic swords.
There are times, though, when they drastically overestimate our abilities to the point that we almost wish that they weren't so confident in us. For example, my three-year-old will let her popsicle melt into a sticky mess and ask me to fix it. I can't do that. When God was handing out parenting superpowers, he totally skipped giving me the ability to instantly revert a liquid into a solid. I can't snap my fingers and make the sun stop shining too brightly, either, which she has also asked me to do. I do have Spidey like reflexes when it comes to catching a kid's vomit before it goes all over the couch, though, which is severely underappreciated.
One time the kids really tend to overestimate just how much I'm capable of is when we're in the car. They expect me to be Doc Ock - a supervillain who has four mechanical tentacles - while I'm driving, and since I a) just have the two arms and b) prefer us all arriving wherever we're going in one piece, I often disappoint them. Not that this disappointment deters them from continuing to ask things of me.
Here are some of the things they've requested over the past few months:
This from the child who once told me that I wasn't any good at doing Transformers? I wouldn't help even if I could.
This one was tempting, just because he bragged about being better at Mario than I am. The ability to gloat was just slightly edged out by not wanting to put the car in a ditch.
Amazingly, I do not have the ability to feed someone while I'm driving.
Foot rubs are also out of the picture, but at least she didn't ask me to rub her back that time.
My daughter also frequently asks me to pick up things she's dropped. Ideally, I could reach behind me and grab the item at a stoplight since her car seat is behind me. However, she typically drops things as far away from my reach as possible. So, not only am I not Doc Ock, I'm not Elastigirl, either, even if my crappy doodles do make my arms look ridiculously long sometimes.
So, dear kiddos of mine, I greatly appreciate your confidence in my abilities, but let's stop with the requests while I'm driving a one-and-a-half ton car down the road at 55 mph (that's my story and I'm sticking to it), okay?
- Erika Watts
Erika Watts is a stay-at-home-mom to two kids. When she isn't busy refereeing screaming matches or burning supper, she works part-time as a freelance writer. She is also the creator of Dorky Mom Doodles, a humor blog that chronicles her parenting and other life experiences and is illustrated with bad doodles. Her work has been featured on Scary Mommy and Wordpress Discover.