peevish mama

Supergirl is constantly writing. On everything. No surface is safe. She writes on her hands, feet and arms. She writes on her stomach. From afar she looks like a delicately hennaed girl, until you get close enough to see what she’s graffitied on herself – Peace Out, I love snow, Hey Hippie, HoHoHo, Rad Elf, Hippie Hobo. Her drawings turn her knees into wizened faces, her arms into long snakes. Trails of balloons, rainbows and skulls float up her legs. Last Thanksgiving she even colored Lil’ Salami’s nipples green as if to say “welcome to my wild-girl-running-around-shirtless-and-coloring-on-myself-tribe”. No Vogue magazine is ever safe. Before I know it she has scribbled mustaches, hairy warts, unibrows and blackened teeth on all the pretty ladies. Sometimes there are fangs and horns. Often there are boogers – or clouds of flatulence poofing out of the taught rumps of willowy models. She writes in my calendar, filling the ever decreasing white space with stick figures, smiley faces and exhortations to BUY WIP CREM! The top left corner of the month of December has the following ditty: My buns are brown, my teeth are white, my hair is rad and my clothes are outta sight. It’s penned in Doctor Dash’s hand, but Supergirl wrote her name below it. I keep forgetting to ask what that’s about.

And a melon lying around on the counter, minding its own business? She is swift, my mad scribbler.

And sometimes Supergirl scribbles in solidarity, in empathy. Relations with Devil Baby have been degrading over the past weeks. She’s been fighting me on absolutely everything, stubborn as all hell. At the end of a couple especially frustrating days, I found myself crying in the kitchen feeling like a bitch and failure, frantically searching through old emails for the family therapist contacts a couple of my book club ladies had shot my way back in August. I didn’t register whether Supergirl saw me in this state or not, but see me she did. And in her inimitable way, she reached out to me through pen and paper leaving this note on the laptop. Sweet and naughty, a tightrope Supergirl walks with ease, it broke my heart and made me laugh. What can I say? The girl has a way with words.The pink writing says p.s I hope you get a new kid and get rid of “M”.