Mothermorphosis

As I awoke this morning from uneasy dreams, I found that I had been transformed into a middle-aged Mother. Coming out of sleep and seeking a more comfortable nook in the mattress, I immediately knew that something had gone terrifyingly wrong. My once lumpy, 50 year old body felt smooth against the sheets, frictionless in the way that only a hairless torso can be; and when I grabbed myself between my legs as a groggy man will do to assure himself that his manhood is still intact, I found nothing but a soft pillow of hair which it turned out was the only hair that remained south of my head. And when it came to my head - oh God - besides the massive piles of hair now hanging from my scalp and brushing my collarbone in tawny shades of blond and grey, there were thoughts inside my head that no man I know would have been able to understand or endure had he thought of them.

As God as my witness, my first full waking thought was of buying women’s shoes. Rows of espadrilles and stilettos and pumps, shelves of slender boots and practical mules, all of them ranked and stacked in the windows of shoe stores like soldiers prepared to march into battle for me; and most disturbing of all was that I could not rid myself of the idea that I wanted (no needed) to fondle each and every pair I saw. This initial thought might have been enough to drive a man to jump from a bridge, but then following immediately on the heels of this (if one can stand the pun) I crashed deeper into what I can only suppose is a mother’s day-to-day reality, beginning a succession of thoughts that ranged so fast in my mind and collided so quickly into each other that it was as if an archangel had opened a hundred different boxes of feelings, ideas and activities only to allow them to mix within me and drive me mad. All at once I thought of children and bills and cooking meals and cleaning houses and working in a job I loved . . . or was it a job I hated . . . no, it was a job I loved . . . no, wait, it was ... God, I didn’t know what it was. I thought of driving an SUV too big to control across hundreds of miles as I took my kids to ballet and soccer and music practices. I thought of work meetings interrupted by phone calls where a whining husband complained he could not find his special socks and then of taking a document out of my brief case to present at a conference only to find that it was the math homework my son had desperately thrust upon me to help him finish the night before. I thought of the nearing of menopause and how I had become my own mother (what!?). I thought of endlessly paying bills which blended into ruminations on my children’s chances of getting into a good college which slammed into how I could possibly entertain my husband’s obnoxious, overweight relatives during the holidays with a kitchen that was too small and a new set of knives with which I might be tempted to kill my mother-in-law. On and on it went. All these thoughts came at me multiplying into new thoughts and creating situations and things that needed to be done that could never have possibly existed or be dealt with in the mind of a man.

“So,” I thought, “this is what goes on inside the head of a woman and mother – this is what she must face every day.” Well, if so, no man – no father - could stand it. We men with our little compartments of ideas, each neatly unpacked to think through and carefully consider and perhaps act on before packing it away again and taking the next one from the box. Until now I had seen this methodical way of thinking and doing as manliness. But now I realized that mulling over one thought at a time is pure cowardice compared to how brave a mother must be to bear such torture as had been going on in my head ever since I awoke.

And that was when the unthinkable happened. Before another thought could enter my brain, the door to my bedroom was flung open and in ran “the kids” - my children. Two of them shouting, one of them keening, all three of them yelling, “mom!” I spun desperately in bed to look for my wife so that she might take care of them and then I realized that - oh sweet Jesus - I was my wife. I was the “mom” that this screaming brood was looking for. It was a living nightmare. I had seen these children every day for years, and I had seen what they could do to their mother, and it was terrifying now to consider what they might do to me.

“Happy Mother’s Day,” my simpering 15 year old son shouted at me. “We have breakfast ready for you downstairs,” my oldest daughter clucked with a smile. I was amazed that they didn’t notice anything different about me. When they looked at me they saw only their mother even though I knew that somewhere inside I was still their father. But they didn’t even seem to realize that I was gone. I tried to explain what had happened - to scream - to tell them to go get help quickly. But each time I spoke - no matter what I intended to say - only the words of their mother came out of my mouth.

“I’m trapped inside the body of your mother,” I shrieked inside my head. “Call 911.”

“Breakfast?” the voice of a wife and mother cooed sweetly from my own lips. “That’s amazing – and you made it all yourselves?”

“You have got to be kidding me,” I silently yelled. “Forget about breakfast. What about me?”

“Just give me a minute, and I’ll be down,” the mother in me said loud and clear while the children smiled. “I can’t wait.”

“Can’t you see that I’m not even here,” I squeaked into my own echoing brain as my teen son began to fight with his younger sister. “Don’t you even care that your father missing? Wait . . . is that smoke I smell coming from the kitchen?”

But not only couldn’t my children hear me, they didn’t even seem to miss the fact that their father was gone. Even worse, their mother emerging within me just smiled through it all. My oldest daughter had now gotten into the fight between her younger brother and sister, and the mother I had become didn’t seem to know or care that our house could be burning down or that our daughter was about to punch her brother in the face. The mother that had taken over my body had been hypnotized by the sheer site of our children.

One by one the three children pulled themselves together and lined up to kiss me on my cheek whereupon I surrendered helplessly to each peck and then watched them leave the room. When they were gone, I could still feel the warmth of their kisses on my face and the strangest feeling started to come over me. Even though I was still afraid that the three of them might beat each other senseless while firemen had to be called in to save our burning home, I wanted my children to come back into the room to kiss me - their mother - one more time.

I pulled myself from the bed and went to the mirror. I started to examine the body standing in front of me, peering at the breasts, standing on my tiptoes to peak at my rear end. I took the slender fingers on my hands and began moving them around my figure until I was stoking my neck. “Wow, I was really something,” I mused. I kept caressing myself and was really starting to enjoy it when suddenly I said aloud, “Well ... isn’t this just like a man ...” I gulped, shocked at the words that had just come out of my mouth. “Wait,” I said trembling, “I am a man!”

Either I had just about gone over the edge, or else I was being completely transformed now - body, mind and soul - into the mother of my children. I ran to the closet where the man fading away inside me had kept his suits and pants, shirts and jackets, black and brown loafers and brogans – I felt myself being repelled by the darkness and the mean utility of these clothes, the ponderous way the coats hung, the boat-like size of the shoes, the razor sharp creases on the trousers. I crossed the room to my wife’s closet – my closet – the clothing here sparkled and seemed barely to need the hangers that held them in place in order to float along the bar and wait patiently for delicate hands to choose them. I smiled and, God help me, I twirled myself among the dresses and skirts and blouses.

What came next, I can barely remember. But I do remember this. I walked from the room to the stairs and, starting down the flight that led to our living room on one side and our kitchen on the other, I called out to my children, “Something smells good.” I wanting nothing more now than for my children to come and greet me at the bottom of the landing, no longer thinking about anything other than getting to see my children one more time.

And then, almost as an afterthought, I can remember hearing myself say, “By the way . . . has anyone seen your father?”



(With apologies to Franz Kafka and Philip Roth, and the deepest of respect and a happy (belated) Mother’s Day to all the mothers in our lives.)