This is a season for wasps. They buzz in the backseat of the car and you drive off anyway, there are so many of them. The only upside to a year of nasty stingers is: the children learn to wave them patiently away instead of freaking out. The sting though. The buzz. My daughter is at camp with her Dad and I am alone at home covered in paint and dry wall dust, eating ice cream. The good kind. The “I am ignoring stings” kind.
A male friend jokes with me on line. “Congratulations on your upcoming wedding. I hope your Fellow knows what he’s getting…and I hope he knows what he’s getting into.” I chuckle and I don’t. Too true. I am marrying up and I know it.
If I was a stronger woman I’d be a good mother in a number of bad situations, no? If I was a stronger woman I could be a good mother in a bad marriage, instead of a part time mother in a great marriage. I hate being without my child for half her life.
The wasps buzz. Oh. Of course. They love the shells from the prawns. I put out water that I have boiled sausage in for tonight’s dinner. How’s death, Italian style? The sausage water drowns about thirty of them in a few short hours. Good. Die suckers. Die.
There was a time when Nora stepped on a hornet’s nest while walking through the forest, around three years old. I picked her up in my arms and ran ran ran away from the swarm. She shook with pain and screamed, her little pudgy innocent legs, the hornets caught in her socks and pants, I picked them out and brushed them off, madly. The image of this, of her innocent skin rising with red welts – still haunts me.
But now, six years later, she doesn’t have a phobia. She doesn’t flinch. She waves the insects away, breezily. It’s all normalized.
I rely on the truth of the matter: a child will be well if a child is loved.
