The Mamas by Helena Andrews-Dyer

Author:Helena Andrews-Dyer [Andrews-Dyer, Helena]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2022-08-23T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

Your Mom’s Vagina

One of the biggest bonuses of the Mamas, particularly the Super Cool Moms spin-off, was that it provided a reliable vent for the vagaries of women on the verge of nervous breakdowns. The group chat was like a ticker tape of what ticked us off about being moms. Top of the list: our own moms.

When the pandemic began, several women escaped to their childhood homes with the juicy carrot of free childcare dangling on a string. What they all got was something different. Mira was ready to call it quits after months of hiding in her childhood bedroom from her mom, Mimi, the retired grandma ninja. “It’s the only place I can relax,” she explained of closing the door and diving onto her teenage twin bed. Carly sympathized. “Two weeks is my max,” she said after a tumultuous fourteen days that nearly damaged her relationship with her mother beyond repair. I was struggling too.

“I’m just seriously hoping that when/if I’m a grandmother I will not be insane. But that’s doubtful,” I wrote, trying to work out my own problems in one hundred characters or less. “All of us (including our children) have to survive our mothers.”

Surviving our mothers. It’s a baptism that can feel a lot like drowning.

The accidental advantage of becoming a mother “later in life” is that you’ve already had plenty of practice parenting your old-ass parents. See, you waited so long to have your own kid that your mom is just like “Fine, then!” and takes matters into her own hands, becoming the baby you’ve been too slow to provide. No one tells you about this secret bonus level of Adulthood: The Video Game until you’re already deep in the trenches, collecting gold coins you can’t spend anywhere but in therapy.

Case in point: my mother’s vagina. Trust me, this is going somewhere.

Not long before I got pregnant with Sally, I saw my mom’s cooch more in the space of a year than anyone without a medical license. It was…humbling. It was also the beginning of my own birthing process, yanking me from one reality to the next.

I saw her vadge in the hospital, at home, on a toilet, in the shower, and once in my best friend’s guest bedroom. I saw it by accident, in passing, sort of on purpose, and because it was propped up for my inspection. I’ve. Seen. My. Mother’s. Vagina.

Judging by the lack of a ticker-tape parade, I guess it’s simply understood that at some point in life you will be forcibly transformed from a woman who has only seen her mother’s vageen during the blissfully forgotten trauma of her own birth to one who sees it when her eyes are open. I was woefully unprepared. But can you study for this test of maturity? Flash-card your way into being okay with getting flashed on a daily basis? Probably not. The trick is to suck it up and pretend like everything is normal until it is. That was the lesson my

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