She does it too!

I'm relieved to find out that I'm not the only one who wants to torture her (future) kids. I once said that to friends of the Big B's and the wife gave me such a look of horror that to this day, I think she thought I was serious.

My good friend Sarwa* came over the other day with her two children in tow.

Now Sarwa is not anyone I'd have pictured as a mom in high school. She moved to my hometown in 8th grade and was always a bit wild. You couldn't hold this girl still. She could burp louder than anyone I'd ever heard, I mean loud enough to rattle-windowpanes-loud. She was always making strange jokes or doing little dances or making up songs spur of the moment.

Our freshman & sophmore years in high school consisted of us mainly walking around town in our ridiculously huge pants while Sarwa would beat box and make up impromptu love songs and sing them to me.

We had the same names and same last initial, and we reveled in the confusion this caused. Whenever anyone would say our name we'd both scream "WHICH ONE?!?"

We worked at Subway together and our manager hated the fact that he had to write out our entire names to differentiate between us.

I NEVER get nicknames (not counting ones from family) so of course when our little duo was nicknamed it was Sarah & Scary Sarah.

I wasn't scary. At all. She was! We wore the huge pants of the rebellious youth of the time, with pantleg circumferences going as high as 5' around for one pantleg.

(If you're curious as to what pants that large around look like, it's so similar to a skirt you'd barely notice except if one walked with very long strides).

Because of these over-large pants, they often trailed behind us like the train of a gown. In the ever-crowded hallways of our rural school, they would often be stepped on. If someone stepped on Sarwa's pantleg, she would turn around and give them a glare scary enough to make them swallow their gum inadvertently and decide they should take another route to class.

Sarwa has 5 brothers and they love to wrestle, and as a result she is freakishly strong.

Motherly is not a word I would ever use to describe her. She would half-jokingly say all the time that she wasn't going to live to see 21, much less have kids, but we were too close for me to allow her to take that seriously.

If someone put a child in her hands, she would hold it out from her body awkwardly and give a look that would say very eloquently "What am I supposed to do with this?"

So when her first child was born, a lovely boy she referred to in the womb as her "parasite", I was highly interested to see how motherhood would take her.

The first time I saw her giving her son a raspberry on his belly I about fell over.

Sarwa just doesn't DO that!

Cut to a few years later and Sarwa had a baby girl this spring. I hadn't seen much of her since she lives up north a ways and schedules are hard to coincide, but we make an effort to hang out at least every couple of months.

So she comes over with 3-yr old son and 6 month old daughter in tow. She is a sweet, sweet child who allows me to hold her without fuss. Sarwa's son is another matter...in order to get a hug from him, I have to fake-cry which always makes me feel guilty, like I'm causing the need for future therapy (*sob* "...and my mom would have this strange lady come over who talked too loudly and would cry until I hugged her, but I didn't really want to hug her...)

I'm a pillow freak (inherited from my mom I think) and so our sectional couch (also inherited from mom) has about a gagillion pillows on it. Her son is having a grand old time burying himself underneath them and exploding out of them periodically while Sarwa & I chat and catch up.

Then she does something that makes me realize that wild and crazy Sarwa is still there, somewhere underneath the diaper changing pad and breast pump.

She grabs her son's ankles, yanking them out from under him so he falls flat on his back on the couch. She puts her hand over his mouth and begins tickling him mercilessly, while he squeals in obvious delight, his heels pounding away on the cushion.

At my shocked expression, she calmly tells me, "He shrieks so loudly I have to cover his mouth or the neighbors think I'm murdering him."

YES!

SHE won't judge me when I playfully torture my kids. She'll join right in!

And to the parents that don't understand that "torture" is an expression of love?

I feel sorry for you. You've never had the joy of embarrassing your kids or tickling them while they squeal in delight. Try it sometime...it's good for the soul. At least I always enjoyed some loving torture growing up.



*Names have been changed...slightly. But I'm not fooling anyone, am I?