Meghan Daum: How to be a grizzly mama
Of all the mom categories used to identify (real or imagined) voting demographics — soccer moms, hockey moms, Wal-Mart moms — the one that appeals to me most is mama grizzly. I’ve always been in favor of “rising up,” and I’m tired of being left out of this mom thing just because I don’t have kids. That’s why I decided it was time to seriously explore my options. After all, when you’re over 35, you can’t mess around.
Being a soccer mom requires having an actual kid. Being a hockey mom somehow seems less strict (or at least the kids seem more likely to have their own apartments before they’re out of high school), but you do need to be able to beat up other hockey moms in the parking lot. Being a Wal-Mart mom — well, all I can say is no thanks. But the advantage of grizzly motherhood is that you don’t need a kid at all. Some would say you don’t need anything but a vehicle to drive to a Glenn Beck Christmas show, or a blog on which you keep track of how often President Obama wears flag pins — and to sometimes share recipes.
But I like to give at least 110%. That’s why I went ahead and adopted a grizzly bear cub. I admit I felt kind of bad taking him away from his mother, an actual mama grizzly. But when I explained that her cub had a higher purpose — namely to bring traditional values back to America and to fight big government — she seemed to suddenly no longer recognize him; she just turned tail and ambled away into the forest. That’s when I knew I wouldn’t have to buy all that annoying gear or go to boring kiddie sporting events to do the Lord’s work.
Motherhood, of course, is the toughest job in the world. That’s true when you’re a liberal with a full-time nanny and a Bugaboo stroller (which is to say, a soccer mom), and even more so when your baby weighs 50 pounds and would rather rip the family dog to shreds than eat the tasty yet nutritious meals you serve.
Needless to say, we went through an adjustment period. When the cub — I named him Trench, just because I like how it sounds — joined the household, he did a lot of acting out. He played way too rough with the neighbor kids, ransacked the garbage cans at night and rebuffed his bedtime stories, declaring Winnie the Pooh and Paddington Bear “mainstream media tools.” When I gave him a time out, he went to sleep for six months. (Guilty mom confession: Part of me was relieved!)
But we’ve worked through our many challenges, and I’m happy to say Trench has made me a proud mama grizzly. I’m home schooling him — teaching him to sniff out socialists (I’ll have you know that his sense of smell is off the charts) — and standing tall and looking fierce when I sense that “something just isn’t right.”
As all of God’s creatures know, Tuesday is election day, and it’s very important that mama grizzlies — and also hockey moms but maybe not soccer moms — get to the polls and cast their ballots for candidates who will help return America to its core values. By doing so, they will be rising up against everything that’s not right in the world. (It’s also a great workout for the calves, let me tell you.)
I saw on the Discovery Channel that what wild mama grizzlies (like Trench’s biological mom, who probably doesn’t even know who his father is and definitely ate raw fish when she was pregnant, which is so not advised) consider to be “not right” are things like other grizzlies looking crossways at their cubs or humans trying to shoot them with .300 Remington Ultra Mags. But not in my family. In our home, “not right” means Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer. Unlike Trench and me, they are not patriots.
I won’t go on and on because I don’t actually know a huge amount about them, but a mother has instincts. A mother just knows. And that goes double for mama grizzlies. And that’s what matters.
