The Day of Mud
I can imagine all the calm focused mothers whispering to each other in the street: Protect your children don’t send them to the Lavons.
T he Day of Mud does not begin with mud. It begins with a perfect moment splashed upon the fabric of time nestled deep within the warmth of summer. Birds trill from thick leafy trees a white butterfly meanders the fragrant green grass lulls me into a sleepy state of harmony.
I am chatting with a friend in my garden about something wonderfully adult like buying an extra freezer. Somewhere in my mind I wonder which cake I’ll bake later on for my husband to take along to a siyum. The kids are playing nicely somewhere beyond our peripheral vision but close enough that no one would accuse us of neglect.
We breathe in the quiet peace in greedy gulps debate size and make and model and if an extra freezer is really a necessity if the money could go toward a new sheitel.
And that is how the mud part begins. With a distracted mother (probably how most mud parts begin). A focused mother would sense the evil lurking beneath the façade of such a lovely day. A focused mother would step outside hear the trill of the birds narrow her eyes at the meandering butterfly and proclaim firmly “I don’t trust you Day.” A focused mother would not allow her four-year- old to unravel the garden hose and slowly inch toward the large patch of dirt at the edge of the yard. She would reprimand in a calm focused mother voice “No sweetie.” And the four-year-old would immediately drop the hose and say “I’m terribly sorry Mother. Forgive my lack of thought.”
Alas I am not her. We have moved on to the malevolence of margarine and I am riveted by this conversation with a human over four feet tall. I’m too distracted to notice the tiny person dragging the garden hose across the grass. Too distracted to watch the dirt transform itself into something wholly uncontainable. And by the time I am undistracted it is too late — her hands are caked her face glowing in gooey wet ecstasy.
My heart plummets. The neighbors! And the other kids playing here and the people and the rules! Mud is bad! It is the destroyer of all things clean! Clean things are good! My friend gathers her children at once leaves quickly.
It will dry. I will dunk her in the bath. This is manageable I lie to myself. But of course it is not because within moments he gets home. And the mud has not yet reverted back to its less destructive state of dirt. It is brown and wet and glorious and it beckons his seven-year-old fingers with cosmic force. I realize in horror that it will take more strength than I possess to separate the boy from the mud. Instead of trying I raise a tiny white flag and tuck myself into a corner.
He hurls the sludge at bricks lets his hands sink deeply into its wickedness. Word travels fast and soon there is a crowd. I try to shoo the neighbors away from the area. I tell them their mothers “don’t let.” With good reason I think as I stare at his shoes his brand-new sneakers which are now two unrecognizable swamp monsters.
I can imagine all the calm focused mothers whispering to each other in the street: Protect your children don’t send them to the Lavons. They’ll come home irreparably damaged by mud. Completely filthy. They’ll never be the same…
“Chanie said her sister said her mommy said that mud doesn’t come out of clothing,” my nine-year-old daughter tells me, “It ruins it. Forever.” She wants to know why I’m letting him do this. And I understand her question is coming from a cultural place, being raised here in the Land of Sponja.
The Supremely Focused Mother here in Eretz Yisrael does not simply mop. She does not stoop to the Roomba or Scooba. She unsheathes her sponja stick with inconceivable force and eradicates, decimates, disinfects, sterilizes her castle on a daily (hourly?) basis. To her, mud is a monster that must be vanquished at all cost. It is the bane of winter, it is the root of all ills, the ruination of floors far and wide — the ultimate beast to defeat.
It is never, ever something to be played with.
I don’t have an answer for my daughter. I cannot put it into words. But I remember being six. I remember running up to my mother with a Frisbee full of mud. “It’s a pie!” I say. “Fabulous,” she answers. I remember this because of my shock — I was doing something wrong, mud is wrong, but she said it was fabulous! Maybe she was also distracted that day, or maybe she consciously let her eyes drift sideways to allow me one of life’s small pleasures.
Maybe, I want to tell my daughter, there is some intrinsic goodness within the mud.
It is the happiest saddest sort of evening as the little kids traipse in with wide smiles trailing ugly brown splotches across the floors. I watch the scene in a detached sort of way because that’s really the only way to get through it.
“Were you able to make the cake? The thing is in two hours,” my husband asks when he gets home.
I didn’t make the cake. You can’t bake on the Day of Mud! You can’t do anything but watch the mud slowly destroy your self-esteem as a parent.
“Making it right now…”
And an hour later, the cake is ready and I swell with pride, having regained a smidgen of self-respect. But as I pull it out of the oven, the entire thing flips over. It lands on the floor with a plop.
He stands next to me, my muddy little boy. We stand in silent shock, watching the cake sink deeply into the kitchen tiles. Then we look at each other, and at the very same moment, we begin to laugh. We laugh so hard that tears stream down our cheeks and our sides ache as we try to catch our breath.
His sisters want to know what’s so funny, they come over curiously and stare at us wide-eyed. They did not watch the cake flip over and land with such a satisfying plop. They simply cannot understand.
A focused mother would tsk tsk and admonish her carelessness. She would sigh and lament the waste of food and the work ahead. And I know this even as I laugh, which makes it the happiest saddest sort of laughter.
Later, as he climbs into bed, he turns to me earnestly. “Mommy?”
“Hmmm?”
His eyes are speckled with the glitter of the day. “Thank you for laughing with me.”
I stand immobile, processing the happiest saddest sentence I’ve ever heard.
And I think maybe if I move, I might cry the happiest saddest tears in the world.
I understand him. And for that fragile moment I wish every day could be a Day of Mud. Where all is allowed and rules are obsolete and we just laugh together uproariously at the problems of the universe while gallivanting in a muddy flower patch, free. I wish this even though I know we’d be miserable after an hour.
But maybe, every once in a while, it’s worth being a distracted mother. It’s worth silencing the reprimands of the Supremely Focused Mother hovering above, just to see his eyes flecked with light and laughter and the tiniest speck of delicious, gooey, forbidden mud, forgotten on the corner of his cheek.
(Originally feartured in Family First, Issue 547)
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