It is not easy to parse the conversations of the Lady Book Club to which I belong. There is too much history and inside information, too many family ties to contend with (three members are sisters).
Outsiders do seem genuinely shocked though that we actually read and discuss the book at hand. The club is not an excuse to drink wine. Rather, it is not solely an excuse to drink wine. The book talk takes place over dinner, so it is only after we’ve cleared the table and opened the umpteenth bottle that things get testy, and loud, and sometimes physical. There seems to be always a struggle for dominance over the group, and this last meeting involved a bout of crotch slapping between the president and an usurper. (Inquire no further, please.) But at least this time I came away with a visual representation of some of the touching/funny/weird conversations I’m privy to being amongst this group of married, and working, and child-rearing women.
Our leader, M., had the night prior injured herself in some sort of dance routine/cartwheel fiasco at her brother-in-law’s birthday party. She was having a soak in the tub before out meeting when her two sons burst into the bathroom to offer up homemade sympathy cards. The first was a basically I’m sorry you hurt yourself doing a Kartwheel (sp) mommy. The second (pictured) reads, in case you can’t make it out, “I love you mom you are the best mom in the whore!!!”
M. was, she said, naturally caught in that conflicting state of being touched by the gesture and wanting to burst out laughing at the unintended message.
You mean I’m the best mom in the whole world? she asked stifling a laugh.
Her son shook his enthusiastically shook his head “yes.”
I mean, it’s moments like that, right?
(If you say “whole world” fast, in that sort of mushy lisp that young kids have, it does kind of sound like “whore.”)
