When I was eight, I found out my mom was a POLAR BEAR. Not a nice, fuzzy SAFE polar bear like you see behind the glass at the zoo. A grumbling, snoring ROARING polar bear (who ate up all the ice cream).
We had moved from our warm and sunny desert home to this freezing, snow-covered land they called “the windy city”. Boy, was THAT a good name! I could hardly feel my fingers on the uphill walk to my new school. My teacher even told me that Mr. Frost would bite off my fingers if I didn’t wear my gloves. I guessed she meant the janitor, who lurked by the lost and found box chewing on dirty mittens (really! I saw him!).
About the same time I found out my mom was a polar bear my dad’s voice was stolen. Oh-he could talk-but only in whispers. That’s how I found out-I heard him whispering to Grammy Kay on the phone about mom turning into a POLAR BEAR. “She just roars at us all and then goes to sleep,” he told her in his hushed voice (so not to wake the bear). I was completely convinced about my mom too-she even ATE like a polar bear! Ice cream shakes, fish sticks (sometimes even together-Blech!) and she was always yelling, “Turn up the heat! I’m FREEZING!”
My mom did still snuggle with me sometimes. We would climb under the warm bearskin blanket she had and share her ice cream. I decided that maybe being a POLAR BEAR wasn’t so bad after all-as long as you didn’t have to share your ice cream with your bratty little brother.
My mom stopped being a POLAR BEAR when I was ten. Daddy took her on “vacation” for a few weeks—but I didn’t understand that because he came home every night without her. When he finally brought my mom back she was smiling and had brought home LOTS and LOTS of beautiful flowers. I’d never seen so many! I guess she picked them on her vacation because they were all in fancy vases and had little cards with them. She must have made lots of important friends too because she was wearing these neat white bracelets that all said “Doctor So-and so” on them.
As I grew older, my mom would only act like that POLAR BEAR once in a while. But secretly—sometimes I really miss sharing ice cream with that bear.
Bonny Oh lives in central Wisconsin with too many ideas, trying to lasso her ADD with the creative threads unraveling from the well-worn quilt of her life.