identity crisis

When W was about 18 months old, his daddy started reading him Goodnight Gorilla before bed. I never read it to him, because I don't read and certainly don't believe in reading to my children, so I never really looked in the book until one night when my husband was gone and W insisted that I read it to him. As we were flipping through the pages, he was pointing out all of the animals and making the appropriate sounds, most of the time, until we got to the page where all of the animals go into the bedroom. There is a woman on this page and W pointed to the woman and proclaimed her to be "MOMMY!". I was taken aback at first and then thought, "haha, funny. Daddy taught you that woman is Mommy because Mommy is not very pretty when she wakes up and probably looks like her". (this is the best picture I could find of her. You can't see her very well, but you get the point. Lets just say, she's not exactly the best looking woman in the world.)

So in my postpartum hormonal state, I stewed and cussed at my husband silently for a few days, as W would yell out "MOMMY!" every time we saw her, until my husband came home. As soon as he walked through the door I threw the book at him and asked him why on earth he would be so mean as to make W think that woman looked like mommy. Surely I couldn't be THAT ugly, right? My husband swore up and down that he didn't teach W to say that and he thought I had taught W to say that. So the kid had to have come up with it on his own. I thought that maybe he just thought every woman was mommy, but he didn't do it for anyone else, except for the ugly gorilla woman.

A few weeks after I had forgiven him for thinking I was ugly, we were watching tv, because again, I don't read, and Heidi Klum came on the screen. W screamed out "MOMMY!" again and would do it every time she came back on. I was so So SO happy that he thought she was mommy. That was much better for my ego than him thinking I looked like the gorilla woman, for sure.

I knew deep down that W had to have good taste in women because he's had an insane crush on Heidi since he was like 3 months old, no joke. I was always stoked when the Project Runway reruns would come on because I knew I could get a quick break every time Heidi was on the screen. Once, we had a VS catalog with Heidi on the cover and the kid walked around with it for 3 weeks straight. He would just sit and look at it, so obviously in love. I'm convinced that the gorilla woman = mommy thing was a fluke. Either that, or I just spent WAAAAAAAAAY too much time laying in bed like the gorilla woman and that is where he got that association from.

Just recently, as I have become obsessed with Project Runway again, has W been seeing a lot more of Heidi and has started referring to her as Mommy again. I love that kid. Seriously. Not only does he call her Mommy but he calls every pretty woman he sees Mommy and it makes me smile. I know he does it because it makes me smile (and because I give him a cookie every time he does it) but I'd like to think that he really means it. Since he is so young and impressionable, I will keep reinforcing this delusion, just so I can feel better about myself. Is this what they call brainwashing?