What Are You Doin' To My Mama?

Sunday afternoon is naptime all over the south.

Everybody and his brother has a "nap attack" just after lunch. Which follows - of course - the morning nap they took during the preacher's sermon just a short while before.

The Sunday afternoon nap is observed by old folks, middle aged folks, empty nesters, kids, and babies. What a pleasant thing it is to take an hour or two's respite from the week's race of the rats. As the Good Book says, "the sleep of a laboring man (or woman) is sweet..."

Not all, however, seek the haven of slumber on Sunday afternoons.

Young married couples who also happen to be parents typically find another form of amusement on Sunday afternoons. "Make hay while the sun shines," can fittingly apply to some fairly passionate and carnal diversions on any given Lord's Day somewhere between the morning and evening services.

There is one caviat, however, to the wedded bliss that Sunday afternoons can bring. The kids must be either out at play, gone home to spend the day with church folks, or fast asleep in their own beds with the doors padlocked and the shades pulled down tight.

Mama's are funny that way, especially young ones.

A dear friend confided one time that one such Sunday afternoon made an indelible memory for him and his young (at the time) wife.

Their kids were ages five (girl) and four (boy). They lived in a very small modular home with paper thin walls and hollow core doors. Just like my dad always said about a Jim Walter home - "knock on the front door and the back one will rattle."

Therefore, for anything serious to take place, one kid had to be gone, the other had to be almost comatose.

On just such a Sunday afternoon their five year old daughter had gone home with a friend from church. They had purposely kept their four year old boy up LATE the night before so that he would NEED an afternoon nap.

Tsk, Tsk...Evidently, the conjugal desperation of youth knows no shame. They might as well have put Nitol in his milk.

After lunch, they put the boy in bed. He had already fallen asleep at the kitchen table during lunch. Then, this amorous young married couple went hurriedly to the bedroom and began enjoying the precious time they had manufactured.

As things were getting cranked up beyond the point of no return neither one could contain the decibel level of their verbal expressions of hormonal relief and celebration.

Good thing they hadn't made the same mistake that one fictional couple did during their child's infancy. The joke says that the pretend couple had installed the baby monitor in their child's room (and theirs) backwards. The result of this snafu was that their child's first words were not "ma-ma" or "da-da", but rather, "C'mon baby, give it up, baby!"

Back to the story...

My friend and his wife were not only getting a little too loud in their frivolity, but were also totally and blissfully oblivious to the fact that at some point during the proceedings an extra person had quietly joined them in the room.

In the throes of passion, someone hadn't secured the bedroom door.

My friend said that when he finally sensed this presence and looked up, there it was. This tiny four year old male face staring at him - at them - in curious amazement and obvious disapproval. Before my friend could think of anything "fatherly" to say, his little four year old son blurted out those immortal words...

"What are YOU doing to MY mama?..."

My friend said the voice was low and demon-like, reminiscent of Linda Blair in the Exorcist.

Here he was - a former Marine, combat veteran, Purple-Heart recipient, and hard as woodpecker lips - terrified and speechless as a whore in church.

"Go back to your room, son!," he barked in his best drill instructor voice. His boy screamed and ran crying back through the modular home to his tiny room, locking the door behind him.

Ever since that fateful day, my friend says that if he even hints to his missus something above and beyond the proverbial Sunday afternoon nap, she takes off running through their now palatial home, screaming and locking their bedroom door behind her.

My homonally deprived buddy then seeks out his (now) teenage son, rips off the boy's Ipod headphones, grabs him from off the couch - interrupting his son's Sunday afternoon nap - and in a crazed, vengeful tone says...

"Look what YOU did to YOUR mama!!!"

LIB John Brown