“Not the mama.”

I hear this all the time. At least every other day.

“Not the mama! Not the mama!”

My prankster wife Roxanne, whose acquaintance you may have already made via The Mom Blog, warns me all the time – though most often when I’ve done something stupid, or just cracked my knuckles yet again – that she’s going to teach our first child to do two things as soon as possible:

1) While I’m sleeping, said child will be trained to quietly sneak up to me, pry open my eyelids with its grubby little fingers and then, with his/her face terrifyingly close to me, scream, “WAKE UP, DADDY! WAKE UP, WAKE UP! TIME TO WAKE UP NOW!” Rox tells me that, when she was a wee one, she routinely roused her grandparents with such a human alarm clock. It’s a wonder they still send her birthday cards.

2) She also insists that one of her first orders of business will be to subtly, surreptitiously teach our child not to say “Da-Da” or any other such goo-goo-ga-ga approximation of Pops. Instead, she will teach our kid to point at me and announce: “Not the mama.”

“Not the mama! Not the mama!”

See for yourself where this, uh, cute synonym for “father” comes from by playing the clip below. (If you know without clicking, congrats: You, too, have seen much too much bad television.)

But for the record, when I (happily) agreed to join the Dad Blog, I had two other monikers for my little corner of online parenthood in mind.

The first was Coupla Kooks, after the David Bowie song.

Some of you may realize I’m also the pop critic ’round here. Bowie is an all-time fave, and the adorable “Kooks,” from his Hunky Dory album, means more to me now than ever before. He wrote it as if he and his then-wife Angela were singing it to their newborn boy, Joe. “Will you stay in a lover’s story?” they ask. “If you do, you won’t be sorry. ’Cause we believe in you. Soon you’ll grow – so take a chance on a coupla kooks, hung up on romancin’.”

Awww … sweet, huh? You don’t know us, but trust me, it suits us: Rox and I are complete kooks. No doubt our kid, our Sam – Samuel or Samantha, we don’t know yet – is bound to be a kook, too.

But, see, Coupla Kooks kinda makes it sound like I’m a single dad raising a precocious orphan. So that was vetoed.

My second choice: Sam’s Town, after the Killers album. Only, I’m not actually a big fan of that album. So that was vetoed.

By me, mind you. Rox just nodded knowingly, letting me figure it out for myself.

Then it came:

“Not the mama! Not the mama!”

And here we are. Hi. Nice of you to have read this far. I’m Not the Mama. I’ll be around.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 at 11:14 am and is filed under Not the Mama - Ben Wener. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.