My neighbor was over the other day, and (wonder of wonders!) found a toy on the living room floor. She tossed it to me and said, “Hey! This looks like the title of your blog!”
Creepy. Why am I so creepy? Instead of shrugging it off as another weird-thing-Jodi-says, I took a picture of it.
I’ve been trying to elude the fact that “And Her Head Popped Off” is, perhaps, a creepy name for a blog. To me, it is just that silly dandelion rhyme/game. You know, Mama had a baby / And her head popped off, in which you pop off the top of the flower with your thumb. I always assumed that the “her” referred to the mama, not the baby. The baby? No, that is disturbing. Why would the baby’s head… *shudder* …nevermind. My version is much less creepy, right? We mamas are always talking about “losing my mind” or “going crazy” or “don’t know where my head is today.” Not creepy. Benign. Silly. Clever. Un-creepy.
Dammit, though. Now I’m creeped out. So I google all things heads-popping-off, and I feel even worse. Nobody knows whose head we are talking about here. This pisses me off, because I could diagram the damn sentence and show you. Mama is the subject! Mama’s head pops off! But more people are in the it’s-the-baby’s-head camp than the it’s-the-mama’s-head camp, and this is a Democracy, after all. As the last straw, google directs me to the lyrics of a rap. The title: “Mama had a baby and his head popped off.”
So. The title, at first, symbolized my struggles with the motherhood/creativity balance. It reminded me of dandelions, which I love for their ordinary beauty (no comments from the neighbors, please), the humble bouquets from my kids, and, of course, wishes. Now the title is just creepy. And it’s a rap.
Which sucks, because it only confirms my fickleness.
