They call me Mega Mom.  My youngest son sat in his car seat, calling me by my new name over and over. “Mega Mom. Mega Mom.”

I sat wondering what was so mega and why they were calling me that. Maybe my hair was super fluffy that day, or maybe it was my new purse. I am a Texan after all and we are known for our mega hairdos and purses. On second thought, it might be the huge size that my eyes expand to when I’ve told them to do a specific chore for the something-teenth time. Now there’s something that can be mega sized.

I’m never sure where my three boys come up with their ideas. Sometimes they surprise me with such cleverness that I’m sure Disney himself would be impressed. Sometimes their ideas roll off something they’ve seen, which was the case for my new moniker.

If you’ve raised boys one thing you will know is that the majority of life centers around superheroes. That’s where my son-given name originated from. Mega Mom was inspired by the character Mega Man, a superhero who helps his creator, Doctor Light, battle the mad scientist Dr. Wily who wants to bring madness upon the earth with his evil robot army.

I still smile when I think about it. My boys had given me a superhero name, and the only superpower that I remotely possess are the eyes in the back of my head that my boys are sure exist. It was definitely a crowning moment in motherhood when they gave me that name, and really, that’s what all of us truly hope to be…super.

I once got it into my head that if I could bake a whole chicken to perfection then I had reached the level of supreme wifeistry and I was going to have mad mom skills for my little guy that was barely six months. Keep in mind, this is not something I had ever tried or even observed someone else doing. It was just a whimsical idea that I pulled out of thin air.

My culinary masterpiece wasn’t going to be a rotisserie like the Walmart super specials that sit under a heat lamp in an oval shaped plastic container for six hours waiting for a desperate customer looking for a last-minute dinner idea. I had done that too many times in the past.  No, what I envisioned is the Southern Living special poultry addition that shows the perfectly roasted bird sitting in a beautiful painted Pottery Barn roaster, fresh out of the oven. The evenly seasoned bird would be sitting atop an array of roasted veggies. The ideal picture captures the steam still rising off the top of the perfectly browned bird. It’s wispy curls revealing all the juices that have yet to escape on that first slice with the newly sharpened chef’s knife.

THAT kind of dinner was what I wanted my husband to come home to find and what I wanted my sleeping baby to wake and smell (even though he wasn’t even old enough to eat it).

THAT is the kind of dinner a super-mom prepares.  I would soon be hanging up my apron to don my new cape in a matter of an hour, or so I thought.

I quickly pulled the whole chicken that I had purchased that day out of the refrigerator and got to work. I began to cut the plastic that it was tightly wrapped in and then stopped abruptly. There were preparation instructions on the package and, after briefly glancing at the pictures provided instead of actually reading the numbered instructions, I realized that there was more to this than just dumping the hen into a beautiful roaster, adding salt and pepper and sticking it inside the oven.

So instead of reading the instructions like any normal master chef would, I did what any young mother would do…I called my mom. Any short cuts available, as well as every trick in the book comes with a quick call to your mom who has done anything and everything worthy of being a wife and mother a hundred times. After all, I remember her telling me stories of when she was a child she would watch her grandmother catch the chicken in their backyard and chop it’s head off. She would always laugh as it ran around the yard, headless. It was the chicken from Sleepy Hollow.

When she picked up the phone I quickly explained to her what I was doing. She joined in with my excitement but she was even more elated that she could help with this spectacular idea, even though she was two states away. I could hear her settling in on her side of the phone, totally ready to enjoy this mother-to-mother bonding moment.

I had already unwrapped the bird, let it fall into my roasting dish and was totally happy with myself that I had completed the first step, as obvious as it was. I was leaning against the kitchen counter staring at my work when my mom told me to wash the chicken.

Since when do chickens need a bath? I wasn’t overly excited about having to actually touch the raw meat with my bare hands, but washing a slimy chicken couldn’t be much harder than bathing a slippery baby, and I had gotten really good at that.

Three minutes later I discovered that it is harder. I dropped the slippery booger a countless number of times back into the sink and felt like I was actually bathing a jumbo jello jiggler turkey, much larger than the original hen I had started out with a few minutes ago. The bird was winning.  Every time it slipped back in the sink a wave of water would splash all over the counter, walls and me.

“Breathe, just remember to breathe”, I had to silently remind myself as my beautifully clean kitchen quickly became a hazardous germ breeding area. At least it wasn’t a whole pig.

Now, here’s where things go downhill. If you’ve never prepared a whole chicken for baking and you’re a chicken-roasting-virgin, then you might want to stop here.

My mom said a couple of things over the phone, but while I kept chasing the chicken around the sink the only word I heard her say was “innards”.  Now, keep in mind, my mother is a high school English teacher. Her vocabulary is immense and I’ve heard most of her usual and unusual words that she has ever used in my entire life.  “Innards” was never one of them. When I finally grabbed ahold of the somewhat washed bird I turned the faucet off and asked her to repeat herself.

“Well, what the heck are innards?”, I said mostly to myself, even though she heard loud and clear.

My mom told me there was something inside the cavity of the chicken that I needed to take out.

                                                                             Cavity…

I only know two meanings for cavity, one involves a dentist and the other one was an awkward and uncomfortable search performed by the airport security or border police on suspicious people who were hiding things in very inconspicuous places.  Chicken don’t have teeth, this one didn’t even have its head. My nose wrinkled because I knew I was going to totally dread what was coming. This chicken had deep dark places and she was hiding something.  The whole time my mother was talking all I could think about was what I was about to find inside this rubbery little being that was taking over my kitchen.

I finally asked how to get the…innards…outtard.

“Well, you just reach up the bottom end of the chicken and pull them out.”

Fantastic. It was a cavity search. Maybe even worse, this sounded like it was turning into poultry surgery.

I asked my mom to wait a minute and I laid the phone down, washed my hands, and returned with a pair of rubber gloves that stretched all the way up to my elbows and an old painting smock that resembled a surgeons cover-ups. The only things missing now were my paper booties, face mask and surgical hat equipped with a lamp. But this would have to do.

I put my mom on the speaker as I laid the phone down and she could hear the snap of the gloves as I secured them on my forearms. Searching for anything in the back end of a chicken was going to require some serious protective measures.

Surgery was now in session. I tried using forceps, better known as kitchen tongs, but being that I had no idea what I was digging around for I knew it was going to have to be my glove laden hands that would have to do the search and rescue. So I put the forceps aside.

The first thing my hand came upon was a plastic bag. As I pulled it out I could see it was filled with gooey pieces all stuck together. My mom gladly informed me that those were the livers and gizzards. According to her, they make a wonderful gravy. Mine made it straight to the trash can. Why would anyone take the organs out of chicken, wrap them and put them back inside. This was similar to a poultry piñata except you couldn’t beat the surprise out with a stick.

With two hands I grabbed the chicken, ready to place it in the roasting dish, when I was informed that the nicely wrapped organs weren’t the only things left as a gift inside the chicken cavity. I laid the chicken down and held my breath as I went back in for round two.

The next object I removed left me speechless.

Seriously.

I was completely speechless.

Out came another…poultry…part. I knew this could be only one thing and it took me a moment to gather my words.  The phone line had gone quiet for several seconds and I could now hear my mom calling my name wondering where I went. When I could finally say something it was her end of the line that fell completely silent.

Finally, I was able to muster up two words.

“A rooster.”

It took everything within me just to say it.

The line was still silent.

I continued on. “Someone sold me a rooster instead of a chicken.” I said it a little louder, not sure my mom could hear.

I stood there holding a long, bony object with loose skin hanging on it. I was pretty sure I had just castrated a rooster from the inside out. This went from surgery to horror story.

Now, have I mentioned that aside from my mother being an English teacher, she was also a Home Economics teacher as well? It was at this moment in time that the homemaking training that my mother had instilled in me in all the years I had grown up began to flood my mind. I knew how to sew, even though my threading job on the sewing machine made it look more like a loom. I knew how to cook and bake and repair torn clothes and sew buttons back on.

But what was I supposed to do with a rooster? Someone at the supermarket was being sneaky and sold me a rooster instead of a hen. Maybe they ran out of hens? I wasn’t even sure that a rooster would have plump breast meat. At this point, all I might be serving was a couple of hairy legs and useless wings.

I remembered that my mom’s side of the line had gone silent. Now I was the one calling her name to see if she was still there. Someone was going to tell me what to do with this imposter, and it better be the Home Economics Queen who knew what to do in every situation, from laundry to kitchen.

Finally, I heard her gasp for air. She was laughing so hard that it wasn’t even audible. She had ended up on her kitchen floor in tears, either because of laughter or because she could never claim to be a home economics teacher again. Her daughter was totally challenging the validity of all her homemaking techniques.

After what seemed like forever, especially when you’ve got what you think is a raw rooster just hanging out on your kitchen counter, my mom gathered herself up enough to tell me that what I had pulled out of the cavity was, instead, a neck.

I’m just going to say this. First, the neck was never originally inside the chicken in the first place, so why put it in there after you pulled everything else out? What on earth could you possibly want with a chicken neck? Perhaps the neck was saved to beat the poultry-piñata, after all.

Second, there should be a warning label on the package warning rookie chicken cavity searchers what lies ahead. I definitely wasn’t going to receive an honorary Homeland Security badge for this search, much less the mom-of-the-year badge I had hoped would follow this laborious entrée.

My mom, trying to subdue her laughter all while still teaching me her Betty Crocker ways, then tells me that the neck was usually used in soup.

Chicken neck soup. Sounds fantastic.

I decided that we wouldn’t be having soup as an appetizer that evening and tossed the neck right in the can with the bag of other prized chicken innards. I was ready to get this bird in the oven. I wanted my husband to be able to walk through the front door and smell the delicious scent of herb-crusted chicken filling our small apartment. I was running out of time.

I placed the chicken into the roaster and asked my mom what to season it with.  She gave me a few ideas, then on a side note, remembered to tell me that the chicken needed to be placed breast-side-up in the roaster.

I sighed. Partly because I was glad this wasn’t a breastless rooster and partly because I couldn’t tell which side was the front and which was the back of the chicken. To be honest, the way I had laid the fowl in the dish left one of the wings sticking straight up, so I knew that wasn’t right.

I tried poking the meat and turning it over and over looking for any sign that might give a hit, but the meat looked the same in my inexperienced eyes. I had bought a perfectly cylindrical-shaped chicken.  There wasn’t a front or a back.

My mom suggested looking inside the cavity to find the side with the ribs. All I could think of was the episode of friends, when Joey got the turkey stuck on his head as I dug my hand around the inside of the cavity while trying to peer inside the best I could. It seemed like that chicken’s ribs wrap around the whole darn bird.

There was only one thing left to do. I pulled the neck back out of the trash can and stood the chicken up right. Constructive reconfiguration was my last hope.  After fiddling with the neck and tying to recreate what I thought the little beast must have looked like, pre-defeathering, I finally laid the hen, for the last time, amidst the chopped veggies and aromatic herbs.

Shortly thereafter, my husband came home from work, complimented the aroma that filled the air, checked the oven then looked straight at me and asked if I knew the bird was roasting upside down.  Normally, we bless the food we’re about to eat, but at this moment, I wanted to curse that amazingly aromatic dish with many colorful words.  My super moment had lost its luster. There wouldn’t be any momma donning a super cape at the dinner table tonight.

I learned something, though. First, you can roast a whole chicken upside down and it will still taste great. Maybe not all my mistakes as the momma of the house will bring the world of the Brodsky home crashing down.

Second, a magazine-perfect home isn’t what makes us super. Perfectly mastering laundry, cooking, cleaning and child-rearing takes time and effort as well as mistakes, and really, there’s a chance they might not ever be mastered perfectly. Honestly, the only thing that I really have mastered in my home is my love for my family. On the days that I feel inadequate I’m reminded that love is enough.

I finally asked my boys why they call me Mega Mom, especially when I feel like I lack so many super moments in day to day life. One of my boys blurted out the story of the time I grabbed a fly swatter with my left hand and nailed the fly directly to the right of the sink without even looking at it as I finished the dishes with my right hand. I guess killing flies with the eyes on the side of my head is a second super power I possess.

My oldest son summed it up in his own way. “Mom, Mega Man assists Doctor Light to fight the evil in the world. He fights for good to overcome the bad in the same way that you always point us toward the Light when there’s so much darkness in the world.” His words reached right past the upside-down chicken, the three loads of undone laundry, the dusty piano, the messy kitchen and unmade beds and went straight to my heart.

Love is enough and it’s what makes a mom super in her children’s eyes. For all the Super-Moms, the Spider-Moms, the Bat-Moms and the Mega-Moms in this world, we do the work given to us by a Higher Power Who has given us all the “super” that we need to do the greatest job in the universe just by loving our family.

So, to all the other “supers” out there, keep loving and give yourself some grace the next time you have to pick up a rotisserie from the grocery store. You’re still doing great!