There comes a time in every mother’s life when she is forced to face the rather harsh reality that her son has found love outside of his shower stall, that his affections will now be placed in something other than that dirty sock shoved under his bed.
For me, it started back in the fall, October maybe, when my son told me that he didn’t want to go out of town with me, that instead, he preferred to go “hiking” with his friends. I didn’t ask any questions because, well, I was glad he didn’t want to go with me, and I was acutely aware that if I prolonged the conversation, I’d risk him changing his mind. So I shut up.
It was only after “the hike” that I asked the one, simple question that changed my life: “Who all went?”
He’d obviously prepared for this.
“Well, there was Bliss, and there was William and his girlfriend, and there was Uli and his girlfriend, and there was Julian and his girlfriend, and there was me.”
I appreciated his effort, I really did, but I know that 1+2+2+2+1 is the same as 2+2+2+2, no matter if you put the chick’s name at the beginning of the sentence, with as much rhetorical distance from your own as your content will allow.
“So is Bliss your girlfriend?”
“No,” he said, as he squinted his eyes at me, letting me know I’d hit the nail right on the head.
Oh I had heard enough and seen enough to already have that queasy feeling, but I wasn’t sufficiently sick, so I asked one more question: “What does she look like?”
“Who?”
“Bliss.”
“Oh her? Well, she’s got really long red hair….” I think that’s when I passed out.
“Bliss”? With long, red hair? That’s not a starter-girlfriend…that’s the rebound chick guys “date” for three weeks after they’ve had their hearts broken…that’s the chick who earns a living gliding around a pole with her taters all lubed up and exposed…that’s the chick over whom harsh words are spoken in the parking lot of a convenience store, resulting in a mixture of motor oil, blood, and Marlboro Lights on the ground. Whichever one she is, she’s most decidedly not a starter-girlfriend.
I’ve tried, I swear I have, to like her. After all, they’re still together…and given their ages (14 and 15), having been together for 4 months now is like 20 years to you and me…and I don’t know of anything I’ve kept for 20 years, outside of that one horrifically ugly LL Bean winter jacket from which I’m still determined to get my money’s worth, style and fashion be damned.
But I’ll admit that I sometimes volunteered to be the one to take them to and pick them up from that new mall. And, along the way, I’d start conversations in hopes of getting her to speak, to say something off-color or rude, something that would give me good reason to not like her. The most I’d ever gotten, however, was a “thank you” as she crawled out of the backseat. So I was at the end of my rope, at the point at which the most reasonable thing to do was to totally fabricate some reason to not like the chick when…when..
I went to the mailbox one day and found a thick, padded manila envelope, the return address indicating that it was from my cell phone provider. "Hmm…time to renew my contract,” I thought. I took it inside, threw it on the table with a thud, then went about harping at my son for one thing or the other. I’d nearly forgotten it until I sat down for dinner, and then, a steaming plate of fake meatballs in front of me, I opened it.
It was my cell phone bill.
Or rather, it was my son’s cell phone bill.
It was a veritable tome, page after page after page of itemized charges, charges that totaled $610.35. The good thing was that he hadn’t gone over on his minutes. The bad thing, however, was the text messages: 4,563 in all, just ever-so-slightly over his monthly allotment of 400.
So now, I have reason, good reason, to not like her. And I still haven’t figured out which chick she is, but I insist she ain’t no starter girlfriend.