“What are you doing?” my mother yells at me as I head toward the kitchen sink to get water, coffeepot in hand.
“I’m going to make us some coffee.”
“That’s not how you do it!” she says, her voice raising a few octaves and with a sense of urgency.
Actually, it is how I do it. It’s how most people do it. It’s not how my mother does it.
And, as I’ve come to realize during my visit home — not the home of my youth, but the home my parents have made in South Florida — is that my mother does a lot of things in what can only be described as “how you do it,” aka the right way. And there can be no variation on the theme.
My mother, less than a month away from turning 80, has become rigid.
It’s October, and so the Halloween decorations have taken over. Actually, they started taking over right after Labor Day, but I refuse to indulge them by paying attention. And since I have had to acknowledge that the last time trick-or-treaters came to my door was about five years ago (or more), I can no longer make excuses for buying the jumbo bag of mini-Twizzlers (which I mostly devour by myself, often eating so many that I have had to run out the night before the big day and buy another bag — just in case.)
So I was admiring the windows in some of the stores downtown, the pumpkins and witches and scarecrows, when I walked by the lingerie shop. Along with the lacy La Perla bras and Hanky Panky panties were some manikins wearing costumes — a French maid, a Marie Antoinette-like French getup (but with a lacy miniskirt), etc.
That’s often how we women dress on Halloween — we flaunt our sexuality, whether as a French maid or a nurse or a sexy witch. I have lent the same nurse costume to a friend for several years now, and each year she tells me what a hit it is. I’m guessing she doesn’t wear it like Nurse Ratched did.
I’ve worn it myself, of course, but after a while it was boring being a nurse. So when I was invited to a Halloween party two years ago, I went as a dominatrix instead; for whatever reason (best not to ask) I had all the various parts of the costume at hand. Needless to say, it was a pretty popular costume.
Two years before, the man I was dating and I decided to play dress-up for our own private Halloween party. I told him I’d be a nurse, but then my friend wanted to borrow my costume and so I showed up as the dominatrix.
He was disappointed. Wrong fantasy!
But, why is it that we women tend to go for “sexy” on Halloween?
“Are you dating someone?” my 15-year-old was asked by a relative while a group of us were celebrating his brother’s high school graduation.
“No. I’m just hooking up.”
Hooking up!?! Did that mean that my “baby” was on his way to becoming a playa?
Now, I'm a hip mom. Of course I've heard of kids hooking up — it's not exactly a new phenomenon. And hooking up to my middle-aged brain means sex (and not the oral sex is the new sex version, either).
As usual, my kids teach me much more than I think I know whenever I stop talking and just listen.
You raise your kid in a safe little nonsexist, organic, Brio bubble, and one day the "Grand Theft Auto" world infiltrates their brain and takes over.
It hit me the other day when I tried to engage my 15-year-old son in a conversation — a noble attempt on my part, but one that should come with a warning: not for the faint of heart.
Needless to say, he didn’t want to talk to me. Most 15-year-old boys don't want to talk, period.
"You're boring," he told me.
"Really? Why?"
"You don't talk about what I talk about with my friends."
"Well, what do you talk about with you friends?" I naively asked, opening the floodgates.
After a long pause, he said, "Who's hot."
"Hot as in who's pretty?"
"No."
"Then, what's hot?"
"A hot body."
I should have stopped there, but, of course, I didn't.
When I told a friend that I was going to — finally — start my own blog, she asked me "Are you a mommy blogger?" (well, after making a snarky remark about entering the 21st century).
I had a visceral reaction, which surprised me. It felt a little like a loaded question, like she was Dirty Harry asking me if I felt lucky — "Well, do you, punk, er Mom?"
Or like she was asking me if I were a good witch or a bad witch a la "the Wizard of Oz."
What is it about "mommy blogger" that give me pause?
