The Year My Parents Were My Playmates
Drop the mic, kid. It’s time for in-person learning. I’m not allowed to walk my fifth-grader to school.
I ask him, “Do your friends think you have your own place? Do they not know you have a mother?”
“Mom!” He grinds the words through his teeth.
His resistance to being a baby tracks though. When I was a fifth-grader, I started getting invited to boy-girl parties. I was a woman. I would have denied my mother’s existence to anyone who spotted her. “Who her?” I would have laughed. “Some crazy lady who feeds me and makes up arbitrary rules. Not sure who she is. The government, maybe?”
At the boy-girl parties, we played spin the bottle. I sat out because as I told them, “I’m dating someone.” It was viable. I was new. I had mystery. What fifth grader didn’t have a secret lover? I could get away with that kind of shit because I was new and had a weekend dad. I was out of town enough to claim a mysterious secret identity.
I didn’t know these people. The people at the boy-girl parties had been going to school together since kindergarten. Why they invited me into their lord of the flies mixer was anyone’s guess. I would essentially be kissing a stranger. They would essentially be kissing a relative. Oh wait…
