Mother May I?

It was early in the school year when Scott and I began our series of 7 or 8 dates in a row. The week following the ass-chewing introduction to my Dad, we had plans again, but this time, it was on my mother’s watch.

My Dad took very little time for himself after he and Mom split. Dated very little, upheld very few after work obligations. I don’t remember thinking it was strange at the time, just a little curious that a good looking fun loving guy like Dad would spend all his time watching TV with my idiot brother. Who knows, maybe it was a matter of money. Such things would never have been openly discussed in our house.

Anyway, the one thing he did put his foot down and insist upon every year was the golf weekend with his buddies from work – a job he loved for 30 years at the newspaper that was delivered to our doorsteps every evening. The tradition continued for many years after the paper closed, and eventually came to include my idiot brother. Glad to see they occasionally got off the couch.

It was the weekend after Labor Day, Pageant weekend at the shore town about an hour and a half from home. Golf, beer, more golf and the pageant festivities unfolding all around them in one of the tackiest, most overblown resort towns known to man.

On this particular weekend, because my brother and I were technically minors, and my mother’s living arrangements at the time were a little unfit for children, my father let his guard down and allowed my mother to come stay in their “former marital residence,” which must have been an act of pure desperation. Given the same option myself in my relationship with Lars, I’d sooner burn the house down than give him a key.

It was like spending the weekend with Lucy and Ethel. Or maybe on the set of Bewitched. Nothing normal. Nothing going as planned. Sleep with your shoes on, the house could go up in flames at any minute.

My mother arrives somewhere hours past the appointed hour leaving my Dad to wonder if she’ll arrive at all. Of course she will, just when she’s done all the things she wants to do. She’s loud. She breaks all our new routines. She asks a lot of questions. She doesn’t wait for answers. She’s exhausting.

On Saturday morning, I am marching in the football game at half time, so I am up early to shower, braid my hair to comply with band front uniformity and to squeeze myself into the made-to-fit uniform that was clearly made to fit someone else. White cowboy boots? Check. White cowboy hat? Check. Bleached white gloves? Check. Game flag, streamers and pompoms? Check. Mom? No check.

Mom is still snoozing away without a care in the world while I panic that I will be tardy and will not be allowed to march. One of the (far inferior) subs will march on my marks and do it all wrong and my whole squad will be pissed. (This is what you worry about in 10th grade, dontcha know)

I manage to nudge her from unconsciousness and get her in an upright seated position while I explain that she needs to drive like a bat out of Hell to the high school so I can stand in line and be inspected with the squad.

She looks at me sarcastically. Inspected?

She claims I am panicking for nothing. We can leave right now.

With her in her nightgown and Oomphies slippers and her hair taking on the appearance of a nest.