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Mom’s shoves a red-lacquered fingernail into her overteased blond curls to scratch a spot above her ear. “When I was your age—”
“I know.” I roll my eyes. I’ve heard the story so many times I can recite it verbatim.
When Mom was my age, she met my dad. They got married straight out of college and she lost her virginity on her wedding night. Nine months later, I was born. And for the first nineteen years of my life, she sold me on the merits of waiting for the perfect man. For my wedding night. Like she did.
Then Dad left.
“What happened to ‘your virginity is a precious gift, Kennedy’? And ‘you don’t want to end up like a chewed-up piece of gum, do you, Kennedy?’” I nail her voice like a perfect balance beam dismount. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were rooting for me to do it.”
She scoffs but doesn’t deny my accusation.
Milk drips from my spoon as I point it at her, half convinced she’s been taken over by body snatchers. “I don’t even know who you are anymore.”
“Stop looking at me as if I’m twirling an imaginary mustache, plotting all the ways to relieve you of your virtue.”
I snort. “If the facial hair fits . . .”
“Don’t you see?” Mom lets out a strangled squeal. “I’m a forty-three-year-old woman whose husband left her for a college student!”
“She’s not—”
“I’ve barely even kissed anyone else, let alone banging—”
My spoon hits the bowl with a splash, and I slide back, almost capsizing my chair. “Please don’t tell me about all the sex you missed out on!”
“Kennedy Jane Beaman, you’re completely missing my point. I’m not talking about sex, I’m talking about life! And you’re in danger of reliving mine. You’ll see.” She absently stirs her oatmeal. “You’ll be forty before you know it. I just don’t want you looking back in twenty years and wishing you’d lived when you had the chance.”
She blinks at me with her giant stick-on eyelashes, emphasizing the passage of time like a looming expiration date.
As if my milk will go bad if I don’t start giving it away for free.
I snicker. “You’re twirling that mustache again.”
“Why? Because I want you to date? To embrace your sexuality rather than be afraid of it? No one would bat an eye if you were a boy and I were your father.”
That may have been true when she was my age, but not anymore. “These hypothetical fathers urging their sons to ‘embrace their sexuality’ is why no one can leave a drink unattended anymore.”
She sighs. Not quite a white flag, but her guilty expression says my point at least got through. “I’m not saying you should work your way down some theoretical list of potential bedmates, but at least experience everything life has to offer. And yes, that includes sex . . . if that’s what you want.” Another sigh. “Expectations were different in my day.”
“Mom . . .” I drag out her name. “You’re forty-three, not ninety-three. Your day wasn’t in the Dark Ages.”
“Close enough. Your grandfather took me to a purity ball for god’s sake!” She scoops up a spoonful of oatmeal but doesn’t bring it to her lips, letting it splat into the bowl instead. “I’m over forty, and I’ve been with exactly one man. It’s too late for me. I can’t get back the time I’ve lost. But you? You have a chance to make different choices. Learn from my mistakes. Make a few of your own. Don’t doom yourself to my fate.”
“Maybe I’d like to decide my own fate!”
She drops her spoon and throws up her hands. “What do you think I’ve been trying to get you to do?”
I raise an eyebrow. “You could always sign up for Tinder, you know—start making up for lost time instead of encouraging your daughter to have indiscriminate sex.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. The last thing I want is for you to rush out and have sex—certainly not unprotected sex. But I do want you to—expect you to—” She fumbles for the right words until they rush out of her. “To break free from the shackles society has forced upon us for centuries and take the proverbial bull by the horns.”
She grins at her clever use of clichés, but her obscene hand gesture makes it perfectly clear she isn’t talking about cows.
“You almost had me, until that.” I eye her clenched fist.
I don’t care what she says. If she had her way, I’d be mounting the first eligible guy I could find to “get it over with.” As if sexual enlightenment is the key to happiness. I love her, but I’m worried she’s lost her freaking mind.
Before Dad left, Mom was the quintessential tradwife—hems never wandering above her knee and necklines never straying below her collarbone. For as far back as I can remember, she baked cookies every afternoon and drove me to playdates, soccer practices, and Girl Scouts, all without a single hair out of place.
