“Why? Everyone else wears their uniform to school.”
Not only did I outrank him, but I also had forty pounds on the kid. I could have refused to back down, reminded him who was boss, exert my authority, and fought him to the bitter end to keep my crown as ruler of the roost; except the bus was coming in less than five minutes.
If the battle went on too long, I would have had to get out of my tattered bathrobe, Spongebob Squarepants slippers, and leave my steaming coffee mug behind to drive him across town to school.
I weighed my options and decided the fight wasn’t worth it. Being the kind matriarch that I am, I consented to let him put on his clothes over the uniform. Concluding that he had lost yet another battle for independence, my son stomped up to his room to do as I had ordered.
Then, we fought the battle to get him out of his dress shoes, which he wanted to wear with his running uniform, and into his athletic shoes. (You will never see Tristan on the cover of Gentlemen’s Quarterly.) Before Tristan could reach the last “m” in “Mom” I yelled, “I’m your mother. Do it!”
The shoes were changed and he made the bus with one minute to spare.
Rank does have its privileges, but it also has its downfalls. For example, it's the captain, not the enlisted personnel, who always goes down with the ship.
I’m waiting for the day that I can rejoin the ranks of my family’s underlings. Let Tristan take on the responsibility of running the ship while I streak naked across the bow.
After wasting our youth yearning for the day that we could make our own decisions—and then taking on the responsibility of making decisions for our children—we do get a second shot at living life with a devil-may-care attitude. Granted, our bodies will be saggy and baggy; our hair (if we are lucky enough to have any) will be gray; and our rocking and rolling may be confined to the rolling of our wheelchairs.
When we reach the age of immaturity, we will be free to wear sleeveless shirts and short-shorts in the dead of winter. If we catch pneumonia, then we won’t be missing any school and since we’ll be retired we won’t have any boss on our backs about missing work.
Our children, who decades before we ordered to shut the front door because we aren’t heating up the whole neighborhood, will take care of us. They will make the doctors appointments, drive us there, and pick up our prescriptions for us. We won’t even have to remember when to take our medicine because they will do it for us.
When I re-enter my childhood, I will date all those undesirable characters that my mother warned me against. (I will get to date them because everyone knows that Jack is going to die first.) I figure that the no good that my mother predicted would come to these characters will have already come and gone by the time they past the age of sixty-five.
Last year, Grandma dated a man from her bowling team. I was concerned because at seventy-five he was older than her and he never had a good job. Like he was going to get one now? But she was flattered that he asked her out because he had the largest bowling average on the whole team. Luckily, he left her for a younger woman of sixty-five. She didn’t care. Now she’s dating someone who has season tickets for the Pittsburgh Steelers. She says that he’s a gigolo but doesn’t care. Back when she was expected to be responsible, and set a good example, she had to date men of depth. Now that she's no longer looking for marriage or children or a future beyond next week’s game, then she can live for the moment.
Meanwhile, those of us who are the filling in the middle of this generational sandwich find ourselves responsible for planning beyond that moment not only for our children who aren’t yet aware that there is life after high school, but also for our parents who have retired from decision-making.
Who can blame them?
My mother is taking full advantage of her second childhood. After being the good girl in the fifties during the Happy Days era, she has now joined a gang. Their uniforms consist of purple clothes and red hats. Once a week they invade a local establishment to raise Cain while the management prays that members from a rival gang won’t show up.
A couple of weeks ago, Grandma and I went to an athletic club where they had a hot tub. After several minutes of soaking in the bubbling hot water, a couple of teenaged boys got in with us. As my seventy-year-old mother got up to get out of the tub, her top dropped down to give both of them full view of her naked breasts.
Instantly, I jumped up to block their view and hissed in her ear to cover herself up. She quickly covered one breast, but still left the other one exposed. Once again, I had to get up and tell her to cover herself up. “You have two, you know.”
With a naughty grin, she covered up the second one. She wasn’t the least bit concerned. Meanwhile, I was embarrassed that these two teenaged strangers had seen my mother’s naked breasts.
Later, I recalled a time in my youth when would I lay out in the front yard in my blue and white string bikini. One afternoon, a state trooper pulled up in front of the house to inform me, and my mother, that I was obstructing his speed trap down the road because all the speeding drivers were slowing down to look at me.
I was quite proud of myself.
Meanwhile, my mother ordered me to move around to the back yard. She didn’t like all these people looking at her daughter’s scantily clad body any more than I liked these teenaged boys looking at her naked breasts.
Now, thirty years later, she has taken on the same attitude I had then. As far as she's concerned, she’s free to go streaking through the club in all her glory. If anyone notices her over the shapely twenty-year-olds then it’s a good day.
Someday, I’m going to grow up to be just as immature as she is.
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