Enter: The nameless girlfriend
My husband and I had planned on shopping that night, for fun stuff I really looked forward to buying - new bedroom furniture, or new tile for the bathroom, or new landscaping. But for the life of me, I can't remember what we were looking for because I have a mental block about reliving that night, a mental block named Angus.
Angus is our son. At that point, he was attending an all-boy, testosterone-laden, Jesuit-run high school. Our reason for sending him there instead of to a larger, coed school was that we wanted him to focus on getting an education, not on getting a date. And so far, that's exactly how it had worked out. ( Parenting teens: The real cost of education .)
My son's girlfriend's nameless début
Until the night my husband and I had planned our shopping spree. Angus needed a ride to a friend's house - a new friend, whom we had never met. The nameless friend whose calls made my son disappear into his room, shut the door and drain his phone's battery.
We arrived to find the new friend, a waifish, Winona Ryder type ( Heathers vintage), waiting at the front door in her short skirt and tiny T-shirt that stretched a tie-dyed peace sign across her chest. Oh, please! Honey, I had that same shirt back in 1972!
My son had a look on his face I'd seen before, but only when he was experiencing a chocolate birthday cake with six candles on it, or a fever of 103F, or a ginormous box under the Christmas tree with a tag reading To Angus from Santa.
He jumped out of the car and then...gave her a hug! Not the awkward, lots-of-air-between-us hug that he usually gave me. Nope. This was a full--contact, lingering hug. With back rubbing.
That's when I heard that high-pitched white noise in my ears. I was having either a panic attack or a stroke. (If parenting teens is stressing you out, check out our primer .)
As we drove away through the winding streets and I was certain that we were out of visual range, I began to cry - a real honest-to-God, shoulder- shaking, snot-producing wail. Because that tart, that vixen, that tiny temptress who had opened the front door? She had replaced me!
My son's posse, my son's girlfriends
She wasn't the first girl my son had known. ( And just how well did he know her, anyway? ) There was, for example, the big group of seven or eight girls who came over whenever Angus's guy posse was in residence. They draped themselves over the furniture like melting timepieces in a Dali painting and helped balance out the boy-stink with their heady mixture of perfumes.
They went to the all-girl, so-called sister school to my son's all-guy institution. My daughter had gone there too, so I knew these girls. I mean, I knew their type - driven, take-no-prisoners kinds of girls who had it together and weren't going to settle for anything less than an Ivy League college or a hoity-toity liberal arts school and husbands or boyfriends who were their equals.
When you're parenting teens you don't get to pick the girlfriends?
These were the girls I had envisioned my son dating. In fact, I had already picked one out. She was the one - Zoey? Chloe? Someone-oey - who worked as a camp counsellor in the summer; the one with the red hair; the one who, I was certain, would bless me with a crop of redheaded grandchildren, who backpacked in Alaska, who knew how to set a fracture with a tree limb. Not this...person whose name I didn't even know.
Next page: My son's girlfriends, round two
