“Ugh,” moans Amy, looking at her kids, “I love them so much it doesn’t even make sense.”
“The other day, Jaxon fell asleep on the couch, and I could see what he’d look like as a grown-up, and then I imagined him moving out and getting someone knocked up and me being a grandma before I was fifty, and I just cried like a baby.”
“I think I’d die for them,” I agree. “Like, any of them. Right now. A bullet, a train, a gradual poisoning? Whatever. I’d do it.”
It’s all true: the good parts and the bad parts. It’s all true, all at once. We may not always like them or want to share a home with them. But gosh dang it, we love them.
29
Amy
MOM: Amy. Mikey told me that you’re having problems.
MOM: I hope you’re not being too hard on him.
MOM: Amy. Just talked with Mikey. He’s heartbroken. Give him a chance.
MOM: I’m calling you.
MOM: Answer.
My mom has always loved Mike. He’s hard not to love, especially if you’re an older woman. He makes intense eye contact with those sparkling eyes of his, he laughs at all the right points in a story, and he is quick with compliments. I’d warned Mike right before our Meet the Family and Tell Them We’re Pregnant dinner that my mom could be tough and would probably hate him seeing as how he’d knocked up her high-achieving daughter. But no, no such thing. My mom was full-on obsessed with Mike, right away.
She’d known Mike for about two hours before she found out she was going to be a grandmother, and she’d already started calling him Mikey, even though she’d told me as a child that nicknames were “low class.” When I finally choked out the words “I’m pregnant,” she had a moment of shock before she broke out into a wide smile.
“Well,” she said, “what a blessing!” She’d said this to Mike, by the way, even though I was the one crying and carrying her first grandchild underneath an oversize college sweatshirt. From then on, Mike was her favorite kid. He started calling her Ruthie, and she allowed it. The two of them always ended up picking each other for my family’s Secret Santa gift exchange. They had to be partners whenever we played card games. In a lot of ways, they were more compatible than Mike and I ever were. Gross, no, I’m not suggesting that my mom should hook up with Mike. Just that she’d ended up with a guy so meek and deferential that my dad was commonly referred to as Ruth’s Husband.
ME: Mom, it’s a divorce. Not a death.
ME: Mikey will still be in your life, don’t worry.
MOM: Call me! Your father is very upset!
My dad, I knew, was not upset. My dad was never upset. Not when my mom traded in his car for a minivan without asking him. Not when my mom had his home office turned into a crafting studio while he was on a work trip. Not even when my mom paid three thousand dollars for some fancy cat even though my dad is allergic. In response to his protests about Jenny (yes, she named her cat Jenny), she bought him an EpiPen.
My phone rings again—Jesus, Mom!—and I put it on airplane mode. Not now, Ruthie.
YOU KNOW WHY COCO HAS A GREAT RATING ON EVERY WORKPLACE ratings website you can find? Because it’s fun to work here! Or, it has been fun for everyone else. Also, because at one point Dale was paying our interns twenty-five dollars an hour to create fake profiles and write good reviews for the company.
Per my actual work contract, I decided to show up at the office today for some facetime of the non-Apple variety.
“Hey, bitch!” Tessa screams when I walk into my office. She is at my desk, with a paper face mask on, listening to a guided meditation that is urging her to offer loving kindness to a difficult person in her life. She peels off her face mask and throws it toward the garbage can, missing by at least two feet. “Swish!” she cries, holding her hands up in the touchdown formation. I pick up the soggy, face-shaped piece of paper.
“Do you want one?” Tessa asks, handing me a foil packet covered in Korean writing. “They’re . . . brightening? Or tightening? I don’t know, I don’t read Chinese.”
I do want to do a brightening or tightening face mask, actually. Tessa restarts her meditation, and the two of us practice noticing our breath and ignoring everyone who walks into my office.
After my facial, I join the frat pack downstairs for a game of ping-pong. It turns out, the fast-twitch muscles I thought I’d lost are still here and still ready to dominate. “Damn, Mom!” Brett (or Brendan? Maybe Brian?) shouts, ducking as I send yet another ping-pong ball straight for his face. “Where did these skills come from?”
“Game,” I declare, slamming my paddle down in victory. “And quit calling me Mom.”
Tessa had warned me that Dale was “really peeved” about the hotel project. I could tell he had something up his ass, because he spent the entire day in his office, pretending he didn’t know I was there. The problem is, all our offices are made of glass, and I could see him up there all day, struggling to look as if he wasn’t looking at me. He was pretending to be looking at his computer all day, which is hilarious because he can’t look at anything for more than thirty seconds.
“Deep concentration is over,” he’d told me one day, when I’d sent him a one-page memo updating him on our sales projections for the coming year. “I need everything in bite-size pieces of information.” I’d pointed out that the memo had fewer than three hundred words in it and was truly just a series of bullets, but he’d balked. “It’s over!” he’d shouted. “It’s all about skimming now.” In the end, Tessa had ended up texting him all the information, bullet by bullet. “Brilliant!” he’d shouted each time he received a message. “This is perfect, Tessa!”
I’d thought about that moment this morning, when Dylan was preparing his breakfast. He’d poured the milk in before the cereal and was frustrated that the results of his breakfast attempt were all over the kitchen floor.
“I can’t believe this shit,” he’d said, whining. “I have to cook my own breakfast every morning?” He stepped over his mess, leaving it for me to clean up, and dumped the rest of his perfectly edible if not perfectly executed breakfast in the sink, leaving it for me to put away.
In the past, I would have grabbed a paper towel, run the garbage disposal, and put the bowl in the dishwasher. But today, no. Because boys like Dylan grow up to be men like Dale and Mike: men who believe that the world owes them something, because they’ve been coddled by their well-meaning but dumbass parents too long. Parents like me and Mike, who let a perfectly capable kid skate by on the excuse that he was a “slow learner” even though the kid can build an entire Minecraft world that I don’t even understand. Parents who tried to protect their kid from the sting of imperfection and ended up the kind of people who do their kids’ science projects? Last year—and I’ll deny it if I’m ever asked directly about this by any member of the McKinley administration—I got a blue ribbon for Dylan’s science project. It ended up going to the State Fair, sitting in a glass display case next to science projects by actual children. And I wasn’t embarrassed, I was proud!
THIS IS HOW IT STARTS: WE LOVE OUR KIDS SO MUCH THAT WE keep helping but forget that they need to be learning. We pick up their clothes and pack their lunches and tie their shoes and erase the wrong answers on their math worksheets . . . and we keep doing that, because we love them and honestly because it’s faster to do it ourselves and do it right than to teach them and watch them fold a T-shirt incorrectly. And then, without looking, we’ve created a kid who is given everything, and believes he’s earned it and owed it. The next thing you know, you’ve created another entitled white dude who thinks he’s awesome for no reason. And he becomes some vaguely financial guy like Mike, whose biggest point of pride is some dumb muscle car he didn’t even restore himself, but lets people believe he rebuilt. Or some dumbass like Dale with an illegible tattoo on his forearm and a startup that gets more funding than nonprofits dedicated to feeding starving kids. Worst-case scenario, they start a friggin’ rap career on SoundCloud and drag all their girlfriends to every awful show.