From the very first day they went to Jr. High I knew it was coming.
The Embarrassment.
Classic partner to every pre-teen.
I know that this stage is a rite of passage, and I have tried every day not to take it too hard as my girls have walked way in front, or begged me not to show up at a thing.
As the months have gone on since the start of seventh grade, this mortification with everything I (or any adult in the family) do has only intensified.
Lately my daughters, 11 and 12, have been requesting to be dropped off for school from behind a large bush, for example.
Yes, this actually happens in real life.
This is why the other morning, as we passed the cemetery next door to their school,
we joked over our shoulders that perhaps they would rather we just park there and quickly hide inside empty graves until they had entered their classrooms.
They rolled their eyes and shook their heads and just went off to school.
However,
What they went with that day would prove to be my redemption in the end:
Two very convincing fake, stretchy bananas tucked inside their lunchboxes.
The night before, as I prepared to pack lunches and they played with their toy bananas, I had suggested that it might be funny for them to take them in their lunches and to trick their friends by looking like they were about to eat them, then, instead, suddenly stretching them out 4 feet long for some real shock-value.
The girls loved this idea, and they set the plan in motion.
When they came home that day, I asked them right away how the banana trick had gone, and they both grew so animated telling me all about how shocked their friends had been,
how they had died laughing, had fought to hold them, and had then drawn a large crowd of boys who began whipping the fake bananas against a picnic table, and in the air.
This raucous whipping and banging of food items, in turn, caught the attention of the yard duty lady, who came over to loudly ask them to “please not make a mess with their lunches.”
Realizing they had all now pulled a prank on the yard duty lady,
who obviously thought the bananas were real,
the entire crowd had laughed,
now forever bonded by two stretchy bananas from the craft store.
And that is when these two perpetually mortified pre-teen girls had confessed to the crowd standing around them that
it had all been their mother’s idea.
They then reported that one of their friends had responded with…
Wait for it…
“YOUR MOM SOUNDS FUN.”
They casually mentioned that everyone agreed.
*record scratch*
“Hold on,” I said as they tried to just gloss over this fact with the end of their story.
“Are you telling me that your friends,
that you have been attempting to HIDE ME BEHIND A BUSH FROM think that I sound… FUN?!
Is that what I’m hearing?!
Say it.
Let. Me Hear. You Say It.”
I held out an imaginary microphone.
They rolled their eyes again, knowing what I was getting at, and with slight smiles begrudgingly admitted,
“Yes. They said that you sound fun.”
I write this story today,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
as a public record of the fact that this year it appears for Christmas I not only will no longer be in danger of doing school drop-off from deep inside the belly of a stranger’s grave,
but I’m getting some beautifully wrapped street cred, as well.
The day after this blessed turn of events,
I pulled into the bus circle right in plain view to wait to pick them up and parked behind another mom in a mini van with a bumper sticker that read in small lower case letters,
“i used to be cool;”
And I couldn’t jump out then,
but I think that the next time I see that mom I’m going to tap on her window as she waits listening to her Enya “Only Time,” and
I’ll hand her my autographed portrait with a note that simply says,
“Chin up, Honey.
Sometimes all it takes is a stretchy banana
and a dream.”
Mom Outnumbered
Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.
