For starters it should be noted that I am no better of a parent than I was when I last posted about Stepmothering-ish. Just so we’re all clear.
I recently tried to be all adult and parent-like and take the kid out for lunch. This was an attempt to try to get things back to normal-ish, per his request. As you may or may not remember nothing has really changed in my world and it was in fact he who created the abnormalities by stashing pot in his room then hiding at his mother’s house rather than owning up to any sort of punishment when my husband found it.
Life is fucking hard.
So we meet at this shitty lunch place that I hate and that shall remain nameless (Birchwood Cafe). Everyone who works there is, like, so fucking annoyed by the fact that they have to help you. When they’re not busy rolling their eyes at how incredibly uncool and unhip you are they are standing around apathetically irritated by your presence. And the food, no. It’s that eccentric shit half of which you can’t even identify. What’s wrong with normal spinach? Oh no, you’re getting a mix of greens that are nearly inedible and were likely pulled from the back of the building by one of their hipster employees riding up on his fucking fixie.
But that’s just a side note.
Lunch was weird. I compensated by talking a lot (that part wasn’t weird at all) and we stared at each other for a while trying to figure out what to say. The kid told me about all his great friends, that he and his mom are getting along, and that he’s “happy.”
FUCKING HAPPY.
Well good. I’m so glad the grass is so much fucking greener in a 1 1/2 story shithole house with broken window-boxes hanging by a thread in an “up and coming” neighborhood (read: shitty neighborhood) with a woman you can’t stand and her useless waste of space of a boyfriend. I hope it’s everything you dreamed.
Went kind of like this:
“How are you?”
“I’m happy.”
My mom has this thing about people who “talk about drinking.” Basically if you have to talk about it and really emphasize that you like to drink, you’re not a real drinker. The real drinkers just drink, we may talk while we’re doing it but about topics that aren’t drinking. So people who ramble on and on about how wasted they were last weekend are just trying to prove something.
It was with my mom’s theory in mind that I absorbed this information about the stepson’s alleged teenage happiness. While helpful, it didn’t make the punch in the gut any less fierce.
I’m sure it’s about time for one of your reader questions so I’ll go ahead and ask it for you: What else did he say?
He has a job at a grocery store, he has so many amazing friends, and he’s been drawing with his non-dominant hand just like his unemployed “artist” mother does because using the correct hand is too mainstream and could be considered selling out (note: the result of this non-dominant hand art* is a product resembling either vomit, garbage, or spaghetti, depending on the viewer’s interpretation).
*The term “art” is being used very loosely throughout this post.
How did he look?
Like a young apathetic hipster-in-the-making but one who’s innately too dorky to really pull it off.
What did you say?
I told him that despite his claims that he wants to see us and get things “normal” again neither his dad nor I fit anywhere into his plan. We’ve always been the stable, supportive ones but that’s not apparently volatile enough for him right now and we don’t really know what “normal” is anymore.
Wow. What now?
Hmmmm. Welll. Hmmmm. SHRUG. I guess I don’t know. One thing I can tell you I won’t do is put myself through that again. I’m not having another lunch surrounded by people who find my existence bothersome and needy while allowing myself to be heartbroken again and again by a teenager I didn’t even give birth to.
In the end I left feeling like I’d gone out to lunch with my own ex-boyfriend hoping so hard that he’d want to get back together but instead he told me about his super amazing new girlfriend.
And I think we can all agree that shit’s the pits.
