My Son Turned 14 and Now We Are Brother and Sister

As I pull on my bright yellow toque with the pom-pom on top, I think to myself, “Maybe one day you should dress like an adult when you go out in public, Lindbae.” Then I snort-laugh because my subconscious and I know that’s never going to fucking happen.

Also, when did I start referring to myself as “Lindbae” and in the 3rd person?

I’m wearing purple pants that show off my colourful socks when I sit down, slip-on shoes, drawn-on eyebrows and a blue three-quarter-length shirt that looks like something a prepubescent boy might choose to wear for wintertime gym class.

Maybe one day I’ll be a grown-up, but it’s unlikely.

I’m telling you all this because I don’t want you to think I’m so delusional that I believe I physically look young enough to be my son’s sister rather than his mom.

It was the clothes, and probably my incredibly chubtastic face that smother out my impending wrinkles that did it. I’ve never been happier to own these chins as I am now.

Please, keep this all in mind as you read.

As we drive to the dentist’s office, my kids enlighten me on the strange experience it is to be my children.

“Mom, why do you have to start randomly singing in public? It’s so humiliating. You’re not even a good singer!” Sophie, the twelve-year-old, laments.

“Oh, that’s just part of my charm. People find my off-tune jingles endearing!”

“Do they, though?” Lars asks.

“Look, would you rather have a monotoned mother who walks around in pantsuits and a beige over-the-shoulder bag, who NEVER sings!?”

“Well, no,” they both hesitantly admit.

“EXACTLY,” I reply in a sing-song manner.

“You’re just really not like any of our friends’ moms.”

“That’s where I think you’re wrong. I bet your friends’ moms are just as weird as me. They’re just better at pretending to be adults. Because here’s the real truth about being a grownup; none of us have any damn clue what we are doing — we’re all just pretending the best we can!”

“Well, maybe you should work on your pretending skills then,” Lars advises, with a laugh.

“Har har har.”

. . .

While sitting in the waiting room at the dentist’s office, I look at my teenage kids and marvel that I’ve managed to keep them alive for 14 years! Whenever I feel like I haven’t accomplished enough these days, I beckon them to me, their highly immature mother, and have a little chat with them — basking in the beautiful, happy, intelligent and hilarious humans they’ve become.

I should raise more kids; I bet the future would be a wholly better place. Or, alternatively it would be a much scarier and erratic place.

Could deffo go either way.

“Lars,” the dental assistant says, looking around at the awaiting patients.

Lars gets up to follow the woman, and I say, in a weird way, “Uh, so do you need me to come with you?” I know he doesn’t, he’s a teenager, but I want to ask, so I appear to be a top-notch mother.

My kid responds by laughing at me and mockingly saying, “Oh yes, mommy, come hold my hand, please!”

This, apropos of nothing, makes me want to bust out some Tom Green and start singing, “Daddy, would you like some sausage!?” but I don’t because I’m sure my children would drop down dead from secondhand embarrassment at that point. This is how I’ve managed to keep them alive for so long — knowing when to draw the line on appropriate embarrassment terms.

“Mom?” the dental assistant asks.

“Yep, I’m mom,” I say, realizing she is asking if Mom is in fact my title.

“Oh wow. I never like to assume, but I thought you were an older sister or something. You don’t look old enough to have teenaged kids.”

Of course, I play it off as if I’ve just received the greatest compliment in the world.

“Meeeee? A sister? Oh no! I could be their grandmother; I’m so old.” This was what I might as well have been saying by the way I was gushing and smiling from her comment.

I think back to that time I did get mistaken for Lars’ grandmother, and I wonder what has so drastically changed from now to then.

Has all this therapy and inward thinking made me younger at heart, thus younger looking irl?

Will I become one of those weird people who wear toques all the time because in my messed-up brain I will now equate toques with some kind of supernatural fountain of youth?

Has rolling my face skin with that jade roller been working actual miracles?

Yet another mystery in the big book of Lindsay Rae Brown.

But all in all, I’m okay with it. When in a matter of 20 minutes, my kids tell me I’m way more immature than any other mom they know, and a stranger mistakes me for a sister rather than a mom, I call that a win.

Or maybe that dental assistant was totally hitting on me.

If that’s the case, I call that a win too.

From The Good Men Project on Medium

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