Me Pluss My Parents

Imagine a 17 year old guy out shopping with his family his head is down, all consumed in texting, head phones dangling. When you jump back in the car he changes the station from NPR to 99.7FM and turns the music up from the respectable conversational level you left it at to two bars below full tilt. He's only had his driver's licence for a year but he very knowingly will tell you which turns to take, when to take them, and that you are driving too slow, you have to learn how to read the road.  This is my Dad, only he's not 17.  He's Dad age.

When I take my mom out, she audibly complains that this play that you paid money to see is stupid and  that there are entirely too many white people here. In the middle of a play in a dark theater where it's necessary for you and your company to keep the utmost theater decorum, she scrolls through brightly lit Facebook and says loudly enough to be heard "Oh my God, there's more?  I just wish I could play candy crush right now."  These are my parents and I've been paying attention to them as individuals and not parents for probably the last month or so.

My mom is quite spoiled.  She loves nice clothes, loves all food and quite expects to get everything she wants.  She is unabashed.  She will show you a picture or point to one of your pairs of shoes and say "I want a pair" or she'll just wear it if it fits. No questions asked.  She goes into my room when I'm not home cause she's bored and she wants to smell all my perfumes to see which one she likes.  She gets  excited and dressed up to go to Lenox Mall with her sister every weekend. She will take ownership of something I've painted, at home or elsewhere, and claim it as her own.  Then she'll get my dad to mount it.  I'll come home to find it on the wall where she wants it. She decorates my our home with pillows.  We have so. many. pillows.  Its her design aesthetic. Also, nothing matches.

My dad often falls asleep on the couch watching YouTube and TV at the same time, and you better not change the channel, it'll wake him.  My mom has to wake him and take him up to bed.  Last night, he took the remote with him. He comes downstairs on the daily, blasting the radio from his phone speakers, despite the earphones.  He loves music, like LOVES it. He takes it everywhere, even into the shower with him.  There is always this look when you ask him to turn it down or put his headphones in, cause he's sitting right next to you and the TV is on and you should want to listen to his music too.  And how dare you.

And its all very fascinating to me, this getting to know my parents as people.  As I write this I'm chuckling because I love shoes and clothes just like my mom does.  She's the one who taught me how to hide shoe purchases, which by the way is how she can spot a new shoe of mine. Every. Single. Time.  And my dad is why I love music so very much, an probably why I have a boom box in my shower, and why I can never understand how my friends don't like Fall Out Boy or Sia like I do.  How could you not? And how dare you?

I think I'm experiencing real life Benjamin button disease.  I could never imagine my parents as children, because they're my parents and I think they were born as parents.  It feels good to have them fuss over adult me like they do, like they just couldn't wait for me to ask for help.  Like the time my mom googled ways to get a stuck ring off and tried with floss and Vaseline for a half hour before we tagged in my dad who ended up just cutting it off while my ma held my hand.  Or how she really does think that my 3.5 month nephew is talking to her and telling her the sins of his parents.  My parents love my brother and I like it's their soul purpose on this earth.  Family over everything.  So its out of my norm lately to see them as EL and Huggins rather than Mom and Dad.  It just never occurred to me before now. With the heavy parenting part of their lives behind them now, they're free to be themselves, so I feel like I'm meeting the teenage versions of my parents but with none of the tech savvy.

It's Mother's day 2018 so I have parents on the brain.  My dad digs Rihanna and Kendrick Lamar and the Kardashians and my mom is the flyest dresser I know so they just might be so much cooler than I am, and I so badly want to be friends.