It’s not my fault.
When my kids became teenagers and no longer ran toward me joyfully, yelling “Mommy, mommy mommy!” when I came in the door from work, I struggled to adjust.
When they shrugged off my affectionate arm on their shoulders as if it were covered with toxic waste, I tried not to feel hurt.
When they insisted I drop them off a block before their destination, so no one would see them with me, I grimaced but agreed.
When they looked at me with disbelief after I suggested we all go to the movies together, I realized it was time for me to get my old life back, and started calling childphobic friends who’d avoided me for more than a decade.
When the kids turned 18 and became legal adults, I proudly took them to vote for the very first time.
Unfortunately, this meant that they were also old enough to sign legally binding contracts, but too young to understand what this meant.
And it never occurred to me at the time to teach them. I was still busy trying to shove them through school.
Cheetah Boy went in to peek at one of those ultimate fighting gyms where you guys go to legally beat each other up. He came out with a year’s contractual agreement requiring him to pay them more than the cost of my first car.
I stopped shrieking at him when I realized he really didn’t understand what he’d done, because they don’t teach you stuff like that in high school. They teach you how to mitigate misnomers and punctuate strange mathematical signs — in short, things you will never use once in your life, unless you become a nuclear physicist.
But my kids’ school never taught them how to make a budget, manage their finances or even mail a letter.
“Are you sure the stamp goes here, Mom?”
They certainly never learned about business law or contractual agreements, and it quickly became obvious that there’s a certain subset of cretins who make a living preying on these innocents.
I had to explain to my son that his signature on that gym contract would not have been legally enforceable yesterday, when he was 17, but now that he was 18, it was.
Guess who ended up paying it off? Ten years later, those people still call and try to get me to sign up again.
When Curly Girl turned 18, she decided to walk into a dumpy used car lot and take a look, because she had a job and she’d been toying with the idea of buying her own car.
She was by herself, unaccompanied by her mother (who’s bought many used cars in her life and, as she likes to point out, is old and knows stuff) or her boyfriend at the time, who was an auto mechanic.
No, she was all alone, on a car lot for the first time in her life and unfamiliar with the wiles of used car salesmen. Well, you know what happened.
She drove home a gray Plymouth station wagon that looked remarkably like a hearse. Pretty much the opposite of any car appropriate for a girl her age.
I’d been trying to get hold of her for hours, so I was annoyed already when she got home.
“What is that car out front?” I asked her, and she burst into tears.
She told me that she’d just gone in to take a look, and before she knew it, she ended up buying a car.
“They scared me,” my daughter said. (She gets anxious.)
“But you had to drive to the bank to get the down payment,” I protested. “Why didn’t you just drive away and never go back? Or at least get me or your boyfriend to go take a look?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I was just confused.”
I told her I was going to get her brother’s baseball bat, and we were going back over to that car lot and raise hell until they tore up her contract. How dare they take advantage like that of a young girl?
“No, Mom. I actually like the car,” she said. “And it was my mistake. I know better now, and I’m going to keep the car and next time, I’ll know better.”
I grumbled about this, but ultimately it was her decision. And nowadays she owns a little Toyota that’s much more appropriate.
The thing is, even though I loved being a mom to my young children, there are advantages to having them all grown up.
I often give them unasked-for advice, but when they ignore it and do something utterly boneheaded, it’s not my fault.
I can’t lock them in their rooms or haul their rear ends into the house until they see reason. I can’t look over their finances or convince them to take my sage advice about big decisions.
So, when they make the same sorry mistakes I made at their age, there’s nothing I can do about it. I don’t have any money to bail them out.
And it’s a relief to know, this time, it’s not my fault.
P.S. Hey, are you coming to my book signing and meetup at noon, Monday, Sept. 30 at Curly Girl’s dive bar? Poor Richard’s Cocktails, 6412 Stearns St. Long Beach. I’ll be there from 12 p.m. to 2 p.m. You don’t have to buy a drink. See you there!
Related links
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