When I Was 13, My Boyfriend Was Obsessed With My Mom
I got my first real boyfriend, but I noticed something was wrong--he was more interested in my mom.
First of all: yes, this story is true, at least the way I remember it. But keep in mind my real-life mom will be reading all your weird comments, so don’t be mean to her. I don’t blame her for this, and neither should you.
When I was thirteen, I was reeling from my biggest social humiliation (so far at that point, anyway): being publicly voted off my friends’ cafeteria table in a ceremony explicitly inspired by the reality show, Survivor. I was hoping that once eighth grade began, I could redeem myself for all my various social sins (apparently having a Hot-Topic-Nickelback-inspired aesthetic in 2002 is unforgivable? Tough crowd.) To help me make friends without all my social baggage, my mother enrolled me in an after-school creative writing class, at a recreation center thirty minutes away, totally separate from my school district.
As much as I wanted to shit on every idea my dorky mom had, this was actually a really good one. I immediately made two friends: a moody girl named Nadine who liked writing PG-13 Lord of the Rings erotica, and her very obviously closeted boyfriend, Jake. But most of all, I was really hoping I would find a boyfriend through this class. At one point, I had an almost-romance with a seventeen-year-old proto-neckbeard in the class who wore a fisherman’s hat laden with ironic political buttons. After our brief affair of flirtation and phone calls escalated to a stated fantasy to run away with me in the dead of night to an “anime convention in California” I think he suddenly came to his senses about how he shouldn’t be threatening to kidnap middle school girls, and he ghosted me. And they say there are no good men!
Eventually though, I did find a boyfriend through the class. Nadine invited a friend of hers from school to join one day, specifically to meet me, so we could double date together. I think she was getting sick of me getting in the way of her and Jake pretending to diddle each other. Her friend’s name was Josh. I realized Josh didn’t know me at all, so I could be whomever I wanted to be. To meet him, I wore my most circumferential gold hoop earrings, Abercrombie red tank top, and low-rise flare jeans. I was a Y2K queen bee, and he couldn’t prove otherwise. Josh later described me to Nadine as a “popular girl,” which was an illusion I hoped to maintain with him, given that I was literally a walking joke at my middle school.
Josh was a little geeky-looking himself—tall, skinny, short brown hair with the notorious 2000s-era gelled flip at the hairline. He wore glasses, polo shirts, and other AV-club coded attire. I was not instantly physically attracted to him, although at the time I would say I was too sexually immature to be capable of feeling that way about anyone. But either way, I liked Josh enough to go out with him. I loved the idea of having a boyfriend, holding hands, and going on dates. And after a few extremely awkward double dates, with Nadine as the mediator and interpreter of our mutual feelings, Josh became my boyfriend.
Because we were too young to drive and we lived in the suburbs, our moms were a pretty big part of our dates. Even before my mom met Josh, I warned her not to “do anything funny.” At the time, she probably saw this as her teenage daughter being irrationally mortified by everything she did, and she wouldn’t be wrong, as I had previously admonished her for yawning “embarrassingly.” But from my vantage point, I had a long history of friends and crushes practically preferring my mom to me, and I didn’t want that to happen with my first real boyfriend.
Unlike other moms, she wasn’t a disinterested chaperone or chauffeur. She might deny it, but the way I saw it, she tried pretty hard to be funny, charismatic, and make my friends like her in a way that felt completely unnecessary. She didn’t try to be “cool” like the infamous character Amy Poehler played in Mean Girls and she wasn’t a MILF in the typical sense (she was pretty, but in a very age-appropriate way, with no nipping and tucking, no revealing clothing, and no attempts to look twenty.) If anything, she leaned into being dorky and, in her words, “un-hip” in a way that unfortunately made her more appealing. Given her history of razzling and dazzling all my friends, I was terrified that Josh would like her just a little too much. And well, this fear was entirely warranted.
