Where to begin? I suppose with the obvious - a week and a half ago, I was your average white suburban mom, complete with all the tension behind the placid exterior; now I'm a teenager again, and from what I'm told and can see with my own eyes, a Japanese-American father and a Latina mother, crossing my fingers that my high school Spanish from almost twenty years ago will be enough for me to fake it. My husband and son are in a similar boat, although I'm sure that they feel having a different gender is a bigger deal than a different ethnicity.
If you've been reading this blog for a while, you know the gist of it, although I suppose it's worth going back a bit to understand what I'm dealing with here, although I'll try to get right to the point: My marriage to Lucas was basically over before all this, and it was kind of a relief. The end was better than the long decay leading up to it; instead of worrying about not being enough or resenting how success for one of us always seemed to lead to sacrifice for the other, and then worrying about how all of this was affecting L.J., deciding to divorce let us be practical and start to plot a way forward. We've even been closer to friendly since we started hashing things out.
There was a kid in the middle of this, one who is probably reading this as I've encouraged him to read the blog and maybe contact some of the other authors who have been through what he's dealing with now, and while we obviously couldn't have expected this, we knew that the split was going to throw his life for a loop. So, maybe underestimating him a bit - L.J. is 15 and feels everything so strongly! - we planned one last family trip. We used to visit the coast of Maine every summer along with cousins, but that changed when Lucas's job took us from Prince Edward Island to Vancouver six years ago, and we were looking to recapture that before telling him everything just before we flew home. But the place we booked was the Trading Post Inn, there was leftover luggage in our closets, and...
Well, you probably know the drill. I'd been doing a morning run for the previous week, so I had my phone's alarm set, and when it went off I sat up quickly, feeling surprisingly refreshed and alert. At first, I presumed I was just having a good morning, and didn't notice anything particularly amiss as a silenced my alarm, looked over to verify that Lucas was still a stationary blob under his covers in the other bed, and walked to the bathroom. My skin was a little darker, but I'd picked up some color over the past week, and I didn't notice that I had much longer hair, jet-black at that, until I pulled off the headband I sleep in. By then, I had turned the light on and was taken aback by what I saw in the mirror.
I didn't scream - at first, I thought that this was a dream where I had to live out some sort of weird fantasy of Lucas's, but when I stomped over to his bed and ripped the covers off to show dream-Lucas that I wasn't putting up with this... Well, I'll let him describe himself and how he reacted; same with L.J. Our son figured out about the luggage in his closet first, and that's how I've learned about Juliana Nakamura.
She, Cora, and Leda are classmates at the Burlington Academy for Girls in Vermont, and had come to Old Orchard without their parents to attend a music festival before returning to school. I won't "doxx" Juliana and her friends, but suffice it to say that they have seemed to handle their change as well as can be expected, faking a story about testing positive for Covid before flying home, editing the photos they hadn't uploaded to social media because they were just boring pictures of them in their hotel rooms and sharing them in support of this story, and somehow rigging things up so that they could text home from their computers until we arrived. Their parents have obligingly changed their flights so that we would go straight from Portland to Burlington where they are apparently best friends and suite-mates, rather than returning "home". We didn't do anything so advanced for the people taking over our lives, although we did send emails to our employers and school district about our own positive Covid tests.
We arrived yesterday, and we're still trying to sort out living arrangements - Cora apparently had the single room while Juliana and Leda shared the other, but we're kind of not sure whether I should let Lucas and L.J. bunk together, or if he'd be more comfortable in his own room rather than sharing with his parents, or if he'd rather have me with him in case he needs to handle female problems on short notice. We haven't mixed a whole lot with the other students who have already arrived yet - I get the impression that this group can be a little clique-y - but I'm already worried about L.J. a bit. The last week or so has been a lot for him to take in, from proper hygiene to just rolling up stockings like you've been doing it for years. He doesn't want to put makeup on, but his bare face does not look like what Leda puts up on Instagram, and his idea that he wouldn't need it in an all-girls' school showed that he hadn't really absorbed how that sort of thing can be more important among girls than in terms of attracting guys.
The thing that is really making me question myself, though, is that while I know it's only been a week, it sort of feels like "Leda" takes advice from "Juliana" better than "L.J." does from "Mom". I don't know if I can explain it, other than him addressing me by that name even when no-one else is around, to try and make it a habit, or asking "how would you try to blend in?" when I try to tell him what he should do.
That's my question to the other former Inn guests: How do you stay someone's mother when you've got to be something else practically 24/7?
No comments:
Post a Comment