Half His Age

It's a strange thing, seeing your mother grow up.

It's funny, I thought our friendship would end dramatically, the insults we'd been saving up for years shot back and forth, tears and snot streaking our faces. But instead, the ending has been uneventful, petering out with almost no noise at all. Maybe that's how you know it's really an ending.

When he finds the time to take me to dinner out of town, he tells me to order whatever I'd like, as if a piece of salmon can cure a broken heart. Maybe it can. I've heard omega-3s have a lot of benefits, maybe this is one of them.

What marks the rite of passage from girl to woman? A certain age? A broken heart? A fed-upness? A real bra? Using pads to catch post-period spotting instead of stuffing your underwear with wads of toilet paper?

I correct my posture. Run my finger along the items as if I'm taking the menu as seriously as I want Mr. Korgy to take me. I jut out my chin. Spew occasional hmms, pretending the ingredients I don't know are appealing. Ah yes, escabeche. Cipollini. Toum. My old friends. Is this how a woman does it? How a woman reads a menu?

Hey, thanks for being so accommodating.

"That's your favorite kind, right?" she asks. It's hers.

I hate that thing moms have, where they can sense exactly how you're feeling in exactly the moments you'd least like them to.

You can never really believe someone if all they're telling you is to be the same as they are.

When in doubt, let the tits hang out, right hon?