Best Friends, Occasional Enemies: The Lighter Side of Life as a Mother and Daughter (Reading Group Gold) (2 page)

“I miss my girlfriend. I don’t know why she broke up with me. The kids didn’t like her, but I did.”

Uh oh.

This would not be a happy ending. He told me the next day that it was the only time he’d ever tried to kiss somebody who was putting her car into reverse.

That would be me, and can you even believe he went in for the good-night smooch?

Could it be worse?

No.

But even that isn’t the point.

Don’t miss out on the fullness of your life because something is missing. Take a lesson from my horrible blind date. He was bemoaning the loss of his girlfriend, when he had a perfectly fine woman sitting across from him, ready, willing, and able.

Oh, so able.

In other words, a man is not a passport to life. If you’re alone, you can’t go into suspended animation. You have to live your life and you can be happy.

You just have to make yourself happy.

How?

Flip it. If you think that being on your own is the problem, turn that idea on its head. Make being alone a bonus. If you’re on your own, you don’t have to ask anybody’s permission to do anything, or take anyone else’s opinion into account.

You’re not single, you’re
a capella
!

And all you need to do is figure out what makes you happy.

So try things. Try anything. Paint. Draw. Take piano lessons. Read a book. Keep a journal. Write a story. Go to night school. Volunteer. Sing. Rearrange the furniture. Join something.

Dance!

Do whatever you like. And since I bet you’ve spent most of your life taking care of others, take care of yourself. Get your hair done. Your nails. Spend a little money on yourself. You deserve it. Buy a new outfit and parade around.

Look at you, girl!

If you’re unsure what else to try, here are some of the things that make me happy: namely, my daughter, dogs, friends, work, books, reading, cats, a big TV, a pony, opera, and chocolate cake.

My life and my heart are full, and I don’t feel lonely, though I live alone.

As for the occasional date, if it happens, great. But if it doesn’t, I’ll live.

Happily.

So make yourself happy, and maybe along the way, you’ll meet a man who doesn’t like vodka so much, but no matter.

The point isn’t him.

It’s you.

For once.

And, finally.

Sometimes I visualize myself as an exotic sports car, like a Maserati or a Ferrari, that leaves its garage only occasionally.

Not everybody can drive me, and I don’t wait to be driven.

I’m not that kind of car.

And neither are you.

So hit the gas, and live.

All’s Fair In Love and Wardrobe

By Francesca

My mom is a great dresser. Mostly because she’s wearing my clothes.

When I was growing up, this wasn’t a problem. She was never the Dina Lohan mom, wearing low-rider jeans and a too-tight Abercrombie & Fitch top. Back then, she had better clothes than I did. It was the 90’s; I waffled between wanting to dress like Alicia Silverstone in
Clueless
and Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes from TLC.

Cargo pants, anyone?

As if.

But now that I’ve grown out of the teeny-bopper phase, my clothes must look more appealing.

My mother has become a cougar for clothes.

Somewhere along the line, I noticed my mom buying duplicates of anything she bought for me. I got new jeans—she bought a second pair in her size. I needed a winter coat—she ordered two of the same from L.L. Bean. She said it was more convenient that way.

I’m not going to be a baby about it. We live in different cities, so it’s not like we’re going to be seen together wearing the same outfit.

Or so I thought.

For the last book my mom and I wrote together, I went on my first full-fledged promotional tour. We had scheduled television appearances and signings all over the tri-state area. I was nervous about everything, but like any girl, my main concern was what to wear. I worried about this a month in advance, regularly rifling through my closet on the hunt for suitable clothes.

I agonized on the phone to my mother. She asked, “Don’t you have a nice jacket, like a blazer or something? You must.”

After more than a decade of book tours, my mother’s closet is chock-full of fabulous jackets—tweed, herringbone, suede, silk, leather—you name it, she’s worn it. It was hard for her to believe I didn’t have one, but it was the truth. I’ve been supporting myself with my writing, and the dress code for a home office isn’t exactly corporate-chic. And my trusty job-interview suit looked like it had been through the war.

So the next time I was home, my mom took me to the mall and generously offered to buy me this lovely green jacket—it was soft, well-tailored, classic. Wearing it, I felt that little jolt of confidence I needed for tour. I was pumped.

A week later, my mom and I were talking on the phone again, and she mentioned in passing that she had ordered the jacket for herself in a size up.

“Don’t worry, we won’t wear them at the same time,” she said.

Right.

Right?

So tour rolls around, and I’m packing to leave for Pennsylvania. Of course the green jacket is coming with me, tags still on, pristine in its garment bag, and I also bring a few nice sweaters and a tweed dress. That should cover it.

But, the morning of our very first signing, my mom peeks her head in my bedroom.

“Are you wearing the green jacket?” she asked.

“Well, I—”

“—’Cause I’m thinking I’m gonna wear the green jacket. Unless you want to. But you should wear that dress, the dress looks great on you.”

I concede and wear the dress. But despite my early acquiescence, my mother repeats this little routine for the next three days of tour. If I hesitate at all, she’s wearing the jacket.

Harrumph.

“Mom,” I say, smiling, on the fourth day of this. “Don’t you think it’s a little funny that with your entire closet full of blazers, the one thing you want to wear is the one item I also own?”

“Don’t say, ‘it’s funny,’ when you don’t really think it’s funny. It’s passive-aggressive. If you’re annoyed, just say so.”

But see, when your mother says, “Just say so,” she doesn’t mean it. She means, “Don’t you dare say so.” I knew this, and yet …

“Alright, I’m annoyed!”

Petty bickering ensued. And then, the inevitable:

“I have a solution,” my mom said. “Why don’t we both wear the jacket?”

I gave her some serious “seriously?” eyebrows.

“It’ll be cute!”

No. Just no. Mother-daughter matching outfits were barely cute when I was a baby, they certainly aren’t cute now.

Somehow, after the fray, neither of us ended up wearing the jacket.

Typical.

But life goes on. We were both having a great time at the signing, and I had nearly forgotten about our wardrobe dysfunction when someone in the audience asked a very nice question:

“You two seem to have the perfect relationship. Do you ever fight?”

My mom shot me a grin. “Should we tell them?”

She recounted (a slightly biased version of) our silly argument and then posed the question, “It’d be cute if we matched, right?”

She honestly thought the crowd was going to side with her.

That’s why I love my mother.

Of course, our lovely, intelligent, reasonable audience shouted a chorus of “NO!”

And that’s why I love our readers.

Empowered

By Lisa

There’s nothing like a power outage to bring a family closer.

To killing each other.

Let me explain. Daughter Francesca came home because we’re about to embark on an eight-day trip to Rome, which is four days of book tour, plus four days of sightseeing. I’m a lucky author to have a European book tour, and luckier still to have Francesca come along, not only because she’s fun but also because she speaks Italian.

All I can say in Italian is pasta.

My books are translated into 30 languages, and I speak only carbohydrates.

To get to the point, we’re set to depart on Sunday night, so I bring Francesca home on Thursday, with dog Pip in tow, and when we hit the house, we discover that the power is off from a summer storm.

The good news is that I installed a generator last year, which means that five things in my house should still be running. I can’t remember which things, so I go around checking. You know where I go first.

The refrigerator is fine.

So’s the water and a TV in the kitchen.

And so’s the oven, so you see my priorities immediately.

But no air-conditioning.

Not even a fan.

I know this sounds spoiled, but it’s ninety degrees in the family room.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, because at that moment, I’m thinking the outage is temporary and might even be fun. Francesca agrees. So we have a chuckle, go make dinner, and eat. It’s our candlelight adventure until the TV stops working, because the cable is down.

Hmmm.

This is usually the time when someone says how great it is when the electricity goes off, and people can really talk to each other, and blah blah blah.

I disagree.

I like electricity.

I’m power-hungry.

Plus the Internet and TV don’t prevent me from talking to my daughter. We’re a family of two women. We never shut up.

By nightfall, there’s still no power. I’m bummed that the sink is full of dirty dishes. She’s bummed that its ninety-three degrees in the family room. And upstairs in the bedrooms, it’s even hotter.

Long story short, by bedtime, we begin to disagree. Francesca wants to sleep in the family room with the screen door open, but I say no, because psycho killers will enter and do their worst.

We have our first fight of the weekend.

I win, which means we sweat upstairs, safe and sound, but it turns out that she’s right, because Little Tony, my black-and-tan Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, almost has heatstroke. We move downstairs to the family room.

Psycho killers stay away, as they like air-conditioning, too.

Day Two dawns, and we sweat and swelter. We can’t do much but eat and we did that already. We’re not fighting per se, but we don’t like each other’s tones. I know that I’m the cranky one. I whine and complain about the heat, the electric company, and the oil spill in the Gulf, for good measure. On the other hand, Francesca keeps coming up with ideas to solve our predicament.

Who raised this child?

Her Day Two idea is that we should go to an air-conditioned place to cool down, so we go to the mall and buy mascara.

This is what girls do in an emergency.

But I find myself cheering up, so we stick with her plan, and on Night Two, we go to the movies and see
Knight and Day.
We become friends again, as we like Tom Cruise. Francesca dubs the power outage Tom Cruise Appreciation Week.

On Day Three, I call the electric company just to yell at the recording, but Francesca’s Night Three idea is that we go sit outside in the backyard, where it’s cool, and watch a DVD on my laptop, which still has some battery power.

I start whining. “Are you serious? It’s dark and there are bugs.”

She says, “We can watch
Collateral.
It’ll be like a drive-in movie.”

“But what about the psycho killers?”

“Mom, it’s Tom Cruise Appreciation Week.”

And she’s right. So we go outside and sit on two beach chairs with five dogs and a laptop. The moon is full, casting bright shadows on the lawn, and the fireflies twinkle around us, like peridots in the air.

Our power struggle is over.

And we sit, happily, in the dark.

Picture Day

By Lisa

I read in the paper that nowadays, the companies who take school pictures will retouch the photos to remove the kids’ cowlicks, missing front teeth, and freckles.

This is not progress.

Reportedly, ten percent of parents request such retouching.

The other ninety percent love their children.

Apparently, some parents like to see their children as they should be, instead of how they are. Or maybe they’re Photoshopaholics.

I can’t think of a better message a parent can send a child than, “You’re almost good enough!”

I never saw a photo of Daughter Francesca that I would retouch. I loved her face and the way it changed as she grew up. Plus the retouching cost seventeen dollars. Parents who request it should put the money toward their child’s eventual therapy bill.

This doesn’t mean that some kids wouldn’t benefit from retouching, or even that some kids aren’t downright ugly. Lots of us have faces only a mother would love, especially during our Wonder Years.

Me, especially.

I look back on my school pictures with a queasy feeling, and that’s as it should be.

Let me explain.

I was smokin’ hot until I turned two years old, then it went from bad to worse, when my baby teeth fell out, only to be replaced by two front teeth that stuck straight out, defying gravity. They used to call them buck teeth, but that would be kind. No buck had these teeth. As a toddler, I could have built a dam.

Also, my nose, which started out cute and little, grew and grew and forgot to stop. It popped out like Pinocchio’s, and I’m not lying. The Flying Scottolines have big noses. Mother Mary says that we get more oxygen than anybody else, and she’s right. If we breathe in, you’re dead.

Plus, my eyes, which looked so round and blue when my nose was little, seemed to shrink and flatten as my nose got bigger, and then I got thick glasses, so I looked like a beaver with corrective lenses.

The proof is my school pictures, which reflect all those hideous stages of my life, all the zits and tinsel teeth and pixie haircuts and horrible clothes. Still, I don’t think Mother Mary would have retouched a single picture. She loved me the way I was and she would have spent the seventeen bucks on cigarettes.

Plus, retouching a school photo would have taken all the fun out of Picture Day. Do you remember that excitement? In the Scottoline household, Picture Day was circled on the calendar, and it was a big deal. Brother Frank and I wore our best clothes, and we got combs at school.