The other day I asked teen daughter if she wanted to see a movie- she looked up at me, with one ear bud in, the other swinging loosely by her shoulder and said, "I love you, Mom, but I don't want to hang out with you."
"Why?" I asked.
"Mom, I don't want to hang out with a middle aged woman."
"What?" I said. To me, middle aged is old and although I am 47, I am not compost material yet- I wear low rise jeans, funky fashion sneakers, keep myself relatively trim, listen to "in" music and have a devilish sense of humor. Since I'm not wearing reading glasses and can't see worth a damn, I don't notice the wrinkles spreading across my cheeks, forehead, lips, hands, legs, feet and toes.
"Well, still, I'd rather go with my friends. "M's" mother is taking us."
"What?
"Yeah, she's cool."
"So I'm not cool?" I asked.
"Well......"
"What do you mean I 'm not cool," I said. Your friends think I am cool. They tell me all the time."
I end the conversation because I see where it is going. This is just another natural snip of the mother/child umbilical cord where your teen identifies more with her peers and their mothers than you. My friends thought my mom, "Dot" ,was pretty hip, always reminding me how lucky I was that she wore cowl neck sweaters and clogs, but I didn't see it until a few years later when I began raiding her closet and found that I could just about wriggle into her designer clothes.

I can still recall cringing when she'd pull up at school in her scarlet red El Dorado, a convertible with a gleaming white leather interior, that ubiquitous ciggie squeezed between her slender fingers, a pair of oversized sunglasses framing her ginger hair, screeching, "Come On, Get in!"

I'd make her drop us off at dances as far as possible from the entrance- "stop here Mom," I'd yell. God forbid if anyone saw that I had an actual mother. I wasn't alone- everyone did this.


Looking back, "The Dot" , as she was called, was a pretty hip Mom even when she was dancing to Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive" with a pair of legwarmers, a Merit clamped between her slender fingers, waving an apricot sour above her head with her other hand. She'd let me skip school to hit the sales, taking me out to lunch afterwards. She never minded when I had a household full of teenagers, and even let my friends and I (at 14) stay in a separate hotel room when she took us to Florida- a big mistake-

Yeah, Mom, I'll survive, too and one day teen daughter will realize that I'm not so out of date.