Bye Bye Mommy
Most mornings I walk around my neighborhood. Each time I do I’m going to take note of something I see and use it as the prompt for a very short story.
Tuesday, 7/21. 8:20am. Glengarry near Colorado Blvd in Pasadena. A hand-written sign that says WE stuck on the side lawn of a house.
If Lacey had to listen to one more Tik Tok video through the curtain of her make-shift closet office she was going to emancipate her own children.
She loved both her kids. And, more importantly, she liked them, but she had never intended to be home with them 24 hours a day, and definitely not while they were twelve.
This pandemic was the Bermuda Triangle of parenting. Twin pre-teens in a 1,000 square foot house with two Tik Tok accounts.
There was the song that said “savage” five thousand times and included a dance with far too much whipping of the butt; the song that said “fit” ten thousand times with an, apparently, complicated dance to learn based on crying it inspired; and Hips Don’t Lie by Shakira, which had been a perfectly fine song until it became the source of daily battles around who had to be the boy.
“I was the boy yesterday!” Paige said.
“Whatever. You’re better at the boy moves,” Jane argued.
“Let’s teach Dad the dance and he can be the boy.”
“Ew! No! I don’t want to drop and grind against DAD!”
“Well then we’ll change the dance!”
“Ugh! No! You can’t change the dance! That’s not how Tik Tok works.”
As far as Lacey was concerned Tik Tok did not work. The videos were short, the songs were meaningless and the actual content was non-existent. Where was the story? Why weren’t there any characters? How could this be the best music media 2020 had to offer her impressionable children? When Lacey was 12 she devoured real music in rich musicals like West Side Story and Hairspray! and her all-time fave, Bye Bye Birdie. The songs were meaningful! The dances were intricate! Not a single character wore sweat pants and a cropped top!
Lacey hadn’t had a whole lot of time for active parenting over the past few months, but now that tax season was finally over she’d been asked to go on a one-week furlough or, as she’d decided to call it Quit Tok 2020: Summer Edition. She did not care how much they cried, this house-hold was going to be a 15-second video free zone for seven full days. In its place, she decided, would be something a little vintage.
“Hello everyone. I’ve called this family meeting to present our incredibly fun, totally dynamic bonding activity for the week,” Lacey said.
The girls stared back at her, still stone-faced. She’d put their phones under lock-down prior to the start of the sit-down. Sean had warned her against it, “Babe, I negotiate for a living. Never fuck someone you just robbed,” but Lacey was resolute.
“I am not robbing or fucking anyone! This is going to be a very fun thing!” No one seemed to agree.
“Why would we put on a play for no one?” Paige asked.
“Bye Bye Birdie sounds dumb,” Jane said.
“I don’t actually have to participate right? I’m just at this meeting to defend you if the kids attack?”
Lacey did a horse breath. That always worked during the hardest part of her Zoom yoga class.
“Yes, you have to play. You’re our Conrad Birdie. And Bye Bye Birdie is not dumb, it’s a national treasure. And as far as putting on a play for no one is concerned, if a tree falls and nobody posts it on social media does it still make a sound?”
“Mom nobody posts trees on Tik Tok. Boring crap is for Instagram.”
Lacey did not like to invoke her mother’s favorite refrain from her own childhood, but desperate times called for hypocritical measures. “We’re doing this because I am the fucking mom and I fucking say so!”
They would begin with We Love You Conrad. Yes it was the third not first song in the film, but it had simple enough lyrics and a sort of march-dance choreography that Lacey was excited to explore. Maybe they could take the moves on the road to a local protest. We love you Black Lives! Oh yes we do! Take that, Tik Tok.
Four hours, three meltdowns, two glasses of wine and one promise of a pizza dinner later they had learned the damn song. Lacey decided to forgo the dance moves because she feared there was not enough alcohol in the house to get her through that phase of the directing. And so they moved on to what she envisioned being the easiest piece of the puzzle: set deck. All they had to do was decorate a few posters with the words We Love You Conrad. She lined up the poster board, grabbed the markers from the basement and even offered glitter paint, against her better judgement. Four words on three pieces of extra large paper. How hard could that possibly be?
When the twins were born Lacey and Sean read this lovely book that walked them through the developmental phases of childhood. It went from infant all the way through puberty. The writer was a child psychologist with a calm voice. Lacey remembered finding so much comfort in her even approach to all the facets of a child’s psyche, until she got to the section on pre-pubescent girls.
Please refer back to the chapters on managing toddler emotions. A 12-year-old girl is like a 2-year-old girl who hasn’t napped in a week and knows curse words. Your best course of action is to leave the house, often.
Lacey laughed at the time. Noted, she thought. I’ll take up jogging when the girls turn twelve.
But this was not the job for a loop around the block. The screams spewing from the mouths of her 12-year-old toddlers would easily be heard from block and blocks and blocks away. Through headphones. Inside a car with the windows closed. A few streets over was a house with an old bomb shelter in the backyard. Worthless.
“YOU MESSED UP THE WE!!!!”
“I WANT IT LIKE THATTT!!!”
“IT’S TOO BIG FOR THE POSTEEERRRR!!!!”
“I HATE YOUUUUU!!!!!”
“I HATE YOUUU!!!!”
“YOU’RE FUCKING UGLY!!!”
“MOOOMMMMMMMMM SHE SAID FUUUCCKKK!!!!!”
“MOOOMMMMMM!!!!”
“MOMMMMMMMM!!!!”
“LACEEEYYYYY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
She didn’t even pack a bag. She could buy clothes when she got to wherever she was going. She grabbed two bottles of wine, an Rx bar and a mask and got in the car.
The last thing Lacey saw as she turned right onto Glengarry was Jane’s piece of poster board fly over the backyard fence and onto the side lawn.
WE, it oh-so-ironically read.
“Not for the next six days, assholes,” Lacey said as she turned up the radio and stepped on the gas.
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