The Pickup Artist
Let me start by saying I’m not a lesbian. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s just not how I identify and I want to make that clear from the start. But I do find myself trying to pick up women lately. It’s become a problem, I can’t seem to stop myself. It’s not for me, it’s for my boys. I have three grown sons and I’d like to be a grandmother someday. I know I’m getting ahead of myself. First, they need a date. Hopefully with a real live girl.
So far, the closest they’ve come to a woman is in the video games they play. All three of them seem content with an online social life, so I’m growing desperate. My biological granny clock is ticking like a mother bugger and I need to find a real girl (or three) fast!
When I’m in public I find myself profiling age-appropriate woman for suitable dates. Does she seem friendly? Is she high maintenance? Are those lip piercings or a lip fungus? Is there such a thing as too many tattoos? Does she have child-bearing hips? My interrogation techniques are fairly stealth and my targets rarely know they’ve been hit. The CIA could recruit me, I’m that good.
I wasn’t always as smooth with the ladies. I really blew my first pick up. It was at a school event hosted by my oldest son. I’d been seated next to a plucky young journalist covering university events for a local newspaper. I’ll never forget her. We bonded instantly over the sesame balls and cheap chardonnay. She had a dazzling smile and cornflower blue eyes, I could see my grandchildren dancing in those eyes.
Within minutes I had the download on her dating status, politics and education. She was new to the area and missed her family on the East Coast. Who doesn’t love a family girl? Inside my head, I was screaming “I’ll be your West Coast mommy!”
I introduced her to my son, but sadly, sparks didn’t fly. Most likely because I never shut up. Not once. It was my first pick-up, I was nervous. Also, I may have accidentally spit a sesame seed into the girl’s chardonnay. Like I said; nerves.
Shortly after that debacle, I tried to pick up a young bank teller at the drive-through. They’re always so helpful and chatty. She tried to sell me a homeowner’s loan and I immediately steered the conversation toward her love life.
She must have thought I was a weirdo, but she covered with a sales pitch about loan consolidation. I finally offered her a deal; I’d talk loans if she’d give me some background information. Just the facts, things that could easily be checked on a database. Nothing creepy.
Her eyes grew wide as she tossed some brochures into the transaction drawer and shoved them at me. I came back hard with questions about her domestic situation. Did she have roommates, a husband or boyfriend? Was she a dog or cat person? Peanut butter: chunky or smooth? Pepsi or Coke? Netflix or Hulu? Ryan Gosling or Brad Pitt?
When she began to tear up I knew I’d pushed the interrogation too far. She held the microphone in a death grip, like Kanye at a Taylor Swift concert. Her jaw worked but only a strangled cry escaped her lips. I’d broken the bank teller.
Realizing there was a problem, the branch manager hustled into the booth to reboot the poor girl. I explained my single son status to him and apologized for breaking his employee. Unmoved by my plight, the bank manager completed the transaction, throwing me significant stink-eye in the process. Before I drove off he warned me that he’d made note of the incident on my permanent record. As if that would muzzle a meddling mother!
Undeterred, I hit the bank drive-through again the following week. But they switched tellers as soon as I drove in. Instead of my future daughter-in-law, a young man in a spiffy bow tie approached the microphone to ask how he could help.
“Unless you’ve got a uterus hidden in those khakis, you’re less than useless to me!” I barked and peeled out of the drive-through. I glanced in my rearview mirror and saw his wide unblinking eyes and slack jaw. Damn, I’d broken another teller. After that, I had to switch banks.
Even if I could drum up a “real live girl”, I’m afraid my boys’ image of womanhood has been severely altered by the web. They’ve seen real girls in school and on the streets of suburbia, so the concept isn’t entirely foreign to them. But after spending endless hours online gaming, it’s important they understand that real girls do not look like Xena Warrior Princess, Kitana or the other video Amazons they’re familiar with.
Real girls aren’t shaped like Barbie dolls. They don’t wear steel breast plates, carry 4-foot-long swords or have a head of Medusa-like dreadlocks. They cannot BASE jump off the side of a skyscraper and land in a perfect Matrix crouch or slay a dozen evil cyborgs with one swing of their battle ax.
If young men are forming their impressions of women based on these pumped up cyber chicks, then dating a real woman could be a quite a shock. After all of that digital perfection, what will they think of a real flesh and blood woman? One without blue titanium skin. Will they see the beauty in skin that has imperfections, freckles, and scars? And will they look for the beauty beneath the surface? Will they recognize that a woman’s strength and grace isn’t found in her packaging, but in her mind and in her heart? These are values Xena cannot begin to offer them.
My boys have spent their entire lives with me, an ordinary human woman, less-than-perfect in every respect. They’ve seen me in my ratty sweatpants, sans makeup, scrubbing toilets. It’s not pretty, but it’s hella-real and my hope is that reality will work as an effective counterbalance to the image of cyber womanhood they’ve been deluged with.
I may not leap canyons in a single bound, but my sons know I possess a different kind of strength. A mother’s strength. They know I will go to the mat for them in every possible way, as I have always done.
I’ve been there for the skinned knees, nursed them back to health when they were sick, dried their tears after losing the big game, and helped heal their broken hearts when those came too.
Let’s see Xena balance work, three boys, a husband and one crazy canine. Lara Croft might be brilliant with a bullwhip, but how would she cope with a mountain of dirty diapers and projectile vomiting? Those things will test a real woman’s strength.
I never wanted to become an interfering mother, yet here I am, helpless to stop. But I need to ask myself what’s behind all of this meddling? Am I really worried that I’ll never be a grandmother? Do I honestly believe my sons are so influenced by the internet, that they’d prefer the company of online cyber chicks to real women? Deep down, I think not.
More likely, my meddlesome motivation stems from an understanding of my own mortality. I know that time is fleeting and I won’t be here to take care of my kids forever. I want to see my three sons happily settled, with families of their own.
What my boys need is a mom, not a pick-up artist. So, for now, I’ll put away the polygraph and stop hitting on strange women at the mall. I’ll try to have faith that my sons are capable of making their own good choices. And I’ll trust that they can recognize a woman of substance when she comes along. Until then, my biological granny clock will just have to keep on ticking.
