My five-year-old apparently likes cougars. And not in an Animal Planet way. My son has a thing for … older women.
When I picked him up from tennis camp last week, did I hear about the forehands and backhands I’d spent a boodle for him to learn? Nope. However, I did get an earful about Anna Clare. Fletcher talked about Anna Clare as he buckled himself into his car seat. He talked about Anna Clare on the drive home. He was still talking about Anna Clare as we shared a post-camp snack. In fact, the Anna Clare Monologue was the most I’d heard about anything camp-related since summer started. The week before, Fletcher had been at Lego Camp – a thrill-o-minute experience if ever there was one. But no matter how many ways I phrased the seemingly straight-forward question What did you do today? he refused to say. It was like trying to pry information from an enemy combatant. I considered water-boarding just to find out who he had lunch with. But on the topic of Anna Clare? He was like a 24-hour news channel – All Anna Clare. All The Time.
“So, is Anna Clare your new friend?” I squeezed the question in when he took a breath.
“Mommy,” he said, impatient that I wasn’t keeping up with the conversation. (Clearly, I am the densest person my child has ever encountered in all of his five world-weary years.) “Anna Clare is my girlfriend.”
A girlfriend. Right. Apparently we’ve skipped over the Girls Have Cooties portion of childhood and landed smack in a Barry White Period. Any moment now, I expected him to start crooning, Darling, I … Can’t get enough of your love, Babe…
Not that it was a huge surprise that the kid likes the ladies. He’s had some wicked crushes lately. There was Anjali, Grace, Aris, Mariel, Johti, Raina, Autumn — I think that’s everyone. He doesn’t seem to have a type – the girls are a mix of blondes, brunettes and redheads — unless “older” counts as a type. To their credit, they’d all good-naturedly indulged his puppyish affections. But Anna Clare … she was the first to be accorded Girlfriend status. And I wasn’t quite ready to deal with that. I’d planned on at least another decade of Legos, pirate ships and Disney movies, before having to contemplate girlfriends and all that entailed.
So I did what any respectable mom does in a situation she doesn’t want to face: I wrapped myself in some sturdy denial, put on some blinders, jammed my fingers in my ears, buried my head in the sand … and any other cliché you can think of for avoiding reality. In this instance, I figured, apathy was my best policy. In a few days tennis camp would be over, and Fletcher would be off to yet another day camp. Out of sight, out of mind. All I had to do was do nothing. Eventually this Anna Clare thing would fizzle.
Or would it? To read more, please click here and follow me over to Lifescript’s Health Bistro Blog where I’m guest blogging today and the second Friday of every month on my late-in-life parenting adventures. Meanwhile, have you got a story about your kid’s first girl or boyfriend? Please share it at the end of the post or below.
Photo credit: Pepifoto
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