The Adventures of Saffron Sally

I was not happy with the way things were going. Ever since Tim, my baby, had gone to college, my life had not felt my own.  I’d lost my job - both of them, actually; the one that brought in money (writing my parenting column), and the one that cost me money (living my parenting column; that is - well, parenting). 

I felt like a stranger in my own house; a stranger in my own skin.  I drove along streets so familiar to me I didn’t even have to think about them.  I knew every pothole, crack, stop sign, bizarrely-placed yield sign.  Yet now I drove these streets and saw them not as roads leading to necessary destinations; I saw them as a living scrapbook of my sons’ childhood. 

I’d drive to the grocery store with the radio on, minding my own business, when - WHAM!  I’d suddenly notice the little park five blocks down as if for the first time, and be flooded with a memory so real I could touch it, hold it to my heart. 

This was the park where Mark had taken his favorite Thomas the Tank Engine train to play with in the sandbox, and had managed to lose it there, and even after hours of exhaustive digging I was never able to find it.  It was like the sandbox had a tiny die-cast train sized sinkhole in it.  And Mark had cried and cried - it was a red train, the only red train and red was his favorite color; for three years straight in elementary school he had worn only red T-shirts and jeans and even though I made sure to tell his teachers that they were clean red T-shirts and jeans, as he had about ten sets of each, I was sure they didn’t believe me, that they thought we were on welfare or something because my son wore the same outfit to school every single day.  For three years straight.

All these memories would overwhelm me, threaten to make me cry and sniffle and it was all because I’d run out of parmesan cheese at home.  Which was why I was driving to the grocery store in the first place.

And heaven help me if I forgot myself, forgot my fragile emotional state, and found myself driving down the street past the elementary school or the middle school or the high school, because I would have to pull the car over to the side of the road, unable to drive for the sniffles and tears and sometimes even sobs.  My heart would actually wince - I could feel it spasm up - as I remembered the time I dropped Tim off and he slammed his little hand in the car door and I leaped out of the car, somehow remembering to turn off the engine, and swooped him up in my arms and had him in the nurse’s office almost before his first wail. 

Or the time I volunteered to be room party parent for Halloween and all my projects and games were such abject failures - at one point, there were three fifth graders with their heads stuck in papier-mâché pumpkin masks that would not come off and I had to send them down to the nurse’s office - the woman gave me a bulk discount during those years - that  Mark had come up to me, patted me on the back sympathetically and, with a sweet sympathy far beyond his years, had said, “That’s all right, Mom.  You tried your best.”

The truth was, I had loved being a mom, had been good at it, and missed it.  Life was simpler then.  People needed me.  I knew what was expected of me, knew how to behave, knew how my days and nights were going play out.  Nobody had asked me if I wanted to stop; my employers - my sons - had just decided that for themselves.  And I was a little resentful about that. 

But when I wasn’t driving down Streets of Perilous Nostalgia, I was standing on the edge of a great unknown, a great adventure or a great mistake, wondering what it would be like to kiss a man not my husband, have my contours and crevices and folds caressed by another man’s hands, and I wasn’t entirely sure how I had gotten to that place.  I only thought that, like the rest of my life lately, it had seemed as if I hadn’t had any say in this matter, either.  Although I secretly suspected that somehow, I had.  I just didn’t want to remember it that way.

Even as I was weeping at being forced to untie the apron strings, I was seized by sudden, coquettish whims and caprices.  I wanted to buy new clothes.  I wanted to grow my hair long again.  I wanted to try sparkly new makeup and jewelry.  I wanted to flirt and dance and shimmy and shake and act like 21^st century flapper, complete with a flask of gin tucked into my garter.  I wanted sugar daddies to take me to Atlantic City and buy me diamonds. 

I wanted to take no responsibility for my actions.  Yet I ached to have someone to be responsible for.

I was, in the words of Christian Siriano, this year’s winner of “Project Runway” - a hot tranny mess.

(I was also addicted to any fashion-related reality TV program such as “Project Runway” and “What Not to Wear,” and curiously obsessed with fashion magazines I hadn’t bought in years.  Even though, after reading these magazines, I usually ended up weeping into a bag of Cheetos and cursing fifteen-year-old models and their flat, non-childbearing hips.)

So.  Mourning mother, flirting teenager.  Who was I?  Who was this person who stared at me from the mirror, this person with the big black pores on her nose as well as the faint imprints of crow’s feet around her eyes, this person with the frizzy adolescent hair, which suddenly was gray at the roots? 

I was a Tweener.  Once again.  No longer a young mother, but nobody’s granny, either. 

Just as awkward, just as hormonally unstable, just as unfamiliar in my own skin, just as prone to making disastrous decisions, as I had been back when I was twelve, thirteen.

My life was not my own.  Everyone was having more fun than me.  None of the boys would return my phone calls.  Everybody’s breasts were bigger than mine.

Which made me understand one of the truisms of being an adolescent girl trapped in a middle-aged body -

The more things change, the more they stay the same. 

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Join other seasoned women as they discuss Sally and her adventures (and maybe their own!) here!