Meet Me at Emotional Baggage Claim (2 page)

Forever.

Shakespeare Was No Dummy

By Lisa

Shakespeare asked, What’s in a name? And The Flying Scottolines answered:

Everything.

Last year, Mother Mary was revealed to be Mother Maria, after using the wrong name for eighty-six years. She was unmasked by TSA and the Florida DMV, so now you can rest easy. They’ve dealt with Mother Mary, and all that’s left is Al Qaeda.

By the way, she used to call them Sal Qaeda, but I told her they weren’t Italian.

And her name isn’t the only problem, historically. My father was named Frank, and so was my brother, which led to confusion around the house. So my father became Big Frank and my brother became Little Frank, and sometimes even Little Frankie.

My brother thinks that’s why he’s gay, and I believe him.

He was stuck with Little Frankie until he wasn’t so Little anymore, when he became Frankie and even opened a bar named Frankie & Johnnie’s.

There’s a hint for you, new parents. If you’re trying to choose a name for your baby, imagine that name on a bar.

If it works for a bar, don’t use it for your child.

We come finally to our present problem, which is Daughter Francesca. Her full name is Francesca Scottoline Serritella, which sounds like a federal indictment.

Mafia aside, the other problem is that it’s too long for a book cover, even if you just go with Francesca Serritella. Here’s another naming hint for new moms and dads. Instead of imagining your child’s name on a bar sign, imagine it on a book cover.

Don’t underestimate your kid.

Despite your best efforts, they may actually accomplish something.

And also, give them a name they can pronounce. Of course, when Francesca was a baby, she couldn’t say Francesca. Many adults can’t even say Francesca, including me, after a margarita.

I confess that I didn’t think of that when I chose her name. She was named after my father and brother, as well as my best friend Franca, who was named after her own father, Frank.

It’s a great name, okay?

So when Francesca was little, she pronounced Francesca as Kiki, and that stuck. Kiki has been her nickname for as long as I can remember, and everybody she knew growing up in grade school and high school called her Kiki.

So far, so good.

But starting college, she decided she wanted to start using her real name, and she introduced herself as Francesca. All her college friends called her Francesca, and in time, that led to confusion, because whether you called her Kiki or Francesca depended on when in her life you had met her, or if you’d actually given birth to her. We’ll leave aside for the moment that Mother Mary calls her Cookie, which sounds a lot like Kooky, and we both know who’s kooky.

Sal Qaeda.

Francesca doesn’t mind if I call her Kiki, but I’ve noticed it’s been a problem, for example, at the doctor’s office, which has trouble finding her file because I refer to her as Kiki, but they have her filed under Francesca. And it wasn’t so great the other day, when the confusion screwed up a prescription. Plus I’ve noticed the disconnect myself, when I talk to people and refer to her as Kiki, and then they meet Francesca and find her very nice, but they want to meet my daughter, Kiki.

Also, Kiki works for a bar sign.

Enough said.

Yet, still I persisted with Kiki. Until the other day, when I asked myself why.

Why did I cling to it, creating confusion? She had a preference, which she’d made clear, so why wasn’t I honoring it?

Of course, you knew the answer before I did.

What’s in a name?

Shakespeare asked that question, but he wasn’t a mother.

To me, Francesca was still my baby. But I’ve decided that has to end.

Because I want my baby to get the right prescription.

And also, for a better reason. Her growing up, through school and college, is the process of forging her own identity. She has the right to define herself, and it begins with her name. She doesn’t need to be reminded, every time we speak, that in my eyes, she’s just a baby.

Because she’s not, anymore.

She’s a smart and lovely young woman, with a name that doesn’t fit on anything.

And I learned an important lesson.

It’s not only new parents who have to choose a name.

Welcome, Francesca.

I love you, already.

I Love You, Man

By Francesca

My mom and I are total bros.

I realized this when we were at an opening weekend showing of
Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol
in IMAX. We had arrived early to snag prime center seats, and I watched the rest of the audience file in—it was all men. Packs of them, of all ages. Men with their friends, men with their sons, a handful of men with obliging girlfriends. It was as if you needed a Y chromosome to go with your ticket. We were the only women unaccompanied by a penis.

Did this make us uncomfortable?

No way.

Our only regret was not getting the pretzel bites.

You may be thinking that one action movie does not a dude-bro make. I confess that we write a column called “Chick Wit,” but you can’t judge a book by its pink jacket cover. In our separate lives, we are girls’ girls, but when we get together, that all goes out the window.

Allow me to establish our bro cred:

Mission Impossible
is only one of our action-movie-franchise loves. My mom sees every action-, superhero-, and testosterone-fueled movie that comes out, but
The Transporter
series is her favorite. If you don’t know, these movies feature Jason Stratham shooting up bad guys while driving at about a million miles an hour.

My mom drives 50 mph in a 60 mph zone.

I fancy myself a highbrow bro, so my choice would be the Bourne series. But no matter, we’re easy to please. Give us some car chases, explosions, and violence, but skip the gratuitous female nudity. We’re like frat guys who are attracted to men.

So we’re like frat guys.

Our taste in comedies is equally infused with bro’mones. If a movie is aimed at fourteen-year-old boys, we’ll probably dig it. We own copies of such classics as
Dude Where’s My Car?, Role Models,
and
Superbad.

We loved
Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo
and hated
Love Actually.

I’m surprised we don’t pee standing up.

I think these movies fried our brain, because we actually suggested
Did You Just Fart?
as a possible title for our last book to our female editor and agent.

Crickets.

I don’t know which surprised me more, that we were deluded enough to think they’d like it, or that we were able to get the words out for laughing. We thought it was the best title ever and 100% true.

I never let my mom get away with a fart. I am the fart police. And we have five dogs, so my mom is often falsely accused. But in toots law, you’re guilty until proven innocent, or in layman’s terms, “the one who denied it, supplied it.”

And like any good bro, I can dish it too. Not in real life—I would pass out before I allowed myself to pass gas in front of a friend or boyfriend—that’s disgusting and rude. Unless I do it in front of my mom—then it’s absolutely hilarious.

My mom and I also bond over football. Like a lot of guys, we have a baseline understanding of the sport—meaning we’re low on stats, high on smack talk. It was my mother who raised me to be a proper Philly sports fan. That means you rag on the Eagles constantly, but you’d fight any out-of-towners who spoke against them. They are ours to hate, and ours alone.

We hate because we love.

I have this weird idea that my mom would be a great professional athlete, largely based on her ability to high-five. Her celebratory smacks feel like catching a fastball with your bare hand. At five-foot-two, she has the high five of LeBron James.

She will crush you.

After sports, another bastion of brohood is alcohol. Neither of us is a big drinker in our normal lives, but in recent years, whenever I’m home, my mom wants me to make us cocktails. She thinks that by virtue of living in New York City, I am now a certified professional bartender.

In reality, I only know how to make one drink really well, but it’s the only drink you need: the margarita.

Tequila has a bad reputation, but like so many of us, it’s just misunderstood. Forget shots, this spirit was made for sipping. I gave my mom a little education and now she’s a tequila snob. She doesn’t speak Spanish, but she knows the difference between
anjeo, blanco,
and
reposado,
and has opinions on each. Thankfully, we’re on the same page that a true margarita has only three ingredients: tequila, triple sec, and fresh lime.

Don’t even think about adding orange juice or sour mix in our house.

What is this, Mohegan Sun?

So we drink margs, catch the game, then watch
Role Models
again, and giggle if somebody burps.

How did we get this way?

Until a couple years ago, we didn’t so much as have a male dog in the house. There were bras drying on the towel racks, Midol in the medicine chest, and a spare hair elastic in every drawer. It was all girls, all the time.

Maybe that’s it. Maybe because for so long there was no man in the house, our sense of gender roles got softened. Or maybe those roles are just myths created by TV sitcoms anyway.

As they say, boys will be boys.

And sometimes, so will girls.

Motherhood Has No Expiration Date

By Lisa

I have a scientific theory the bonds that tie mothers and daughters are love and worry, like the two strands in the double helix of some very twisty DNA.

In other words, if I love you, I worry about you. And vice versa.

Let me explain.

The moment Daughter Francesca was born, I started to love and worry about her. And my worry, like my love, had no bounds. I worried if she was sleeping too much. I worried if she was sleeping too little. Same with crying, nursing, and pooping. If I was breathing, I was loving, and worrying. And my biggest worry, of course, was whether she was breathing. I’m not the only mother who has watched her baby sleeping to see if her chest goes up and down.

I still do that.

My theory also applies to grandmothers. Because they’re mothers, too. Just grander.

Mother Mary worried about Francesca, and all of our conversations back then were consumed with my worries and hers, and together we aimed our laser beams of worry on this hapless infant, which is undoubtedly why she turned out so great.

Or guilty.

Francesca knows we worried about her, uh, I mean, we loved her.

Likewise, I know, in turn, that Mother Mary worries about me. She worries that I work too hard. She worries when I fly. She worries when I drive. She worries when I’m not at home, and even more when I am at home. For example, she worries that I could put too much food on my fork and choke.

Let me suggest that this last worry isn’t so dumb. You’ve never seen me eat.

I used to feel guilty that she worried about me, but now I don’t.

She should worry about me, constantly.

It proves she loves me.

I realized this when I understood how much I still worried about Francesca even though she’s living in New York, on her own. I don’t mean to make her feel guilty, and she shouldn’t. But I can’t help it.

Motherhood has no expiration date.

And what just happened is that the worry has boomeranged, so that I’m starting to worry about Mother Mary.

Well, not starting.

But recently my worry, and my love, have come to the fore because of Mother Mary’s health. In particular, her nose.

It’s blue.

No joke. The last time she came to visit, the first thing that I noticed was that her nose had a distinctly bluish tinge. I told her so, in a nice way, and she told me to shut up.

But still, I worried, big-time. Her circulation has never been good, due to a lifetime of smoking, but she finally quit at age eighty-two, when she got throat cancer.

Better late than never.

Anyway, she beat the cancer, which is remarkable enough, but she’s supposed to use oxygen at night, according to the doctor. But she won’t do it. Our conversation today on the phone went like this:

“Ma, why won’t you use your oxygen?”

“I don’t like the tube. It smells like popcorn.”

“So what? Popcorn is good. Who doesn’t like popcorn?”

“I don’t, and that’s what it smells like, so forget it.”

“But it’s doctor’s orders, Ma.”

“Hmph! What does he know?”

I don’t know where to begin. “Everything?”

But Mother Mary wouldn’t listen even though I eventually raised my voice, which is another thing that mothers/daughters do to prove our love.

If I’m yelling at you, you know I love you.

Because I want your chest to keep going up and down, whether you’re my daughter or my mother.

Or whether I’m your daughter or your mother.

It’s all the same emotion, which is worry.

Or love!

So the next time your mother is worried about you, don’t tell her to shut up.

And don’t feel guilty either.

Try and understand. She can’t help it. It’s in her DNA.

Chalk it up to mom genes.

Ode to Vance Packard

By Lisa

Computer companies are full of great ideas, and I’m stealing one of them.

I’m selling my rough drafts.

Rather, uh, I won’t think of them as rough drafts anymore. I’ll think of them as earlier versions. I’ll call them Scottoline 1.0.

Yes, that’s right. I’m going to start selling unfinished things to make money.

Why not?

Granted, it won’t be as good as the final product, but it’ll be as good as I can make it in the time I took, and there’s no reason not to sell it that way if people will buy it.

Dumb people, like me.

I bought two iPads at Christmas, one for Daughter Francesca and one for me, only to see Apple come out with the iPad 2.0, three months later. The new iPad has a camera and a better way of turning on and off. Why they couldn’t have done this at Christmas, I don’t know. Why they couldn’t have
told
me at Christmas, I do know.