Mother's Bad Date [hot] [ Trending ]

“The final straw,” she said, taking a massive bite of ice cream, “was when he told me I’d look younger if I smiled more. And then he corrected my pronunciation of ‘bruschetta.’”

She winked. And just like that, Gary the ergonomic-chair salesman became a ghost—a cautionary tale, a footnote, a tiny, ridiculous speed bump on the long, strange road of my mother’s recalibration.

She pulled the carnation out of her hair. It had lost two petals. She looked at it, then at me, and for the first time all night, she smiled. A real one. mother's bad date

“Surprise me.”

“Did you at least get a good story out of it?” I asked. “The final straw,” she said, taking a massive

“Comma the cat.”

“He also said,” she continued, “that he once broke up with a woman because she named her cat after a punctuation mark. The cat was named ‘Comma.’” She pulled the carnation out of her hair

We both burst out laughing. And in that moment, I realized: a bad date isn’t a failure. It’s just material. My mother put the wilted carnation in a juice glass on the windowsill, where it looked, somehow, not sad but defiant.