I choke on a mouthful of wine and turn to see my mother walk into the room with her arm linked through Carter’s. “Have you been working out, Carter?” she asks as she rubs her hand up and down his bicep.

“Mom? What are you doing here? I thought you were going to an art gallery opening?” I ask.

She lets go of Carter’s arm and practically skips across the kitchen to me, wrapping me in her arms and squealing in delight.

“Nonsense! When you called the other night and said you were nervous about making a good impression on Carter’s stuffy parents, I knew I needed to be here for my best girl,” she explains as she pulls back and fiddles with a lock of my hair that has come loose from my pony tail.

“Oh my God, Mom! I never said his parents were stuffy!” I argue as I smacked her hand away from my hair. My mother, while well-meaning, treats me more like a best friend than a daughter and possesses even less of a filter between her brain and her mouth than I do.

I give Carter a look of embarrassment and beg him with my eyes to not listen to a word she said. My mother continues talking like I'm not even there.

“Now, Carter, you look positively yummy and not at all tired. Shouldn’t you be exhausted from staying up all night sleeping with my daughter? Claire, why aren’t you keeping this man up until the wee hours of the morning having lots of sex?”

“Jesus, Mom! Can you tone it down a bit please?” I beg.

Carter had met my mom the day we moved in when she came to help us unpack and has stopped by for dinner several times since then. He is quite familiar with the way she acts but that doesn’t mean I can't try to nip it in the bud before it gets out of hand.

“What? Can’t a mother be concerned for her daughter? I just want to make sure your va**na doesn’t get full of cobwebs like before. Those things can take a pounding so don’t worry about breaking anything. I once pulled a muscle in my vagina. Did I ever tell you that story?”

So much for the no va**na talk today.

I chug the rest of my glass of wine, reach for the bottle on the counter, fill the glass back up, and then took a swig right from the bottle before setting it back down.

“Mom, did I tell you dad brought Sue with him today? You know, the woman he’s been seeing? She’s really nice. And never, ever talks about pounding vaginas. Ever.”

I think maybe making my mom a teensy bit jealous will deter her from all things inappropriate but sadly I'm mistaken. Sometimes I still forget just how cordial my parents divorce was.

“Ooooooh goody!” she squeals, clapping her hands together like a two-year-old. “I’ve wanted to meet her ever since your father first told me about her. We have so much to talk about. I wonder if he’s used his Sean Connery accent on her yet and tried that move where he puts his foot on the headboard and then thrusts-”

“STOP! Jesus Christ, please stop,” I plead before taking another big gulp of my wine. “Carter, can you let everyone know dinner is ready and we’re doing it buffet style. They can all come in here and fill up their plates before sitting down at the table. If you need me, I’ll be in here with my head in the oven.”

~

An hour later everyone is still picking at their food after going back for seconds and thirds. My mom sits next to Sue and the two of them have been whispering and giggling like school girls through the entire meal, stopping every once in a while to glance over at my dad before falling into a fit of hysterics all over again.

“Hey, Claire, does this apple pie have nuts in it? I don’t like nuts,” Drew states.

“I like nuts. Nuts are delicious,” Gavin pipes up, taking a big bite of apple pie to prove it.

“Well, I don’t like nuts,” Drew argues.

“Guys, that’s enough nut talk,” Liz complains as she pours herself another glass of wine from the bottle in the middle of the table.

“I’M GOING TO PUT MY NUTS ON ALL OF YOU!” Gavin yells through a mouthful of food.

Carter clamps his hand over Gavin’s mouth and then leans over to quietly tell him it isn’t polite to yell at the table.

“So, Claire’s mom, do you have any good stories to tell us about your little cupcake when she was growing up? Any slumber parties with na**d pillow fights or lesbian experimentation?” Drew asks.

“What’s a lez bean? Is that like a lima bean? I don’t like lima beans. I am NOT going to eat a lez bean,” Gavin declares.

“Oh, you’ll change your mind about that someday,” Drew tells him with a wink.

“Gavin, how about you go pick out a movie, and I’ll put it on in the living room?” Carter suggests. He obviously doesn’t want our son learning about the fine art of carpet munching just yet.

Gavin lets his fork clamor to his plate, jumps down off of his chair, and takes off running to the DVD shelf in the living room.

“Sorry, Drew, my childhood was pretty uneventful,” I tell him, bringing the conversation back to the original subject. “No one has anything even remotely interesting to tell,” I inform him as I hold my glass across the table towards Liz so she can give me a refill.

My mom nods in agreement and gives Drew a sad look.

“Unfortunately she’s right. Claire was a very boring child. She liked to read and take naps. We used to invent things to do just to mess with her and try to f**k her up a little bit. She was entirely too well-rounded. It was disturbing. George, remember that time you had your friend Tim call the house when she was eight because she wasn’t listening to you? Didn’t he pretend he was Santa Clause?”

My dad leans back in his chair and comes an inch away from sticking his hand in the waistband of his pants in post-dinner bliss before he realizes he isn’t alone in his own home. He quickly switches directions and moves his arm to the back of Sue’s chair.

“Yep, she was being a mouthy little shit so I had Tim call and put the fear of Santa into her,” he says with a chuckle.

“Hey, that wasn’t funny. He told me I was a very bad little girl and that he’d been watching me. He said he lived in the basement and came up at night to watch me sleep. He’s the reason I still take the basement stairs two-at-a-time when I run up them and why I called America’s Most Wanted when I was nine because there was some killer on the loose hiding in people’s basements,” I explain. “I told them the killer was Santa, that he called me the year before, and that he was probably still in our basement.”

“I remember that afternoon. The police questioned us for two hours so they could make sure we weren’t harboring a criminal,” my mother states. “That was such a long, boring day.”

“No, don’t worry about me. I was totally fine,” I deadpan.

“Oh quit your bitchin’. It wasn’t that bad. You’re still alive, aren’t you?” my dad asks. “And don’t lie, Rachel. They only questioned us for about thirty seconds. Then you asked them if they wanted a joint and all was forgotten. Cops were way more fun back then,” he says to the rest of the table.

I turn towards Carter. “Never, ever ask me again why I am the way I am. NEVER. AGAIN,” I whisper.

“I did walk in on her playing with her Barbie’s one time, and she had them all undressed, humping each other. It was some weird sex circle, and Ken was sitting in the middle just watching them, fully dressed. I wanted to light some incense and set the mood for her, but then I saw she had one of the horses in the circle of sex and it just got disturbing at that point. I never knew Barbie was into bestiality,” my mother states solemnly.

I lean forward and start banging my head softly on the table.

“Nice! Getting freaky with the Barbie dolls. I like it,” Drew exclaims.

“I think in honor of this family dinner, we need to remember the best part about our holiday dinners, Rachel,” my dad tells her with a gleam in his eye. “Ceiling fan baseball.”

My parents start laughing as they remember dinners of the past, and I just continue to bang my head harder.

This was supposed to be a nice, peaceful dinner.

“Oh my God! I remember ceiling fan baseball from high school!” Liz says excitedly. “Except didn’t we play it with tater tots a few times?”

“Yes, we’ve been known to make substitutions,” my mother states.

“Okay, what the hell is ceiling fan baseball? It’s not what I think it is, right?” Drew asks as he looks back and forth between my parents. They each look at me expectantly. Liz is practically bouncing up and down in her chair in excitement.

Oh what the hell.

I roll my eyes and drain my glass of wine in one gulp, slamming it back to the table with a thunk.

“Alright, fine. Carter, grab the wooden cutting board with the handle. Liz, put all the extra rolls on the stove into a basket. Jim, turn the ceiling fan on low and Drew, move the table to the side.”

Everyone stares at me with their mouths open for exactly three seconds, and then they all jump into action and start gathering supplies.

“I’ll get more booze!” Jenny announces happily.

“I got the mashed potatoes,” my dad states casually.

“What do we need mashed potatoes for?” Carter asks as he walks back into the room with the cutting board, a.k.a “baseball bat”.

“Claire, this man is hot as balls but he’s kind of dumb,” my mother says as she pats Carter’s cheek affectionately. “The mashed potatoes are the catcher’s mitt. Duh.”

11. Mommy!

I think it’s safe to say that my parents will never understand the whirlwind that is Claire and her family. I’m okay with that. It’s not like I’ve ever been that close to them anyway. Their parenting style had always been a bit more standoffish than most. I think it’s one of the main reasons I knew I needed to do right by Claire and Gavin. I never want my son to feel like there is anything even remotely more important to me than him. Don’t get me wrong. My parents are good people. They love me and they have done a good job raising me. They had sent me to the best schools and had high hopes for my future. When I dropped out of college because it bored the shit out of me, they didn’t take it very well. They had wanted me to be a doctor or a lawyer and share their country club membership. They like things calm, neat, orderly, and pretentious. They most definitely aren’t ceiling fan baseball-playing people, and they never will be. It had taken them a while to stop trying to fit me into a certain mold and realize they need to just let me make my own choices and live my own life. They had been really excited to find out they were grandparents and I know they will be good at it. On the bright side, at least Gavin will have someone in his life who could teach him how to sit on the board of a company, complain about paying taxes, and hide money from the government. Since he already has people showing him how to swear like a truck driver and throw food at ceiling fans during dinner, I do believe this will make him the most well-rounded human being on the planet.

It takes a lot of explaining and even more wine to get Claire on board with my line of thinking. She wants everyone to like her and considers herself a failure because my parents have only seen her at her worst. When I tell her that after twenty-five years I have yet to impress my parents and therefore she shouldn’t let it get to her, she finally relents and decides against writing an apology note to them in chocolate on their front yard.

After my mother apologizes for showing up unexpectedly, and Drew throws a wild pitch into the fan that results in a dinner roll right to her neck, my parents realize the importance of calling ahead. They do their best to not make faces as they tiptoe around clumps of bread that litter the dining room floor to find an available seat. My father explains he thought he was coming down with a cold but after a short nap, he felt much better so they decided to stop by for dessert. Claire does her best to stick to the original plan of plying them with a bunch of alcohol and sweets to suck up to them, but after thirty minutes of Rachel trying to get my mother to admit she would love to try a threesome some day and goading my father to confess he dropped acid in the sixties, my parents decide it's past their bedtime.

After they leave, everyone helps clean up before they head to their own homes. When the last dish is put away and the final crumb is swept from the floor, we finally have the house all to ourselves and nothing can be heard except the ticking of the clock in the living room.

I walk into the kitchen after putting Gavin to bed to find Claire standing in front of the sink, staring out the window, lost in thought. I don’t want her to feel guilty about my parents. I won’t let them make her feel like anything less than the amazing woman I know her to be.

I come up behind her and slide my hands around her waist and clasp them together on top of her stomach. I rest my chin on her shoulder, waiting for her to speak.

“So. This was a fun day,” she says sarcastically, bringing her hands up to rest on top of mine.

I turn my face and place a kiss on the side of her neck, inhaling the subtle hint of chocolate that always lingers on her skin.

“Actually, it was a very fun day. I had no idea you ever called America’s Most Wanted,” I tell her with a smile. “And that Barbie likes horse cock. Who knew?”

Her body shakes with laughter.

“Hey, don’t judge me. Ken had underwear that wouldn’t come off. What’s a girl to do in that situation?” she asks as she turns into my embrace, slides her arms around me, and rests her cheek against my chest. “I was an only child with two crazy parents. Unless I wanted to hang out in the basement with my mother and smoke pot, there wasn’t much else to do other than have Barbie orgies.”

I laugh along with her and rub my hands in slow circles around her back.