Class Traitor.

So this season, E had a hard conversation with his mom. When asked if I liked the book they sent me, he bit the bullet and explained that it really wasn’t my style of read. I could hear the (beat) pause and then the tone of his mom’s voice as she asked what I did like to read. “She reads a lot about werewolves and vampires,” E offered.

And then I think I heard the echoing crash of her highest hopes plummeting into the abyss.

Now, to be fair, I do read more than gothic horror tales, but I find it highly unlikely that I would choose to read her gift, a book containing the correspondence between Carol Sheilds and another woman, as they were both dying of breast cancer. E’s mom loves her some Can Lit, so that’s how she chose it. And as she sent along in a note, “I always think that people like the same things as I do”.

That sentence says it all, really.

As I am an educated, literate, artistic, middle-class woman with left-but-not-scary-left leanings, she expected that I was going to do what she would do: Force E to get a haircut, a wedding ring, a Toyota, a mortgage, and a ‘real’ job. She hoped I would take the soul of a rocker, and remake it into an accountant, I guess.

He has always been a big puzzle to his parents, no matter how he tries to explain himself. They’re all very musical, but they don’t understand how they raised a rock-and-roll guy. That’s the crux of it: He’s speaking in power chords, but they’re listening in opera.

And so when she heard about my lowbrow tastes, I think E’s mom finally twigged that I am never, ever going to ‘improve’ her son into something she understands. And I sort of hate her for wanting me to.

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