“Mom, why are you wearing that?” The Kid ask as he watches me dress for a date, fussing before my full-length mirror as I try on yet another outfit while a pile of rejects replicating Mount Tam spills off my bed.

“Because I like it. Something wrong?”

“No,” he mumbles. “You look nice.”

True, there's nothing wrong with it, but I know what he’s getting at. Dressed in a body-hugging short black dress that ignores my cleavage and accentuates what I believe are my better parts, stockings and stiletto heels, I am playing up my femininity and strutting my stuff.

It’s hard for a teenager struggling with his own sexuality to have to face his mother’s. I'm sure he has some complicated feelings about that, but at least he's not trying to keep up with me.

For my girlfriends who are mothers of teenaged daughters, it's a very different story — they are in competition in a way that I never was with my own mother, or most likely, them with theirs.


Read more at www.blogs.marinij.com/katwilder