CoAbode

Pseudo Mom, By Lori Hughes

The Real Parents would often return on a Friday afternoon, thus freeing me for the weekend. But this time they wouldn't come home until Saturday evening so my Pseudo-kid and I spent the day at the mall, assembling perfect outfits that I would never buy. I don't like to shop. I don't like to wear clothes. But I always enjoyed the artistry with which my Pseudo-child could combine color and texture, shape and style and she loved doing it so I indulged her. I had planned to have dinner with my Pseudo-daugther before the Parents arrived. She had asked for spaghetti "with butter only!" She had agreed to eat salad but apparently she had changed her mind. I encouraged her to eat a bit of tomato. I insisted she eat 3 slices of cucumber, usually her 'favorite'. I enticed her with a promise of olives. She ate some lettuce. But the spaghetti sat until it went cold and she complained that it wasn't any good without having taken a bite. I wanted her fed and happily ensconced in front of the TV before the Parents got home. Why? I suppose it suited my sense of completion. A job well done. Accomplishment. See... I'm the perfect Pseudo-mom and everything that went before, all mistakes, arguments and locking device foul-ups can't be counted against me. I don't know who I thought would be keeping score but I felt the need to chalk up some points of my own.

Sadly, my version of the perfect ending was not to be. We argued about eating spaghetti, a food with such dubious nutritional value it hardly deserves discussion at all. We stared at each other with quiet resolve, certain the other would soon give in. We simmered with anger. We hated each other. And somehow during all of this, the cat crept up on the table and settled down between us, its pink, whiskered nose hovering dangerously near the spaghetti. I grabbed the cat and dumped it on the floor. "He licked it!" She crowed. I had a very good view of both the cat and the noodles and I knew he hadn't so much as opened his mouth. "He did not." "Yes. He did!" She was fiery and defiant, certain she would win this battle as she had so many others and I was just as determined to wrest from her this tiny victory before taking my weekend off from non-motherhood. "Eat the spaghetti!" I growled. "No!!!" I heard a car door slam and realized the Parents had arrived. Torture almost over, but still. One mouthful, please. Just a mouthful. One tiny bite so that I may report that dinner is, at least, in progress. I turned to the door. "Your parents are home. They won't be happy if you don't eat." She smirked at me. "I can't. The cat licked it." I walked toward the door to welcome my friends, my deliverance from irritation. Throwing a quick glance over my shoulder, determined not to let her get the best of me I saw two things. My Pseudo-daughter languishing before her plate of uneaten food and the cat, standing on the table, hovering over the noodles. The front door opened, the little girl smiled and the cat... licked the spaghetti.

When I last discussed these things with my Pseudo-child she did not remember it as I do. She swore it was rice not spaghetti and had no memory of the cat. She remembered well the dismantling of the door lock but insisted she drew no conclusions about life or anything else that morning. She once assured me that her psyche bears no scars as a result of the time she spent with me but I sometimes wonder if that's true. She developed a rather strong desire to study abnormal psychology somewhere along the way. Hmmm.... I wonder why.