[crow]

Yeah, impressive, right? Real classy. 'So, how did your parents meet?' Now, there's a story to impress your new friends. And it gets worse: my dad doesn't even get to find out til my mom comes to his dorm one day and drops off a freaking baby. I have no idea what she had planned--- no, knowing my mom, she probably didn't have any plan in mind. Mom's the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of person, which isn't really the attitude you'd want your neurosurgeon to have, I'd think.

That was what she does for a living, by the way. Mom's a neurosurgeon. She'd just found out she had gotten into medical school when bouncing baby boy appeared, and she had a choice: raise this one night stand lovechild or go to med school. I mean, she could've done both, but it wouldn't have been pretty, and even she knew that. Honestly I'm really glad she didn't try.

[crow]

Anyway, so there was mom, on the doorstep of my dad's dorm room at 7 AM with me all swaddled up in her arms. I have no idea what she said to him, but that handover must have been a doozy. I imagine dad resisted the idea at first, though he always says he wanted to keep me right from the start. As soon as he knew about me, anyway. Not even dad would try to sell me on the idea that he'd somehow known I was born even before mom told him.

However it went, at the end of the morning dad had gone from a party-happy guy living it up in college to a party-happy guy living it up in college with a baby. You'd think that would maybe put a damper on the party-going, but it didn't. The big reason that it didn't was because dad had a roommate, and that roommate was papa.

[crow]

So, here's where the clarification comes in about me having two dads. They're really not in that kind of relationship with each other. I'm not saying that because I think it would be weird if they were. Actually it would almost definitely be less weird if they were some married gay couple with a son from a surrogate. They were just roommates. I wonder if either of them knew what they were getting into when they applied for the same room. Or maybe they were assigned? I'm ten; I have no idea how college dorm arrangements work. Still, when you end up with a roommate, I don't think you expect to be living with them maybe ten or twelve years down the line, raising a family together. Sans marriage. Sometimes dad still brought girlfriends home, but that's a story for another time.

[crow]

What I do know is how it had probably gone down. I know dad didn't ask papa for help, at least not beyond the casual could-you-hold-this-diaper-while-my-hands-are-full kind of way. Definitely not the life-long partnership commitment way. Dad and papa tell it differently, but I've lived with them my whole life, and I'm almost as good at telling when dad is lying as papa is by now. Papa saw what dad was doing with the baby--- with me--- and decided that if he didn't provide a merciful intervention, I was probably going to... well, not die, dad's not that bad and he meant well. But I'd probably have more than a few screws loose by now, if it weren't for papa.

[crow]

I probably still have some screws loose, but it's not as bad as it could be. And I'm not hyperactive, which a diet of pop tarts and soft drinks would probably have encouraged. I guess it's a pity, since broccoli is gross, but I don't want to contemplate what I'd be like on a constant sugar rush.

At any rate, papa started offering parenting tips, and then actual parenting, and before they knew it they had a buddy movie comedy premise on their hands. Two boys in college with a baby. It's a wonder they didn't get kicked out, or maybe they did, and just didn't tell me. They did manage to graduate, and I guess the arrangement they had must have worked for them, because they're still living together. With me.

[crow]

You'd think that would be colorful enough for any household--- I'm certainly glad they didn't decide to get more kids. Call me selfish, but there are plenty of nice things about being an only child. And usually it is--- colorful enough, that is. But the thing is, sometimes life, or my mom, liked to remind me that I did in fact have three parents, not two.

She had plenty of ways of doing this, of course. Not a Christmas goes by without her sending some half-baked home-made present. She tried to knit me a sweater one year... At least, I think it was a sweater. It's kind of hard to tell. It lives in the back of my closet in a special little box reserved for all the mom-gifts that would fit, because sometimes she asks about them, so we can't throw them out.

[crow]

I get phone calls every so often too. Not at regular, predictable intervals or anything. She'd gotten me a phone once for my birthday so we could keep in touch even though she wasn't around much, and whenever she remembers, she calls me. She said she would pay my phone bills too, but within the space of about six months papa slowly took that over, since she remembered the phone bill even less regularly than she remembered to call. We only barely managed to convince her to hold off calling me while I was in class, to keep me from getting in trouble. More trouble was just about the last thing I needed at school.

[crow]

The most involved and most exhausting of these is the visits. She really is very busy, or else I guess these visits would happen a lot more often. Maybe if they had, I'd be better used to them by now. As it was, when I walked through the front door and saw her sitting at the kitchen table, I just about had a heart attack. “Mom?” I dropped my shoes and stood there, staring.

She turned at the sound of my voice and smiled. Mom had a really nice smile, perfect teeth, TV-commercial hair, pretty face. She looked young for a mom. I guess she was young for a mom, but she looked younger than she was.

[crow]

It runs in her side of the family. Sometimes I got invited for dinners with them, and for a while I'd entertained myself trying to guess the real ages of everyone else there. Those same genes hadn't done anything for me so far except make me pipsqueaky and girlish-looking, so I was maybe not as grateful as I could be.

She beckoned me over with a flutter of the hand. “Sweetie! It's so good to see you,” she said. As soon as I had walked within grabbing distance, she swept me up into a hug. Even when she was hugging, which involved a kind of enveloping closeness, my mom felt light, like a bird. It wasn't just that she was skinny. I don't think she's capable of physically smothering anyone--- not physically, at least.

[crow]

“Hi mom.” I said into her shoulder, though the words came out muffled against the fabric of her cardigan. She didn't cling for long. Easing up, she held me out at arms' length to get a better look at me.

She crooned, “Look at you! You've gotten so big! Your sweater doesn't even fit anymore, does it?” Of course, she meant the sweater she'd sent me for Christmas when I was six, which was only a sweater because she said it was. I didn't say anything. She turned me this way and that as she spoke. I felt like a pair of shoes, and she was trying to see if I was worth buying or whether the store clerk was trying to rip her off. “And so thin too. What are they feeding you?” she clucked. My mom didn't look like the clucking type, but maybe it was just a thing that came with mom-ness, even if you did only see your son once a month, more or less. Usually less.

[crow]

“A balanced diet, I assure you,” said papa from behind the counter. He was pouring a cup of tea, herbal, no caffeine for mom. Me neither. I don't know if it's true, but I hear it stunts your growth, and if there was a surefire way to get me to stop getting involved with anything, it was the possibility that it would keep me short and pipsqueaky forever. I could tell that papa was trying, not very successfully, not to sound passive-aggressive. Mom must have been here a while already.

I was still trying to get over the shock of her being here. It was always a shock, since calling ahead never seemed to occur to her. Or maybe it did, and she just decided against it, for whatever reason. I don't spend nearly enough time with mom to be able to read her like my fathers.

[crow]

With all the hubbub and the shock of seeing my mom, I had forgotten about dad, which was a big mistake. For one, dad wasn't the sort you should ever forget about, since that was when accidents tended to happen. Sometimes papa liked to say that it was really one father and two children in this household. But more importantly, if I had remembered, I might have been able to warn him about mom, and if I had, what happened next might not have happened at all.

“We're home,” dad said. “Hey Cas, did you know the parent-teacher conference thing was coming up? Kiddo's been keeping us in the da--- oh. Elle,” he said. He looked surprised for all of half a second before he broke out into a smile.

[crow]

“Elle! To what do we owe the pleasure?” He was a lot better at this than papa, maybe because he got along with mom and papa didn't. They didn't like each other enough to get married, but they always seemed happy to see each other again. He closed the distance between them--- did I see him take off his shoes?--- and mom let go of me so she could teach her arms out to him and let him sweep her into a hug. Mom couldn't smother people, but dad could, and did. I wandered over to stand next to papa, who handed me a mug of tea.

[crow]

“Oh, I was just in the neighborhood,” mom said, when dad finally eased up and let her go. This was, of course, a lie. I have no idea how mom spends her free time but nobody comes to our stretch of suburb unless they have someone to see, or they're planning on moving in. Nobody. It's the place you go when you want to stop having fun and start having children. She looked between me and dad with what might have been an attempt at being conspiratorial. “What's this about a parent-teacher conference?”