On Soccer Moms
I want to be a soccer mom.
Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t want to become a woman (not to say I’m transphobic). I just want to be “The Woman” on my street.
I just want people to be impressed. I want a to-do list that’s novella-length, every task checked off by 7 p.m. I want solid half-hours set aside for that unlisted task: ensuring that sweet, bi-weekly spousal love has been ably made.
I want to fill out my yoga pants even as forty fast approaches. I want to speak with passion at PTA meetings, citing the most recent research from child development journals. I want all the child athletes to clamor for rides in my mirror-sleek Escalade.
But I don’t want my kids to play soccer. I want them to play American football instead of European, to inherit the same brain trauma as my husband and my father. I want them to be men to the same extent I am The Woman — that is, to the fullest.
I want to chat knowingly about the merits of probiotic yogurts and gut-health as a whole. I want a gardening vlog and a best-selling eBook thriller authored under my penname.
I want a handsome husband who says “she’s just…she’s just great” when asked by neighbors to comment on how driven I am. “She’s a dynamo,” he’ll go on to say, and it will create delicious uncertainty as to whether he’s referring to my overall energy levels or to my sexual rapacity in specific.
On Christmas cards, I want ugly sweaters on sons and daughters and husbands and dogs, their faces split horizontally by picket-fence smiles.
I want barely-noticeable Botox and improbably pert breasts, so on-looking couples have no choice but to debate whether or not I have implants. I don’t want to care that everyone knows my lips have collagen in them. I never want to remove the cat-tracks tattooed on the small of my back.
I want to be arranging playdates with the offspring of doctors and lawyers. I want spousal selfies that get nearly a thousand likes. I want the neighborhood children to want me to be their mom.
I don’t really even want kids.
I want a spritely step and a ponytail so jaunty that 16-year-old girls would envy me — would want to grow up to be me. I want teenage boys to need me.
I don’t even want to be married.
I will be the one your significant other watches in spin class. I will be the one your wife is jealous of; mine will be the hind that your husband fantasizes about. Everyone will say I’m good enough to become an instructor. I’ll reply: “I’d just love to teach, but right now, as it is, it’s always go-go-go, you know!”
And I’ll laugh.
I don’t even really want to be alive. I just want suburban homeowners to talk about me when I’m not around.
