My mom (53) is dating Ethan (25), my childhood crush. She keeps inviting me over, saying we should “bond” as a family. At brunch, Mom kept gushing about how “mature” Ethan was.
I felt gross. At the next dinner, I felt even more disgusted when she fed him a bite of her tiramisu while locking eyes with me, like she was trying to prove something. Ethan chuckled and wiped a smudge of cream off her lip like they were in some soap opera.
I wanted to vanish into my risotto. I should explain. Ethan wasn’t just any childhood crush.
He was my neighbor for 10 years. My older brother’s best friend. The boy I would write bad poetry about in middle school.
The one I tried to impress with my glitter eyeshadow at 14. He was my entire pre-teen emotional universe. And now, somehow, he was dating my mother.
When I first found out, I thought it was a prank. My mom had casually dropped it into a conversation like it was no big deal: “I’ve been seeing someone new, sweetie. You remember Ethan?
From next door?” I remember I literally dropped the spoon into my soup. She just giggled like a schoolgirl and said, “You’ll love him once you see how mature he’s become.”
Right. The first time I saw them together, I felt like I was watching some weird alternate timeline.
Ethan wasn’t the shaggy-haired 17-year-old I remembered, but he still had the same laugh, the same crinkly eyes, the same charm. Only now, he was calling my mom babe. And she was dressing younger than me.
At first, I tried to be civil. Maybe even open-minded. After all, love doesn’t follow rules, right?
But the more I saw them together, the more it messed with my head. My mom wasn’t just dating him — she was parading him. Posting gym selfies with him.
TikToks. Hashtags like #couplegoals. It wasn’t just love.
It felt like competition. I couldn’t shake the feeling that she knew I used to like him. That maybe that was part of the appeal.
She’d always been the kind of mom who didn’t like being outshone. Growing up, if I got a compliment, she found a way to one-up it. If someone said I had nice hair, she’d remind them she had hers “naturally full” even at 40.
Now, she had Ethan. At one particularly painful dinner, she actually said, “You know, honey, Ethan says he always thought you were a cute kid — but he loves women now.” Then she winked at him. I laughed awkwardly, but something twisted in my chest.
After that, I stopped going to dinners. I ignored her brunch invites. Dodged her FaceTimes.
She’d text me selfies of them at the beach, in robes at a spa, with captions like “Wish you were here!”
No. No, she didn’t. I tried focusing on work, on my own dating life.
But somehow, my mom and Ethan kept popping into my orbit. A friend saw them at a gallery opening I planned to go to. Another messaged me, “Hey, is your mom dating that Ethan from high school??” It was like a running joke from the universe.
And then came the worst of it. One evening, while scrolling Instagram, I saw a video — a proposal. My mom.
In heels too high for her to walk in without wobbling. Ethan, down on one knee, at the same lake where he taught me how to skip rocks when I was 10. I stared at the screen for a long time.
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