Wingmom and the Mother-Daughter Vacation

Posted On January 25, 2016

New Orleans, LA If you haven’t noticed by now I’m not “normal” like most people. The older I get, the more I realize that I seem to unintentionally do the opposite of everyone else. Most of you probably went through the phase that TV and movies tell me occurs in the pre-teen to teenage years. You know, the phase where your parents are a major embarrassment to you and you never, never, never want to be seen with them in public? Well… I never went through that phase… not until my adult years, that is.

It all started back in 2007 when I took my mother to see a Meat Loaf concert in New York for her birthday. It was the first time I had actually been on a trip with my mother without the rest of my family. This meant that my mother’s navigation system, a.k.a my dad, was absent, which ultimately meant that my mother was pulling out a large scale map of New York City on literally EVERY street corner. As a girl who gets around, especially in the States (I’ve been to 35 of them and counting), looking like an obvious, map-reading, camera-around-the-neck, fanny-pack-wearing tourist was pretty much mortifying for me. Not to mention the fact that she was buzzing around the city hoping to share her new catch phrase with the locals, which was, “Well after 9/11 happened…” because that’s totally appropriate.  The icing on the cake was that Meat Loaf had fallen ill and cancelled the show day-of-game, so it would seem that there really just was no point in us being there… alone… together on the mean streets of NYC.

Fast track to 2015, and the only thing I wanted for my 30th birthday was a trip to The Big Easy. New Orleans had always been high on my list of places to go, but since there isn’t an NHL team even remotely close to it, well, I just never made it down there. It had been eight years since the mother-daughter trip to New York, and so I thought we could give the experience another try. To be fair, my mother was really the only person I knew who would appreciate NOLA in the same ways that I would, so it seemed like a good idea.

It was nearly 10 years since Hurricane Katrina had devastated that city, so you can imagine what my mother’s new favourite topic of conversation was. Unlike in NYC, when people were actually willing to talk about the terrorist attacks, in NOLA nobody wanted to be reminded of the trauma they experienced in the summer of 2005. So, when my mother was ultimately shut down, she would switch to her next favourite US topic of conversation. Yep, you guessed it, 9/11. But believe it or not, embarrassing run-ins with the locals was not the most embarrassing thing that happened on this trip.

It was our last night and we had decided to have one last drink before packing up for our flight home the next day. We had chosen Royal House, an oyster bar that had captured our hearts over the course of the week. We must have gone there four or five times during our stay. In the interest of variety, I’m not normally the type to go to the same place twice, but this place was just too good to keep us away.

We ordered a couple Hurricanes, which is one of the signature drinks in New Orleans, and like the bad tourists we are, we had waited until the eleventh hour to actually sink one on home ice.  Naturally, my mother tried to take a picture of the Hurricane (that’s me) drinking the Hurricane… har har har… that’s when it happened…

I was posing awkwardly (as I do) with my drink at the bar, when the guy sitting next to me decided to pull *the move.* You know, that move where you put your arm around the girl and get into her picture as a way to break the ice. Yeah, that move. But here’s the thing, my MOM was the one holding the camera, which I felt spoke volumes about the size of my new stranger-friend’s balls.

Not long into our post-pic conversation, he reveals that he’s from Texas and that his family owns oil wells. My mother’s eyes suddenly widen as she imagined what she’d wear to our wedding, which would undoubtedly be held at the Alamo under a never-ending waterfall of black gold. Desperately needing to make it real and secure this prosperous union, she immediately took out her phone to show the “nice young man” photos of me.

Mom: And here’s one of her in Egypt. She has dark hair naturally, you know.

Oil Wells: Oh, she looks good with dark hair. And I’m normally a blonde guy…

This awkward conversation went on for several minutes with other photos of me in exotic places, like my mother was trying to lure him into meeting her mysterious, world-traveling, single daughter. Not, you know, like if said single daughter was not only in the same room as them, but actually sandwiched between the two of them on a barstool. But it gets worse (or better depending on how you’re reading this)…

Being the sly fox that she is, my mother awkwardly removes herself after Oil Wells mentions a jazz bar that we should go to.

Mom: YOU STAY HERE… I’m going to go pack… BUT YOU… YOU STAY HERE with this NICE BOY. I’m going to go… YOU’RE going to STAAAAAAY. 

The awkwardness was just too much for me to handle and so I passed on the jazz bar and all that could have been that night. In a way, I’m disappointed in myself. I’m usually the type that likes to go with the flow for the sake of the story, and a little (read: super obvious) nudge from my mother shouldn’t have changed that. Truthfully, I think I just wasn’t myself at the time. I was about to move to Singapore in five days, and I had just experienced the trauma that is the 30th birthday. I’m sure if this had happened at another point in time, the story would have ended much differently.

Back at the hotel my mother was in a frenzy over the fact that I had left that bar with her instead of the Oil Wells. I don’t remember what his actual name was, and for some reason when I can’t remember a guy’s name I always think of that guy as a Chris. Apparently my mother actually knew his name, though, and within minutes of getting into bed with her iPad, was stalking him on LinkedIn. Periodically she’d have an outburst and the words ‘oil wells’ would escape from her breath, but after fully examining his resume, she readied herself to berate me.

Mom: He had OIL WELLS! What is wrong with you? You could have had nice babies. You can’t say I didn’t try to get you laid on this vacation… OIL WELLS!

I guess it’s nice to know that if I ever have a hard time finding a willing human male, my own mother will be quick to come to the rescue and suit-up as my wingman.

Thanks, mom.