Mother, Can You Not? Read Online Free PDF

Ashley’s mom and told her to stop the gossip. And in spite of her mother’s “life ruining” concerns, Ashley and I both grew up to be normal teenagers. Not friends, really, just two well-adjusted humans from moms with very different parenting styles. Though I do hope Ashley’s mother eventually told her how babies are made or, at the very least, where her vagina is located.



My First Fake ID
    M ost kids get their first fake ID from a sketchy friend with a connection at the DMV. My first fake ID was handed to me directly by my mom when I was twelve years old. Mind you, it wasn’t so I could start guzzling 40s and chain-smoking Camel Lights. It was all part of her master plan to help me get into an Ivy League college.
    When she is passionate about something, my mother is terrifyingly convincing. Under the right circumstances, she could persuade a vegan to dive headfirst into a platter of ribs. And when I was in sixth grade, she had both me and my father convinced that:
    1. Getting into an Ivy League college was the most important thing in the world.
    2. We needed to immediately start building my college résumé with extracurricular activities and honors classes.
    How could anything you did as a twelve-year-old impact college admissions, you ask? It probably can’t, but this is my mom’s brain, the same place where a study about trace amounts of carcinogenic material in tap water translated to fifteen years of drinking exclusively bottled water. There was a near divorce whenever my father poured me a glass from the sink.
    After a few calls to the top universities (using fake names, so as not to hurt my chances when I would apply
six years later
), my mom identified three extracurriculars that were “hot commodities” for college admissions: tuba, water polo, and crew. Trying to appeal to my artistic nature, she suggested tuba first. What could be cooler than wrapping my body in a giant brass instrument and sentencing myself to ten years of sweating in parades and getting stuck in doorways?
    I agreed to try crew, so my mom found a summerrowing camp at Stanford University for me to attend, but you needed to be fourteen years old in order to enroll. Again, I was twelve, but she signed me up anyway. Screw the rules! This camp was run by actual Stanford coaches! Who knew? Maybe I would even get scouted and recruited for admission! As a lying twelve-year-old.
    One morning in the late spring, she woke up the family and herded us into the car for what she described as a “surprise road trip.” The last time she said this, we ended up stranded with a flat tire in Compton. Why? My mother wanted to try her luck at a liquor store that was famous for selling winning lottery tickets.
    When she took the Maple Avenue exit from the I-10 freeway, I was relieved and excited. I instantly knew we were on our way to the Santee Alley, a literal alley in the middle of downtown Los Angeles. It is a bustling three-block thoroughfare lined with stores and pop-up stands, hawking everything from bootlegged DVDs to replica handbags to live animals.
    “Oh my God, YESSS! Please, please, please, please, please, PLEASE, Mom, can we get a turtle today?!!”
    “We’ll see. But first we’re going to get you a fake ID!”
    “What?!” My father turned to her in the passenger seat.
    “Relax, Michael. Don’t go get a shotgun yet! Your daughter’s not going out clubbing. It’s for the rowing camp she’s going to this summer. They said we need to bring proof of age.”
    My mother parked the car in a garage a few blocks away from the alley’s main entrance, and we fought our way through the crowded streets. I’d like to point out here that my mother is a terrible criminal. The alley was a place people went to eat street meat (that usually resulted in diarrhea) and buy knockoff handbags, not a place where terrorists went to buy forged government documents. And what was her master plan? To walk up to random people on the street and ask them if