I was two-and-twenty the summer I experienced what I ticked off would certainly be the single most awkward moment in my life. Not embarrassing, not humiliating…I keep hitting the refresh button on those two. No, what I am talking about is that moment of being inescapably uncomfortable in a situation, where the only possible resolution is to just wait it out, keep quite and avoid any eye contact until you can pretend that you were never there. Every seemingly maladroit instance since that time has been a walk in the park. After all, what else could possibly ever rattle me more than sitting in a dark room on the sofa next to my mother while watching Laura Dern and Nic Cage “go at it” in the David Lynch directed Wild at Heart on cable? If you haven’t seen it, I will attest that it is awful on just about every level. The dialog, the accents (Cage was clearly working on what he would later use in Con Air, which I have already blathered on about here), and the whole story line in general is just garden variety bad. And the sex scenes? It was more like characters acting out and having tantrums while partially and entirely naked. If I were sitting around with friends guzzling alcohol and watching it, it would be hilarious. Like when me and Big Daddy got a case of beer and watched Showgirls. But in a dark room, with my mother…both of us sober and alert, it was punishing. The sounds alone of the characters were bad enough, but the sights just pushed it to my limit. The remote control had been set down too far away on the coffee table for either one of us to have gotten to it without a reach over and possibly a grunt. Neither one of us was mature enough to just throw out a nervous laugh and make the move to end it. I still cringe thinking about it. My personal discomfort could never be topped…or so I thought.
In fact, there is something far, far worse than watching an eager “up for anything” sex scene in a dark room with your mom. It’s me being the mom watching an eager, glamorized teenage vampire-mortal sex scene with my own daughter in a dark theater. Yes, it’s true.
In an unprecedented move, Snakebite wanted to go see Breaking Dawn, which had me breaking down. But right now, she is the middle school Queen Bee in our house and I just want to earn her approval and am thrilled when she wants to do anything with me. I complied, mainly because I thought it’d be laughably bad and then I could blog about it later. Know this: we aren’t up on the franchise. We both read the first book and saw the movie when my niece came to stay with us one summer. I thought it was some of the dumbest fodder I’d seen since my friends and I made a slasher movie one bored Sunday afternoon in high school. This was 1988 and my mom’s huge VHS camera that we used was not equipped with steady cam. That movie had a richer plot line than Twilight. If I recall correctly, about 30 minutes into watching that first one, Snakebite said it was weird and lame; she was bored and was going to go to bed.
I have a scant understanding of what goes on in the Twilight series because the world is populated with people who call themselves “Twihards”. Ugh. I can’t plead that I was ignorant that the girl character, Bella, was going to marry her glittering and frosty vampire beau, Edward. And I knew from the trailer that they would be starting a family. It just never occurred to me that they would have rocker Tommy Lee filming the honeymoon. While nothing as out there as Ron Jeremy showing up in a nurse’s outfit happened, there were ripped feather pillows, broken furniture, tilted light fixtures, body bruises and a lot of position changes. And they were both allegedly virgins. There was no, “Ouch, wait, that hurts”, not a single, “You’re on my hair!” nor, “The school nurse said to always use birth-control, Edward. I am not on the pill. Did you remember to bring condoms?” Nope, none of that real life deflowering dialog. Instead it was Bella glowing and begging for more the next morning and me trying to neutralize the acid reflux in my throat with a fist full of popcorn. I can’t even discuss the birthing scene that has, like the Pokémon movie, spawned epileptic seizures in movie houses across the world. The silver lining, I guess, is that Bella didn’t end up with Jacob, the werewolf boy. That could have been a far worse sex scene to have had to white knuckle through.
What have I learned from this? Well, for starters, nothing is absolute. All the things that I thought were awful about being a disgruntled and misunderstood teen daughter myself are now amplified now that I am the mother of a disgruntled and misunderstood teen daughter. I will never be smug again in thinking that by getting through adolescence and young adulthood I have passed some imaginary finish line where I am now always mature and insightful in the face of awkward moments. I have not been properly inoculated against personal horror and am therefore not immune to it, as previously thought. I did exactly what my mom did when Wild at Heart’s credits rolled. Nothing. I didn’t mention anything about Bella and Edward’s sexy time and Snakebite announced that she was tired. And so the cycle is complete…I hope.
Hot damn, Charlotte Ann! 