“Okay…and I’m also not allowed to say that, even if I do love him, I’m not sure if he loves me back?”
As his mom charged on ahead, she brushed past the Arbor Day fake tree, and it tipped precariously on the box it was resting on. Thank god, it didn’t fall. Neither of them had hands to catch it, and he didn’t trust the floor to hold up to a twenty-pound pot falling on it.
“Your anxiety about him returning your feelings is slightly more acceptable, but still nonsense, so I don’t want to hear it,” she said.
James followed his mom down the ladder and to the living room, where she dropped her box on the couch with a huff. That rubber band ball of tension and anxiety in his stomach tightened, and he placed his boxes on the coffee table so he could crack his knuckles. Leon wasn’t there to make fun of him for it, so he did it once on each hand and then started again.
His mom watched him, her expression making her look more like his sometimes-annoying roommate, not his mother. His mother coddled and soothed him, while his roommate poked funat him when he did something dumb, and sometimes pushed him when he needed it. Right now, he didn’t really want to be pushed, though.
“Mom, I’m being serious. I don’t know how I feel, and I don’t really know what to do.”
Her face softened, and suddenly, she was his mom again.
“Okay, honey, I can be serious. Just because I don’t believe your anxiety is warranted doesn’t mean it’s invalid, so let’s hear it. What’s going on?”
Unfortunately, now that he’d been given the microphone, he didn’t really know what to say.
“You’re afraid,” she said, and it wasn’t a question, but he nodded anyway. “That it’s too soon?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t believe that there is such a thing. I knew I loved Linda within the first two months, and that’s when I told her, too.”
Huh…that was news to James. “Oh, wow, Mom. That’s amazing. Did she say it back?”
She smiled peaceably and shook her head. “No, not right away. It took her a little while longer, but by Christmas, we were both saying it to each other.”
That meant that there had been around a month's delay between his mom saying it and Linda saying it back.
“Did you…feel insecure while you waited?”
She broke eye contact, but her brow furrowed in thought, not in stress, as she turned to open up her box on the couch. “No, not really, because I knew exactly how I felt, and nothing was going to change that.”
James mulled this over as he began unpacking his two boxes onto the coffee table, with some items spilling over onto the floor. They had a lot more decorations than James had remembered, and it wasn’t until he glanced up to see his mompulling items out of a shopping bag that he realized his mom had added to their collection.
He watched her pull out throw cushions and a blanket before asking, “What about Howard?”
She let out a surprised laugh. “Oh, with Howard, I was the one who took my time with it. He actually said it within the month.”
“Oh my God,” James exclaimed. He couldn’t imagine doinganythingin just a month of dating.
“There’s no right or wrong amount of time, hon.”
“Yeah, but I’m pretty sure there’s an average, and I don’t think it’s a month.”
His mom’s hands went to her hips again. “Before you go making fun of my beau, how about you look it up?”
James should’ve seen that coming. His entire childhood had gone like this. Anytime he tried to get smart with his mom, no matter the topic, she’d have him look up whatever it was on the family computer. For a while, that had meant waiting for their dial-up internet to connect while his dad grumbled about missing phone calls and wasting time. When he was a teenager, his mom’s school had replaced all its laptops, and the teachers had been allowed to take home the old ones. She’d lugged it all the way home on the train and set it up next to the kitchen table so they could look things up right in the middle of a debate or discussion. By the time James came home for Thanksgiving, his freshman year of college, they both had rudimentary smartphones they could pull out at the dinner table to fact-check.
“I can look it up right here,” he grumbled as he pulled out his phone.
His mom crossed her arms, and he hastened to type his question in the search bar.
“Ha!” he exclaimed, not bothering to read past the first result. “It says for men, the average is between three and four months. For women, it can be longer.”
He glanced up, expecting his mom to concede defeat, but instead she narrowed her eyes at him.
“What?” he asked, defensively holding his phone out in front of him. “That’s what it says!”
