So Cheesy

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So Cheesy

My oldest daughter pulled the meanest trick on me when she came home from college in May. She got me to break my streak of never watching reality tv by convincing me that it wasn’t so much watching The Bachelorette for two mind-sucking hours every week as it was wisecracking together while snuggling under blankets on the couch for two beautiful hours of mother/daughter bonding.

Are you kidding me? Her college is 3,000 miles away. Like I wasn’t going to fall for THAT.

What she failed to tell me is that is that The Bachelorette is like terrible crack that you can’t break free from, once you’ve had the initial two-hour hit. And then, four episodes in, she had the temerity to leave for work as a summer camp counselor off the grid in the Adirondacks.

It wasn’t like our younger daughter was going to fill in for her big sister – she still lives at home and has gotten adept at dodging all my attempts at cuddling, which have approximately doubled since her sister left for school. She would in no way consent to regularly watch what a friend of mine in the TV industry calls “improv, only with terrible actors.”

Was I really going to watch this crap television show, about an extremely accomplished and beautiful lawyer who seemingly believes that selecting her future husband out of a group of 30 randos with good ab definition over a 9-week period is a rational idea? Even if Roxane Gay said it was ok, nay important, to watch because this season’s Bachelorette, Rachel, is African American and it’s an important step forward in representation, I felt uncomfortable contributing to the Reality TV Industrial Complex. Especially alone, with no one to laugh at my jokes about Miami Bryan’s cheekbone implants.

Thankfully, that’s when my daughter’s oldest friend stepped in. “I’ll come over and watch it with you, Nancy,” she said. I don’t like to reveal the business of minors in this blog without their consent, so for the rest of this I’m going to refer to her by a nickname I call her: Cheese Wound.

(And also because by doing that, I have an excuse to tell you the story behind the nickname. Cheese Wound loves cheese, see. No, I’m not sure you see. You THINK you love cheese, but you have NOTHING on Cheese Wound’s love of cheese. So she and her family are in Mexico, see, and she spots a roadside sign advertising “Queso.” And she uses all her persuasive powers to get her parents to pull up to a strange little house where some lady sells them some cheese she made in a hut. If all your alarm bells are going off right now, congratulations, though they’re probably going off for the wrong reasons. See, Cheese Wound is HUNGRY and that cheese looks good and the family’s vacation condo is still a ways away. So she asks her parents if she can have some of the cheese while in the car – remember, these are the same parents who consented to buy her roadside Mexican cheese, so their judgement isn’t always 100, as Rachel the Bachelorette might say – and they say yes. And she whips out a pocket knife, braces the questionable cheese against her inner thigh, and slices…through the cheese, and through the thigh, though mercifully not through an artery. A few hours later I’m getting pictures texted to me of Cheese Wound, who it must be said is a very tough girl, smiling as a Mexican doctor stitches up her inner thigh. Thereby making Cheese Wound the only person I know who was injured by cheese, and not in an artery-hardening kind of way. Hence the nickname.)

And that has been the constant of Summer 2017. Every Monday at 7:55 pm, there is a knock at the door, just as I am setting up the evening’s cheese tray for Cheese Wound to eat while we watch. She sits in my daughter’s spot on the couch and joins me in wondering aloud why Lee the racist even signed up for this jawn, whether Pete borrowed Dean’s pants from last week’s episode because how many pairs of elastic-ankle maroon burgundy men’s pants are there are in the world, and what is up with Rachel and her humongous rings that are as big as her actual fingers. Every time Rachel refers to the 9-week relentless hunt for an engagement ring as her “journey,” we mime throwing a shot back.

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We agree it is the worst show in the world. We understand that as smart as Rachel the lawyer is, she is exercising spectacularly bad judgment when she nags gap-tooth Peter for not being quite ready to propose after they have spent probably 10 hours together. I threaten to sign Cheese Wound up to audition for the next season when the producers come to the city where her university is located. We agree we will watch it again next week, and I ask if she prefers cheddar or manchego.

I miss my older daughter a ton. But watching this cheesy show with Cheese Wound has been a nice reminder that one of the greatest gifts your kids can share with you is the friendships they’ve made during their “journey.”

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Who else? May Rachel find her One and Only. (Hint: She chose Miami Bryan and his cheekbone implants, so I’m not optimistic.)