How Not to Calm a Child on a Plane by Johanna Stein

before.
    But of course I can’t, because she’s barely out of diapers. At best it would just confuse her, and at worst I’d get picked up by Child Protective Services and locked up for being a pervert, because I’m guessing it’s not appropriate to tell your toddler about the first time you got French-kissed by someone, especially since it wasn’t her dad.
    But what if I never get the chance? What if I drop dead from some all-over body tumor that I’ll develop from standing too close to the microwave? How will I teach her what I learned about life from playing Strip Backgammon with my upstairs neighbor?
    And if I live through Cancer of the Everything, even if I wait until she’s of an appropriate age (twelve? fifteen? twenty-one? sixty-five?) to talk to her about it, there’s a high probability that she’ll hatemyfrigginguts (mother-hating being a mandatory rite of passage) and won’t want to hear it from me, the way that I didn’t want to hear it from my mom. *
    And even then, if by some bizarre twist of nature she doesn’t hatemyfrigginguts, I’ll still be screwed because by that point, I’ll be wearing sweater sets and pearls and suffering from a selective-memory syndrome that causes me to replace my personal history with the plot points of Grease (the sequel).
    The only solution is this: I must write down deliberately and with absolute and horrifying clarity the storyof my former loves, and the lessons that they taught me, all while the memories and shame are still fresh enough to make me hot-faced and queasy. Because if she’s anything like me (and considering the fact that we both love peanut butter, fart jokes, and watching ourselves cry in the mirror, it appears there is some significant overlap), this transcript may help guide her in her own future, and hopefully/possibly/dear-God-please help her avoid just a few of the XXXL-size mistakes I made. *

    First I will tell her about “ Soccer Legs McGee, ” † the most beautiful high school boy who has ever existed in the history of formal education. His very presence in a room electrified me; it was as though he was the scent of a chocolate fountain, and I was a walking nostril, so attracted to him was I. He was a jock with a bad-boy streak; he loved heavy metal music and often threw parties where there were drinking and drugs, and if you were a girl you stood a very good chance of being felt up. Me, I played cello in the orchestra, owned all the greatest hits of Lionel Richie, and wouldn’t have my first hit of pot until my twenties (and even then it would take four tries to get it right). Yet I had no shame where S. L. McGee was concerned; I sangsongs to him in public, gave him unrequited gifts of oversized stuffed animals, and publicly confessed my love to him with a regularity that causes me to thank the heavens hourly that Facebook didn’t exist back then.
    Surprisingly, my methods worked. It took a few years, but eventually I won him over and was able to call myself the official girlfriend of Soccer Legs McGee.
    Soccer Legs McGee taught me Lesson 1, that, given enough ingenuity and lack of shame, there is no person, place, thing, or goal that is out of your league or beyond your reach.
    I would learn the second lesson shortly thereafter, upon discovering that SLMcG and I were a poor match, due to the fact that (a) he hated books—all books—with a dumb passion, and (b) he loved making out with girls who were my locker partner.
    Lesson 2, then, is that “Contents Are Not Always As Advertised,” or, more specifically, that personality, integrity, and intelligence bear positively no relation to muscular legs or the ability to grow a mustache in tenth grade.
    The next lesson came courtesy of “ The Slightly Older Man, ” the nineteen-year-old love of my seventeen-year-old life. He was the first guy who thought I was interesting and wanted to kiss me anyway. He was