Last week, I spoke about the best content on the internet: the Instagrams of my best friends’ moms. My gears were turning. This topic is lush for me and so I’ve decided to deliver a part two. Last week, I was a creep for my friends’ parents in an endearing way. This week, I am doubling down for the worse. I am here to talk about my former friend’s mom’s Instagram. “Former friend’s mom’s Instagram” is a hellish mouthful but stick with me here.
I met Ally in third grade. She wore Juicy tracksuits to school and lived in a massive white house with a gate, a swimming pool and an elevator to the third floor. This last bit seemed very cool at the time and bizarre to me now, but I think it was to accommodate an elderly relative who couldn’t walk upstairs to the bedrooms.
First, you must understand who I was when I met Ally. I am an only child who wasn’t allowed to watch TV and whose parents bought Kashi cereal if they bought cereal at all. We only had candy on Halloween and if we had sandwich bread, it was whole wheat and multi-seeded. My mom didn’t eat grapes for twenty years in solidarity with migrant workers and wore foundation for the first time on her wedding day. When kids at school talked about anything pop culture related – shows on Nickelodeon, pro-sports teams, trips to Disneyland – I listened intently, hoping to absorb everything I needed to know without letting on that I had zero firsthand experience. There is an art to participating in a conversation about a TV show that you have never seen and I was an artiste.
Also in the mix is that from as early as I could remember, I was ready to be a teenager. I was a foot taller than every kid my age until the 7th grade. I started wearing a training bra in third grade and shaving my legs in fifth. At birthday parties and extracurricular activities, I was often confused for someone’s older sibling. I felt like a weird giant. If people were going to think I was thirteen when I was nine, then I really just wanted to get it over with and be thirteen already.
I did not look like a little kid. Neither, for the most part, did Ally. Not only was she tall like I was, but she knew about being a teenager/grown woman. She had three teenage sisters and a mom who had glossy, blown out hair, Gucci sunglasses and wore bikinis instead of a one piece. I wanted so badly to wear a bikini that I once cut a hole into a one piece to separate it into two, was stopped mid-slice by a creeping sense of guilt and left the thing with a gaping hole in the center. It was a teen-daydream lacuna in polyester. When my mom asked what happened, I pled ignorance. A jagged-edged hole in the midriff of my bathing suit? Moths have gotten advanced.
Ally’s dad was around but often working, so the family energy was distinctly feminine in an early 2000s glam sort of way. Their downstairs bathroom was a display of shiny black lacquer and pink accents with infinite mirrors on all sides. I was gagged. The list of things this family introduced me to for the first time includes, but is not limited to:
- Gossip Girl
- Keeping up with the Kardashians
- The Simple Life
- Ralph Lauren
- Juicy Couture
- Betsy Johnson
- Juice cleanses
- Diet Coke
- Doing cardio while watching TV
I studied the women in Ally’s family like I devoured the magazines available every time I got my hair cut at the salon. These were my opportunities to learn the things I felt certain everyone but me knew about. I wasn’t getting these things at home. My dad couldn’t tell you who Brad and Angelina are if his life depended on it. Luckily, I have outgrown thinking that is a great personal humiliation of mine. In the era of Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie and a young Kim Kardashian geeking about her upcoming appearance on the Tyra Banks show (KUWTK S1E1), Ally’s family in my mind was just one of many celebrity families. The difference was that I got to lunch with them on Saturdays and order a Diet Coke with everyone else.
Ally and I were attached at the hip from ages eight through sixteen despite going to different middle and high schools. Our cross-contamination of one another’s social circle behooved us both. When as middle schoolers we loitered around our suburban “downtown,” it felt like we knew every thirteen-year-old there was to know. I spent my young childhood wishing to be a teenager and when I turned thirteen, I was blessedly in my element. Thirteen was my social currency peak.
We stayed close our freshman and sophomore years of high school, but the gap between us widened. As I’ve said before, you can’t force someone to be your friend, painful as that truth may be. Nobody was wearing Juicy Couture anymore. People who met me in middle school laughed about the way I’d entered sixth grade in a cropped velour jacket (purchased on eBay, but nobody needed to know that. My mom was not about to buy her eleven-year-old an $80 hoodie, which in retrospect, I respect). I had managed to catch up and then keep up with what was cool. It didn’t matter anymore that I hadn’t seen the kid shows, because now I had Tumblr and an eighth-grade boy iChatting me that I had “nice boobs for a seventh-grader.” Life was good.
Although my friendship with Ally didn’t last, she and the women of her family were more formative in my young-to-teen girlhood than they do or should know. I realize that this ode to them is giving want-to-wear-your-skin. If we had grown up a decade earlier, I would likely have no idea what Ally’s family is up to. Lucky for nosy me, I still follow her mom on Instagram. I’ve seen the IRL Kardashian/Hilton/Van der Woodsens of my childhood grow up, get married and pose for family photos at Christmas time. It’s nice to know they’re still out there doing their thing. Instagram feeds my curiosity from afar and that’s plenty for me.
