Staking Her Claim

All of last school year, Nathan was repeatedly queried about whether he was going to this or that school dance. The fact that he was not going because he was not sixteen yet was his response, his safety net. I’ve warned him in the past that once he turned sixteen, he was no longer going to have an easy out. In response to similar questions regarding last Saturday’s homecoming dance, he asked Sariah, one of his best friends. That was a safe and socially acceptable choice, but in the minds of all the teenage girls, his going to the dance was an indicator that he is now on the market.

Yesterday afternoon, Nathan told me that the Madrigal women were already talking about who they were going to ask to Sadie Hawkins, the next school dance and a traditional girls’ choice event. He was flabbergasted about how early they were making plans, but I explained to him that girls just think that way. They plan much farther in advance than boys and they have to talk about all of it so that everyone knows who is claiming which boy in order to avoid huge amounts of teenage girl trauma and drama if someone’s preferred date is asked by someone else. He didn’t really get it, but he’s a teenage boy, and the minds of teenage (and honestly, any age) boys and girls just work differently.

At just after 7:00 a.m. this morning, Nathan sent me the following text:

Yup. Yesterday was the female powwow about who gets to ask whom and today the plan went into action. Nathan is even more flabbergasted and I’m just laughing over my Cheerios. The dance is in six weeks and the girl in question is, in fact, one of those Madrigal women that was making plans and staking claims yesterday.

I fully expect Nathan to get asked to pretty much every girls’ choice dance of his high school career. He is a talented, smart, kind young man, one who also happens to be tall and pretty easy to look at. I’m his mom so I know I’m biased, but he is kind of a cutie. Try as he might, he’s never going to understand how those girls think, but at least I can steer him down a safe path in order to avoid as much “wrath of teenage girl” as possible.