Free Mother Daughter Me by Katie Hafner

never done much traditional dating, which is guided by many unspoken rules. One of those rules, I gathered after my first date with Bob, is that on an initial encounter people usually steer clear of intimate or painful topics. Bob hewed closely to the first-date protocol, offering a brief, polite, and well-rehearsed description of his twenty-year marriage, a union that sounded singularly joyless.
    But in the first fifteen minutes of our dinner, even before the wine had been poured, I gave Bob an entire data dump of my convoluted life so far—divorced parents, alcoholic mother, waiflike childhood, dead husband, disastrous marriage on the rebound. Reporting the facts felt like the right thing to do. But partway through my soliloquy, I noticed that Bob looked uncomfortable. Still, I plowed ahead. He told me later that he wasn’t merely uncomfortable but was seeking a polite excuse to leave. At the same time, he was taken with my lack of guile, and apparently the latter reaction won out over the former, because since then we’ve gone out several times.
    We’re growing on each other. We know people in common beyondthe couple who set us up on that first blind date. Bob was a medical resident with Carolyn, one of my closest friends. He’s devoted to his two sons (one in college, the other Zoë’s age), and he’s funny. He’s also pragmatic—even programmatic—in his approach to life. When we established the connection to Carolyn on our first date, he suggested, in all earnestness, that I call her for a “reference,” which I found endearingly businesslike. Also that evening, he told me that in the two years since his separation he has gone out with thirty-two women, and keeps a spreadsheet containing each woman’s name and age, children’s names and ages, and other pertinent information, mainly to ensure that he doesn’t repeat himself on subsequent dates. I was at once appalled and impressed and made a mental note to myself:
Should Bob and I ever grow close, ask to see that spreadsheet—not just my own entry but those of the thirty-two others
.
    Bob travels a lot, mostly to give talks on preventing medical mistakes and on hospital medicine (he helped create the “hospitalist” specialty, which refers to internists who see only hospitalized patients). Dating someone who’s out of town a lot is fine with me. Having recently climbed my way out of a swamp of pain, I’m more than content to be seeing someone whose frequent absences will make a deep romantic entanglement a challenge.
    Unaware of my shuttle-service obligation, Bob has decided we should scrap the drinks and go for a full meal. I say nothing to him about the tight timing. I love the idea of a meal with Bob, and things are so new between us that I’m not ready to confess I’m a slave to my child. We go to a neighborhood Italian restaurant known for its homemade pastas. But the math isn’t adding up. By the time our food arrives, it’s already 6:45. When Bob orders a second glass of wine, I know I’m sunk. So I carry out a small rebellion—against the tether of Zoë’s constant stream of needs and requests, their intensity compounded by her separation anxiety. I ignore both the time and my phone, vibrating from somewhere deep inside my bag.
    By 7:20, Zoë is placing her fourth or fifth call to me. I see this only by accident, when I reach into my bag for something else. I answer the call.
    “Where are you??” she yells.
    “I’m in a restaurant.”
    “What? I told you we had to leave by 7:15!”
    My jailbreak isn’t going well. How I expected to get away with this I am currently at a loss to explain, even to myself.
    Bob has yet to meet Zoë, and until this moment she hasn’t been much more to him than an entry under “Children Y/N” in his dating spreadsheet. But he’s going to meet her now, because I tell her to walk down to the restaurant.
    Bob’s seat faces the door, and ten minutes later he looks up to see a sudden squall in the form