One day in the not too distant future, a podcast host will ask Charlotte about the moment she realized her parents were human. I am almost 50 and I don’t believe in robots, so I’m assuming the host will mean this only figuratively. I’ve always known this day would come, and I’ve been on guard, which has been exhausting, since I’ve spent a lot of time under her surveillance. Until she was about seven (the age of reason, she often reminded us) I foolishly believed I could get away with “just doing my best”. Even years before she joined the Castagno advisory, I always sensed Charlotte silently prodding me to find another gear. I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea about who was in charge in our household, but Charlotte fer shur had influence. Early in Facebook days, when vanity led to my participation in one of the challenges, I included as one of just ten essential facts about me: “Sometimes when I overreact, Charlotte remains calm. I am proud of her”. 

I was proud, but also annoyed sometimes. “Why is Teddy having so many cookies today?” she asked me around that time, probably at the end of a day of Meerkat Milers practice, a birthday party at the Oasis Family Fun Center, and that one time I had to be in charge of the thin mint distribution.

“Because I’m tired and I don’t feel like enforcing the rules,” I told her. She was disappointed, which my own mother taught me is the same as mad. I don’t know if that’s true, but I bet Charlotte does. Don’t tell me, Charlotte. 

I hope you can all imagine, then, the trepidation I feel when faced with writing anything Charlotte might even one day read, let alone something about her. For years I have procrastinated on my Rosamunde Portsmouth novella, Intrigue in Greenville, out of fear of Charlotte’s judgment —and not, Tom, because I’m scared of never getting to go to the Holly Ball.  

Following Charlotte through a subway tunnel (somehow at 5 miles per hour), or watching her quietly locate and place all the leaf-colored middle pieces of a fifteen hundred-piece puzzle, or witnessing her swift and emotionless ken-po self-defense reaction to a punch from her eleven-year-old brother might make a parent feel sort of useless. Fortunately—and I don’t know if these are just ways of throwing me a bone–she still likes me to check for monsters in her closets, and she says she hasn’t had time to read The Cider House Rules. 

I guess a mother expects she will always have dominion over SNL, but even while surveying political data, which I believe was one of her main areas of study, Charlotte has been making her way through all the seasons of SNL. I’m sure I’ve already started to send her sketches she has seen, and she has been forced to send me whatever emoji people send their parents when they do that—is it applesauce? She’s still on my Peacock account, so I am watching it happen in real time, and it feels like this is her way of letting the door close gently on her way out into the world.