A while back, I was chatting with a close mom friend when she referenced her first husband.
“Right,” I nodded. “Your first husband.”
She had a first husband?
Should I have known that? Did I know that, and space out the fact somewhere between buying my tween wide-leg jeans and binging The Bear?
But, no. Though we’d spent countless birthday parties, beach days and even grown-up dinners together, we had never gone there. And I guess, by now, she’d forgotten what she had and hadn’t shared.
The more I thought about it, the less surprising it seemed. After all, when we meet as parents, at least initially, we present mostly sanitized versions of ourselves. We want to appear solid, trustworthy, like upright citizens, always at the ready with organic snacks. We swap anecdotes about the best dance and theater classes, teachers and math curriculum—even parenting fails.
But past lives as club kids and potheads, past relationships with discarded first husbands, past romantic dalliances? Not so much.
All that fun stuff is sort of off-limits.
My fascination with that concept—the juxtaposition between the different versions of ourselves, what we choose to present and, alternatively, bury—is at the heart of my choice to include a third narrator in my new book, Pick-Up, a contemporary romance that revolves around parents at school drop-off and pickup (and then meanders to a private Caribbean island). The book features the voices of the two love interests, Sasha and Ethan, and then Kaitlin, who is essentially a social voyeur from Sasha’s present and past.
I first had the idea for Pick-Up while lingering outside my kids’ elementary school after drop-off with a group of parent friends, discussing the dearth of decent scandal at our school. We were all so well behaved! Or so it appeared.
I myself became a parent while living in Brooklyn, only a mildly inconvenient, if not foul-smelling, subway ride away from Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where I grew up. But because I spent the intervening years living in Los Angeles, when I returned and had kids, my two worlds of high school friends and parent friends remained distinctly separate.
But what if, I began to imagine, my two worlds collided? What if someone here knew who I was before—and had opinions about my then and now?
When we begin new stages of our lives, we are often presented with the opportunity to reinvent ourselves, both for appearances and authentically. That is, unless there’s someone around to remind us, even peripherally, of who we were. Someone who we may feel not only judging us for our current decisions, but also seeing us through the lens of a previous incarnation of ourselves.
Are they seeing us more or less clearly?
Throughout Pick-Up, when she’s not arguing with Ethan, Sasha begins to open her eyes to how her identity has morphed over the years, for the better and worse. So, in some ways, the character of Kaitlin becomes not only an observer of Sasha’s story, but also Sasha’s own shadow self, an example of what happens when we allow ourselves to be so weighed down by our past self-concepts that we convince ourselves we are failing in our present.
Classically in romance, there are—of course—two players who fall in love. But maybe, if we dig a little deeper, there are actually myriad characters who have their own valid versions of our main characters’ stories: the friends, the enemies, the onlookers, the interlopers, even the past versions of the characters themselves.
Photo of Nora Dahlia by Rich Wade.