Toothpaste and Text Messages

I saw my daughter’s boyfriend’s erect penis. I didn’t mean to do it. Really, I didn’t. But like mother like daughter.

Backing up a bit. I already knew my then teenage daughter and her boyfriend were sexually active. They’d been together for three years and I knew she was contemplating whether she wanted him to be her first. One night, when I was nestled under the covers, drained from a day spent moving my husband’s grandmother into a nursing home, my daughter came home from a date, all animated and brimming with excitement. She plopped down on my bed and asked me how I was. I took her vibrant energy and crushed it into petulant pulp with my tale of hours spent in institutional grey-green hallways amidst the scents of Lysol, urine and deterioration. I didn’t catch on that my little girl, the perky, pink antithesis of managed elder care, wanted to share the story of her own evening. I welcomed her suggestion that I just get a good night sleep and she’d catch me up on her night tomorrow.

The next morning, I sat on a stool in the back of a photography studio and watched my daughter don a red cap and gown for her Senior portraits. I was awash in the sentimentality of the milestone when her phone pinged on the makeup table next to me. “Last night was amazing babe,” said the text on her hot pink glitter-covered cell phone. And I knew, the kid had gone and done it.

I saw her blush as she checked her texts on our way home. “Mom, I wanted to tell you last night,” she said as I pulled onto Lankershim, “But you were in a geriatric funk.” The kid has a sense of humor. She said they’d used protection. She was happy they’d done it and the sex was good.

Judging by the penis I saw many months later, I would imagine it probably was. Not that I am imagining my daughter’s boyfriend in bed. Gross! But, we’ll return to the sighting in a moment.

Accidental closeness with a daughter’s boyfriend’s penis seems to be genetic. My mother was a most properly prudent Irish Catholic proponent of zero sex until marriage, and afterwards mostly just for procreation.

When I was 24, my family came to visit me in Hollywood, three years after I’d graduated college and fled my rigid East Coast upbringing. My ever-frugal parents never considered a hotel on their first trip to the West Coast, and showed up at the door of the two-bedroom apartment I shared with a friend.

           My folks slept in my bed while I had a “slumber party” with my little sisters on the living room futon. One morning, I passed my mother en route to the bathroom. I was wearing a blue velour bathrobe. “Oh honey,” mom said while instinctively dabbing her finger with saliva and scraping her nail at a spot on the collar then adding a little more saliva to her finger and going at it again, “You’ve got toothpaste on your robe.” In fact, it wasn’t toothpaste at all, but the remnants of a blowjob and possibly the first time my prim mother had ever had cum in her mouth.

When I introduced my mother to my boyfriend later that evening, my roommate and I had tears streaming down our faces trying to stifle laughter over their inadvertent closeness.

Several years and a couple boyfriends and blowjobs later, I was engaged and travelled with my fiancé to North Carolina so he could meet my extended family. We were 29 and had been living together for a year. Still, mom insisted we stay in separate rooms. That Wednesday morning, mom said she was going to the 10am mass at St. Michaels. Finally, we had some time to ourselves in my childhood home. Mass takes an hour plus a minimum ten minutes travel time each way. We had the house for at least 80 lust-filled minutes!

Mere moments after the tan Honda pulled out of the driveway and headed up Old Farm Road, we tore off our clothes, fell onto my twin bed and were quickly entangled in fiery fornication, when out of nowhere I heard the creak of the third to the top step. A sound I remembered well from childhood. The warning to lower your voice on the phone. The warning to hide the package of cigarettes. The reminder that privacy is not a thing in our house. I simultaneously pushed my soon-to-be husband out of the bed and lifted my head to see mom’s car in the driveway. My fiance sprang toward the un-lockable door just as my mother did her famous “tap-tap-then-enter” knock of my youth. The quilt was pulled up to my shoulders and I’m sure my facial expression was a priceless blend of “What-the-hell-are-you-doing-home?” And “Damn-it!-we-were-so-close!” mixed with a childish regression to “I wasn’t doing anything!”

I was focused on my mother’s righteous face and her close proximity to my boyfriend’s very erect penis turned doorstop.

“I changed my mind about mass today. Everything ok in here?” she asked, taking in the room with her practiced sweeping glance, but thankfully not looking behind the door.

  “I needed a little more rest,” I lied, wondering what she would have done with the information she’d so stealthily tried to attain? Had she glimpsed my now husband’s rather ample appendage, would it haunt her?

Like the way glimpsing my daughter’s boyfriend’s is clearly haunting me?

So, the day I became my mother, this boyfriend, whom my daughter had been dating since she was 14, was in college out-of-state. My girl was a Senior in High School and seemed unusually sullen and refused to talk to me about what was bothering her.   

When she was at school one day, I logged into imessage on her laptop, thinking maybe there was a fight going on with a friend or the long-distance romance was becoming too difficult. I scrolled backwards through a series of single word texts:

“Hey” period.

“Hey” exclamation point!

“Hey” no punctuation, and clusters of meaningless-to-me emojis, until this boy-man I’ve known since before he had reason to shave, stood buck naked in front of his dorm room mirror, the flash of his iphone shining a bright light on a glowing pink penis.

You can’t unsee such a thing. And if you’re a maternal sleuth with a puritan upbringing like me, you might look away in shock. You might slam the laptop closed and bury your head in your hands. You might spend a few seconds assessing your nausea. And you’ll pause before re-opening the laptop and further investigating the situation.

Indeed, it looks like he’s in a dorm room. It doesn’t appear anyone else is involved in the photo shoot. He doesn’t make his bed and there are red cups spilling out of the trashcan and onto the floor. A biology book is on the desk. And yes, this young man is well-endowed.

He has set the bar high for my daughter. Well good for her, I guess. It appears that the sexting is one sided and limited to this one penile shot along with an absurd attempt at a come-hither face with a sheet over a penis tent pole with the caption “I want you.” 

Thankfully, my daughter hasn’t sent any photos, but she’s apparently into phone sex, which I am grateful never to have heard. She has a session planned for Friday night and I make a quick plan to go out. Somewhere. Anywhere. I close the laptop with a grimace, open a bottle of wine and think of more pleasant images. Bunnies in flower fields. Toothpaste on bathrobes. Old folks in nursing homes. Anything but penises on iphones.

As shared at Story Salon on Wednesday, February 12, 2025 when the theme was "Oh No, You Shouldn't Have."