michelle's photo response

Kimi, great photo. Here's my quick response...

"Playing House"

Mike and Mia always got to play the Mom and Dad, because they were the oldest. Mike knew the moves. He would survey the neighborhood cooly, and speak without looking at anyone else, the way fathers with real authority would.

"Looks like the Jamisons are going at it again," he'd say, as they watched a chair fly across the space framed by their neighbors' bedroom window. Or, "I'll have to get myself one of those," as Max walked by, showing off his new watch. Mike would shift his weight to the other foot with great gravity, and look off into the distance, deep in thought.

Mia would stand behind him, supportively, as she had seen mothers do. She would smile at passersby, and nod in agreement to anything Mike would say. Sometimes she would gently pat his shoulder.

Ama tried to keep up. She knew the moves, but not as well. She would break into giggles at the wrong time, or hop up and down on one foot when she was supposed to be looking seductive. She wasn't very good at wearing the mask. It always fell off, or would come down over one eye. This is why, Mike and Mia explained, she never got to play the mom.

Except that never made any sense to her. Their own mom would often break into giggles while she was doing her hair, at some private thought or memory. She would sometimes hop up and down on one foot when excitedly greeting their father. Her love was expressive, jubilant, childlike.

And their father, in turn, never had the right watch. He looked at their mother way too often and too respectfully during conversations (he even listened, enraptured, to her stories). Theirs were not the mom and dad of the TV commercials, or even the ones they saw next door.

So Mia and Mike would try to create that normalcy, that structure. Each morning, they would put on the masks and perform their roles for the neighborhood; a signpost to the world that everything was as it should be.

But Ama, too young to understand, could never keep up. They usually tried to ignore her, hoping that, with time, she would eventually learn the rules.