“Would it kill them to stock diet grape soda?” I bitched, staring at the soda shelves at Walmart.

Ethan busted out laughing.

I looked down at my kid.

I’d rearranged my activities that day. Instead of hitting the store, I did some laundry, paid my bills, and cleaned the house before he got home.

This was because he liked going to the grocery store and he wasn’t a big fan of cleaning.

I didn’t let him totally get away with that. He had chores. He took out the trash, helped me do the dishes when I was home at night, and he had to keep his room picked up.

He got an allowance because I thought it was best he learned that you had to earn what you got. I didn’t want to shelter him, then send him out in the world so he could get blindsided about how hard you had to work just to afford decent. I wanted him to know even as I was careful not to bog him down in that crap.

So he got extra if he vacuumed or dusted. More if he took on the bathroom or mopped the kitchen floor. And he needed cabbage for whatever kids needed cabbage for, so he did both, often.

But I didn’t want our time together that day, a Saturday that was a full day off for me, to be about laundry and cleaning. I wanted it to be about hanging and doing shit we liked.

I wasn’t a big fan of grocery shopping, but Ethan was, so I got the crap stuff out of the way so that when he got home we could focus on the good stuff.

“Somethin’ funny?” I asked, feeling my lips quirk, even after the day I’d had and the lingering hangover that I’d had to manage without an Egg McMuffin but with pills and a fried egg on toast.

“Mom,” Ethan said through his laughter, sweeping his hand to our cart. “We got diet orange, Diet 7UP, Diet Cherry 7UP, Diet Coke, Diet Dr. Pepper, and two different kinds of Fresca. How much diet crap do you need?”

“I have to look after my girlish figure,” I retorted.

“Yeah, right,” he muttered, putting his hands to the cart and starting to push. “You do that real good with your candy stash.”

I didn’t look in the cart because I didn’t have to. We’d hit the candy aisle already and we were loaded up. My kid liked sweets, but I was a candy junkie. I had some every day, sometimes more than “some.”

I had a lot of bad habits.

I could drink my fair share of booze.

I had three drawers of makeup in the bathroom.

I knew I should filter some of the shit that came out of my mouth, but I didn’t bother.

I dressed in a way I knew people thought was more than a little skanky, but I liked it. It made me a dick magnet of the extreme variety, but even knowing this, living and breathing it, I still didn’t change. I just couldn’t bring myself to tone it down. I liked the way it looked—it was me—and I’d learned the hard way to be nothing but me.