Doh

Think back, if you will, to your days on the playground. Jumping off swings, playing tag, and of course, THE ONE. That first person of the opposite sex that had found the cure for cooties. Your first crush.

Mine began probably way too early. I think it was second grade. I had just gotten contacts, so my coke bottle outcast glasses were a thing of the past. He said something insignificant, probably, like "you look different" or "you look nice". It didn't matter what it was verbatim. It was enough to capture my heart on the spot.

So, even though I was desperately in "like", I think he either wasn't interested in girls or always had someone he was "going with", which back then meant maybe an extra word or two on the GIJoe/Cabbage Patch/Garfield valentine you shoved into your homemade shoeboxes-in-tissue paper Mailboxes.

You adore him from afar until suddenly, middle school hits, and people start resorting themselves into new groups. (I went to a small school. The people in kindergarten were basically the same people you graduated with. It puzzled me how even in that rather contained society, different clicks formed.) Anyway, by the time you get to high school, somehow you ended up in a different group than he is. Yeah, you still have nearly all the same classes, and you even participate in the same extracurricular activities. But somehow, you are invisible to him. He knows you exist, he must. But he doesn't seem to notice.

So forget him, right? You move on to bigger and better crushes, and have other relationships, and life goes on. But in the dark, cobwebby recesses of your mind, he is still there.

Ten years later, you are wheeling your daughter around a grocery store. She has just spilled water all over herself and she hates being wet, so without a dry pair of pants, she is sitting in a diaper. She refuses to keep her hair in a pony, or a barette, or a braid. Her style of choice is messy, bedhead, covering her eyes hair. You yourself are 7 months pregnant, in a frumpy pair of capris which do nothing for your legs, but you wear them because they are comfy and you are 7 months pregnant. Your maternity shirt likely has some sort of stain on it because you live with a two-year old. You didn't put on makeup that morning because your husband is "away" and who are you trying to impress anyway. Your hair is a wreck from taking your daughter to the park earlier, and let's face it, you haven't done much with it lately anyway.

Around the frozen pizzas, there HE is. He recognizes you. You even chat a couple of minutes on your current lives. As he walks away, you realize his last memory of you as the salutatorian/track star/quiz bowl and math relays anchor/actress girl of years ago has now been replaced with Mrs. Frumpy Housewife and her unkempt, half-naked daughter "It". Whatever visions you had in your head of that reunion where you are so dynamic and put-together that he grinds his teeth over what he could have had but passed over are completely shot to hell!

As Homer Simpson would say, "DOH!"