I still eat kiddie cereals every now and then. I get the tiny travel-sized boxes so they don’t get stale in between my infrequent cereal moods. I guess that’s why the guy at the grocery store assumed I had kids.

“Picking up the kid at three today?” he asked me as he rang up my items at the checkout lane.

“Uh, no,” I replied, confused because I’d totally forgotten I had the cereal there and couldn’t figure out why he’d say that. “It’s just me and the cat.”

And because I’d forgotten about the cereal, my mind was a bewildered storm of questions. Do I look like a mother? Am I getting long in the tooth? Do my jeans fit like mom jeans? Why would he assume that I had kids old enough to be in school?

It got me thinking about all the times that H.E. has referred to me as a MILF. He means it as a compliment, of course, but it’s a little hard to see it as one because MILF stands for Mother I’d Love to … let’s say, Frisk. Just replace the letters R-I-S with another two letters, you see, and you’d have something a little more fun than frisk. Anyway, MILF is just another way of saying Hottie With Kids.

The only problem is that I don’t have any kids, never had any, not even a little bit. So it feels like he is trying to tell me that I look like I’ve had a couple of children—i.e., I’m hot despite that obvious rubber tire around my supposedly stretched-from-pregnancy waist and what must surely be a stretched-to-impossible-proportions hooha. That’s not what he means at all, so he assures me, but that’s the implication my wacky mind creates.

H.E. used to call me a hottie. A babe. Eye candy. Then I hit my late twenties and early thirties, and now I’m a MILF.

Granted, he has always referred to me as Mommy when talking to the cat, so I guess in a way I’m a mother. But I just want to be reassured that I don’t look like some middle-aged hottie stuffed into mom jeans before my time.

So I panicked a little when the checkout guy assumed I had kids, and all of these mid-life crisis thoughts flitted through my head.

Then I remembered the boxes of cereal and realized why he assumed what he did, and I felt a little bit better about the whole thing, though not by much. I went from feeling offended about being seen as old and motherly … to feeling embarassed about still eating kiddie cerals at my ripe old age.

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