Make me feel like a woman? Are ya kidding?

Dating, for me, comes with a caveat.

Unlike other men and women I've run into into in my online dating chronicles, my kids come first.

I had them later in life. They still need me in their different ways, and preoccupy much of my time and thoughts.

Actually, they will probably always come first, tipping the ledger towards the maternal as contrasted with the amorous.

Not that a little ooo lah lah wouldn't be nice. A glean in the eye, a flutter of the lashes, a flush of the cheeks...I'm not hopeless, ya know.

I also am painfully aware of how fast time rushes by, and how soon even my son will be gone on to his own adventures.  At that point, I'll HAVE to create a life wide enough to welcome them, and yet allow room for adult adventures.

But I don't understand the whole idea that I have sacrificed much, and that it's now "my time" (come to think of it, that's the name of a senior dating site, isn't it)?

Gross me out. Eeewww.  Even the painful elements in this pilgrimage haven't been a sacrifice -- although they have come close to driving me to the madwoman's attic.

Now and then, a man says to me that it's time to think of myself first -- that he will court me and treat me like a woman, not a mom.

Excuse me? Does that mean that mothers are, by definition, not female?

This flummoxes me. By no means a selfless person, or martyrdom's candidate from Chester County, I am not aware of having let anyone else take precedence.

Perhaps it's because I lost my mom and brother in my thirties, before I'd gotten married.

Maybe it's because I am gun shy about romantic relationships.

Could it possibly be that my stammering arises from my inability to separate my well-being from that of my dependent children?

Aw, heck. I know not why.

What I do know is that a guy who imagines that he can make a "real woman" out of this exurban mom doesn't understand that he's got a woman standing right in front of him -- who doesn't need to be set free from her children's shackles.

The tapestries of their lives are part of who she is, and will become -- and the man who accepts this may find that she does not need to be enticed.