Teen Love Gets in Way of Mom’s Nights Out

The first thing we do, let’s kill the boyfriends.

With apologies to Shakespeare, the thought keeps floating through my mind. . . .

I’m sure they’re nice enough young fellows. Michael and Jason and Dana and Jon . . . these boyfriends who keep infringing on my baby-sitters’ time, whose social schedules have come to dictate mine.

As in: You need me to baby-sit on Friday? Lemme check with my boyfriend first, to see if he’s already made plans.

Or worse. I know I promised I’d watch the girls tomorrow night, while you go on that dinner cruise you’ve planned for weeks--and already bought a new dress and had your hair done for--but my boyfriend just scored these really great tickets for the Lenny Kravitz concert and he’s been wanting to see him, like, for forever, so I really have to go with him. But maybe another time, OK?

No, it’s not OK . . . but it’s clear there is little--certainly not the lure of $8 an hour or the thought of another night watching “Clueless” with my kids--that I can offer to match the draw of young romance.

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I knew when I wound up single six years ago that whatever social life I could muster would have to be squeezed around the schedules of my three little girls. But I never knew that my plans would also be subject to the caprice of a bunch of teenage boys.

I’ve followed the advice of my friends with kids. The best sitters, they said, are young girls with minimal needs and rudimentary social lives. So I courted 14-year-olds, and learned to plan my outings around their early curfews and softball practices, their mall excursions and sleepovers with friends.

There were certain upsides as my sitters grew older. My life got easier as they learned to cook, to drive. And they seldom turned down my invitations, because they had strong financial incentives. Someone had to pay for car insurance, tongue rings, manicures . . . the necessities of their new lives.

For a moment, it was a single mom’s nirvana; their maturity signaled my freedom. Then it ended as quickly as it began, as boyfriends came marching on the scene, wooing them with the prospect of an evening at the bowling alley or a night spent snuggling on the couch, watching “Austin Powers” again.

I suppose I’m luckier than some mothers. My oldest child is now 15, and I can often count on her to tend her sisters. But she has baby-sitting jobs of her own and a social life that eclipses her mom’s.

And so far I have avoided the crises that have afflicted friends of mine. My neighbor was once summoned home from a party by a sitter who’d just had a fight with her boyfriend, and was too distraught to do anything more than sit alone in the dark and cry, while the toddlers in her care ran wild.

Who would have thought, we mused, that 30 years out of adolescence, we’d still be held hostage by young love?

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Sometimes I want to lecture these girls about priorities and responsibilities; to warn them not to give in to the whims of a man, however cute his dimples or tight his abs.

But I can’t . . . because I was once 17, with a boyfriend I doted on, whose comings and goings dictated mine.

I went through high school wearing a heart-shaped necklace, with a notch cut from it in the shape of a key. “He who holds the key can unlock my heart,” the card that came with it said.

The key was fastened around the neck of my boyfriend, my gift to signal our undying love . . . and warn other girls that he was off-limits.

But it conveyed a different message to our history teacher--a “woman’s libber,” the football coach called her--who spent her free time volunteering at the rape crisis center and trying to kindle a spark of feminism among love-struck young women like me.

“Why does he have the key?” she’d ask me, as I hung around her classroom waiting for my boyfriend after school. “That’s the power . . . the key. You’re too smart for this. Let him wear the heart, you keep the key.”

It didn’t mean much to me then; I didn’t see power, only romance.

But now--as a middle-age woman raising three girls--her message comes roaring back to bite me, circumscribing my life in ways I never would have dreamed.

And I feel as helpless now as I must have seemed then, as I probe and try to make these girls ponder: “So, does your boyfriend call you when they ask him to work late at the market? He always checks with you before he goes surfing, right?”

But I cannot compete with their boyfriends’ attention. So I bargain, instead, for a little of their time:

“Can you come for maybe an hour? Pick up this daughter from soccer practice, drop that one off at a birthday party? How about you bring your boyfriend along . . . everybody goes to a movie. My treat! ‘Big Momma’s House’ . . . ‘X-Men.’ Is there anything you haven’t seen? Just a couple hours is all I need. . . .

“You see, my boyfriend just called, and he’s got the evening free. Can you dump your boyfriend, so I can see mine?”

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Sandy Banks’ column is published on Sundays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.