Posted: Sunday, August 15, 2010 10:16 pm

Wingmom adds creepy tone to summer fun
I am so glad my older boys are back in school with girls their own age.

Say what you will about the peer pressure in middle school. It’s much easier to deal with than the frightening new predator my family encountered this summer:  The wingmom.

I’m calling her the wingmom because it’s a mom who performs the same function as a wingman on a date, someone who has your back and supports you when you’re trying to, well, score a phone number, a date, or whatever, with a girl.

The problem with the wingmom is that she’s out there recruiting potential partners, not for a single-mom friend like you might think, but for her teenage daughter.

Yep, that’s right. Apparently I’ve lived this long with no clue that there are moms out there flagging down boys they don’t know to tell them their 15-year-old girls think they’re cute.

Seriously, y’all. This actually happened to us this summer. I took my twins to Nashville Shores with a bunch of their friends to celebrate their turning 14. That’s right, I said FOURTEEN.

They had been roaming the water park all day being goofy with their friends. When it was time to go, I tried to gather all six of them in one spot so we could head for the vehicle.

When I finally had three of the six back at the chairs gathering their stuff, the other three moseyed into view. I was all business in preparation for the drive back to Brentwood, but as we walked over to our chairs, a middle-aged woman who’d been lolling about in the waves suddenly yelled to one of my sons, “Hey! Hey, wait! Come here!”

I was about 10 feet ahead of the boys, per the Official Unwritten Rules for Parents of Teens, so I turned to see her talking to him while pointing to someone out in the water. At first I was concerned and wondered if he had hurt her child in the wave pool or something. Then he kind of laughed, shook his head and came over to the chairs.

“What did she want?” I asked.

He didn’t answer at first but kept shaking his head while laughing a bit.

“Um, she wanted me to meet her daughter,” he finally said. His friends were laughing too.

“What?!” I asked. “Her daughter? Why did she want you to meet her daughter?”

“I don’t know,” he said, trying to put on a damp shirt. “She wanted to know what school I went to because her daughter is 15 and wanted to meet me.”

As he told me these few details, my mind flashed to thoughts of Facebook stalkers, articles I’d read about appropriate parental boundaries, and future TV news reports about a Brentwood mom arrested for murder at Nashville Shores.

“Are you kidding me?” I asked my son. “That is so wrong!” I grew angrier by the minute. I was about to head over to that mom and tell her to back off my son when he grabbed his bag and started walking.

“Let’s just go,” my son said, and we did, though I gave that heifer the stink-eye all the way past the wave pool.

 A couple of weeks later I found out that this same thing happened to another friend’s son at a hotel pool. During their vacation, the dad had taken the two boys to swim while the mom and daughter stayed in the room. After about 20 minutes, a woman approached him in a very, um, friendly manner.

At first the dad didn’t know if she was hitting on him or his ninth-grade son. It soon became clear, though, that she had a double date in mind for her and her teen girl.

Folks, that just ain’t right. If the roles were reversed and a dad was approaching 14-year-old girls he didn’t know to introduce them to his son, it wouldn’t be long until his name was on a list prohibiting him from living within 1,000 feet of a school or day care.

I’ll tell you one thing. if it happens again when I’m around, I’ll be sure to introduce the next wingmom to my friend Mama Bear.

 Jill Burgin calls her column “Joyride” because you never know where she’ll end up. E-mail her at tjburgin@comcast.net.