Big fan. Read all your books. Can't wait for you to finish your next one! Anyway, I have a question. I'm a straight 24-year-old female. When I was 18 I was hooking up with this SUPER hot guy who was a friend of my brother. I then got a boyfriend who I was with for over four years. Hot guy and I stopped talking because he was kind of a dick. While we were hooking up he would occasionally pick me up at my mom's house. They met maybe three times for a total of 15 minutes. My mom is a good looking lady. I have had friends who have had crushes on her. When I would come home from college, I would sometime witness my mom bring young guys home from the bar—one I remember being 26!—and my mom made lots of comments about hot guys in their twenties.

My boyfriend and I broke up about a year and a half ago. I finished graduate school and moved back to my hometown for the summer and reconnected with hot guy. He apologized for being a dick and we started a quasi-friendship which ended up with us making out in his pool. After this happened, he disclosed to me that my Mom had messaged him on facebook two years ago. He showed me the message:

Hey! how r u?! how was ur week? im @ [college my brother attended]. love it here! Have fun whatever u do tonight! Signed [my mom]

I texted her confronting her about it and basically stating that I knew her intentions. She called me and acted dumb. She then told me she looked in her inbox and could not find the message. She then tried to make me feel guilty for insinuating that she would try to do that. The subject was quickly dropped and I let it go. Fast forward to last week. I moved away and my mom came to visit. She left her Facebook open. I looked in her messages—yeah, yeah: privacy, balh blah blah—and found the message! She didn't even bother to delete it! I took a picture as evidence. So not only did she send it and then lie to me about it, she sent it, lied about it, and tried to make me feel guilty that I would accuse her of sending it!

My mom has a live in boyfriend now and thankfully hot guy never responded to her message so the point is pretty moot. But I am 100% sure what her intentions were and it makes me disgusted. What the hell do I do? I feel like I have 3 options.

1. Confront her, call her a liar, get into a massive fight, stop talking.
2. Ignore it and move on.
3. Leave it for now until she does something equally as shitty—I give it a couple months!—and I throw this in her face.

Mom Made Moves On My Ex-FWB

P.S. I am not on my home computer right now. But if you respond I'll send you pictures of my hot ex!

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So...

You're mad at your mom for being a middle-aged parent who likes hot guys in their twenties and isn't above making a play for her daughter's hot ex. And in the hopes of getting a response, MMMOMEFWB, you bribe me pictures of that same hot ex. You do realize that I'm a middle-aged parent too, right? And that by choosing to respond to your letter I have revealed myself to be no better than your mother?

Please send the promised pictures at your earliest convenience.

Look, MMMOMEFWB, some middle-aged women like to sleep with much-younger men. People started calling them "cougars" a decade or so ago and then cougars became a "thing" and then they became a sitcom and now they're dead. (Google "Demi Moore" and "Ashton Kutcher" and read up on world historical events.)

Demi and Ashton are no more, sadly, but there are still women out there who like to sleep with much-younger men. Your mom is one of those women. And there are still younger men out there who like sleeping with middle-aged women. I believe your mother introduced you to one or two when you were home from college, no?

Where am I going with this? Here, I guess...

I'm not sure why you're so angry at your mom, MMMOMEFWB. The Facebook message Mr. Hot showed you—and I am still waiting for those pictures—didn't tell you anything about your mom that you didn't already know. She likes younger guys. There's something creepy about her hitting on your ex-FWB and your mother's denial could charitably be interpreted as an admission of creepguilt on her part. But your mom didn't hit on Mr. Hot while you were with him. And one random, ill-advised, and humiliating Facebook message ≠ a sustained assault on Mr. Hot's virtue. And your mom didn't hit on him until long after you had fallen out of touch with him. So... it could've been worse, right?

Frankly, MMMOMEFWB, it sounds to me like your mom's antics grossed you out when you were forced to witness them—all those young men stumbling around her house in the middle of the night, all those friends of yours who had crushes your on your mom (not necessarily her fault, of course, but perhaps she encouraged them)—and now you're attaching a lot of free-floating anger to a silly lie she told about a humiliating Facebook message that she probably regrets sending. If you're angry with your mother for not being an adult when you were a kid—or not being the adult you needed her to be—then be angry with her for that. And you have a right to be upset about that. It does sound like your mom was too busy chasing after young adults to parent one.

Back to the options for lay out for yourself:

1. Confront her, call her a liar, get into a massive fight, stop talking.
2. Ignore it and move on.
3. Leave it for now until she does something equally as shitty—I give it a couple months!—and I throw this in her face.

If you don't like the person your mother is, MMMOMEFWB, then you shouldn't go with option 1 or option 3, as both options require you to act like her. Confront and fight, wait for a fight and confront—those are choices that would appeal to an immature person. So go with option 2: let it go.

And by "it" I mean the stupid Facebook message. If you want to have a conversation with your mom about the way her youngmanizing made you feel uncomfortable when you were a teenager and young adult, go ahead and have a conversation with her about that.

Now send those pics.

P.S. I finished my next book earlier this week. You can pre-order it now by going here.