Season 2, Episode 3 - Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

Original Airdate - October 6th, 2022

Christine tells Emma that she and Mr. Simpson have been dating. After a little freak out about the fact that he is her teacher (including a weirdly lingering shot on her silent face before the theme song), she decides that she’s fine with it. She just doesn’t really want to talk about it. She tells Manny and swears her to secrecy and they try to see the best in their awkward teacher.

It’s the day of the Degrassi 80s dance. Junior high kids have an afternoon dance party DJ’d by none other than Mr. Simpson. The senior high kids get the cool nighttime slot. Everyone is in a good mood about it, except Emma. She’s not happy when Mr. Simpson tries to talk to her after class and make sure she’s cool with the relationship. She’s not happy when he plays his high school band’s song during the dance. And she’s definitely not happy when Craig, her crush, asks her and Manny if they’ll be there that night, and she has to admit she isn’t allowed to come.

At least she and Manny have big plans for their Friday night — a girls’ night with Christine. But even that gets ruined when Simpson scores them Elvis Costello tickets. Emma knows Christine lives for Elvis! Emma decides she’s not content to just sit on the couch with Manny. She’s pretty sure Craig has a crush on her too, and she tells Manny they should crash the senior high dance to hang out with him.

They dress up in their cool 80s costumes (see thumbnail). Manny comments that Emma looks like her mom, which pisses Emma off. Meanwhile, Craig dresses up like Sid Vicious and tells Joey he has a crush on someone. Joey gives him his signature fedora for the dance.

Emma and Manny run into Raditch at the front door, but luckily, spot Craig too. He’s thrilled to see them and sneaks them in the locked side entrance. The dance is so much better than the junior high fiasco. Instead of stupid Simpson, they have real world Toronto radio hosts Mad Dog and Billie! It’s all going great until a slow song comes on. Craig approaches the pair for a dance— and asks Manny, not Emma.

Emma tries to be supportive. She tells them they should dance. But she’s hurt, and heads home. When she gets there, she runs right into her mom and Mr. Simpson, making out outside. She storms upstairs to her room, but Christine follows. Christine yells at her daughter. Emma is being rude and moody, plus she was supposed to be home!

Emma bursts. The issue isn’t that Christine is dating Simpson, it’s that Christine is dating anyone. Emma is not used to sharing her mom, and she’s finding it hard. Plus, she feels embarrassed about the Craig situation. She knew Manny liked him, and she’s happy for her, but Emma really though she was Craig’s crush. She’s worried about losing Christine and losing Manny.

Christine comforts her. Things will be different, but they will always have their close connection. She asks Emma if she can get used to it, and Emma ends the episode admitting that she isn’t sure if she can or not.

Meanwhile in Grade 9, the senior dance includes a breakdancing competition to win hockey tickets. Spinner and Jimmy want it bad. Between Spinner’s music and Jimmy’s dancing skills, they think they have a shot. There are just two problems. First, Spinner is a terrible dancer. Second, their classmate Marco is really, really good.

Yes, that Marco. This is the first appearance of iconic homosexual Marco Del Rossi. He has zero lines and is not like his eventual character at all.

Paige tells Jimmy that if he wants any shot at those hockey tickets, he needs to cut Spinner loose. Jimmy tries to, but Spinner thinks he’s jealous, and then makes it about race. It’s a stupid freshman boy fight and ends with them deciding they’re both entering the contest solo.

At the dance, Spinner has the perfect track prepared, but Jimmy secretly switches it out. Jimmy has a great MJ costume, but definitely can’t dance in it. Spinner steals his dance costume. Jimmy rips his pants, Spinner freezes when the track is wrong, they both lose to Marco.

They find each other outside and neither quite apologizes. That was so stupid of them, and now Marco has those tickets and is surrounded by a bunch of girls. That’s got to be his dream!

There is another drive-by moment where Paige refuses to talk to Ashley. She’ll be back in a big way tomorrow, but it’s still really striking to me that she’s so absent from the start of the season!

My mother has gone through two periods of dating during my life. During the first, I was a baby and I don’t remember it. That was just fine for me. By the time I had any awareness of myself, she was remarried and everyone who read yesterday’s essay knows that nothing bad happened there!

When my mom and stepdad got divorced, I was 30. I was an adult with a fully formed frontal lobe and a life a thousand miles away. It was still extremely weird when my mom started dating.

I spent a long time telling myself a few different stories about my awkward feelings. I told myself they were inevitable and normal and not a very big deal. I told myself that I was being sensitive and needed to remember that this wouldn’t have a huge impact on my life. I told myself that whomever my mother dated or eventually married could hurt me. I was a big boy and these weren’t deep feelings.

That wasn’t incorrect, but it certainly missed the point.

One Christmas, I arrived at the airport expecting to be picked up by my mom and was surprised to see a man I’d never met. I instantly knew this was the man my mother had told me she was dating. I actually didn’t, at that point, know how serious they’d gotten. Or that he was going to move in with my mom. Or that he was joining us for all of our Christmas festivities.

This man, who is now my stepfather, is very kind. He’s quiet, but he is not annoyed by the loud silliness of my family when we get together. He laughs at my jokes, even if he doesn’t make his own back, and I think that’s okay. I didn’t know any of that when I met him.

All I knew was that I’d been sideswiped. I instantly thought about years earlier when my biological father picked me up with his surprise wife. It was triggering. My mom wasn’t supposed to be the person who forgot to tell me extremely relevant information. That was supposed to be my father.

This strange man at the airport drove an F-150 and had an accent. It was triggering. It was just like the men back home in Alabama. The men who never understood me and made me feel weird for being friends with their daughters or dancing or being smart. The men who found me too gay or too weird or generally too much. The men I needed to be scared of and avoid. Didn’t my mother know that? Why wasn’t she taking some care around that? Sure, she never really understood how weird people were to me as a kid, but we’d talked about that, right?

But the most triggering of all was watching my mother care for him. That sounds bad, but it’s true. It’s not that I wanted mommy to take care of me, it was that he was prioritized. It was extremely triggering. My stepdad’s temper and bad behavior had been prioritized over my need to feel safe for my entire childhood. Prioritized by my mother.

Bad feelings simmered in me the entire trip, and when I got back to my big boy, independent life, they overflowed. I was mad. I stayed mad for about three months. I was a bad, impatient boyfriend. I was a needy, nitpicking friend. I was a frustrated, complaining employee. It was rough. I was rough. It was anger I’d felt before. I was acting like a fucking teenager.

When I entered my first relationship since I’d been seeing my therapist, I said something incredibly naive. I told her I was glad I had worked through so many issues before this relationship started so they wouldn’t get in the way of the connection. She responded with warm pity. All of that stuff was going to come up again. We were going to have to deal with it all over again.

I didn’t expect that to happen when my mother entered a new relationship. I didn’t expect that her new connection would cause me to reprocess everything about our relationship, things I thought I had long accepted and healed.

I worked on it. I processed. I forgave some stuff and I embraced my inner child and I learned to stand my ground a little more. I learned, as I have over and over, that my mom is a human being. She has her own relationship to men. One that’s affected me. One that I’ve inherited. Her new relationship was salt in the wound and a fun house mirror.

Something happened in this episode of Degrassi that also happened in my own life. My mom made the same mistake as Christine and put her new relationship in terms of the present. In the present day aesthetics of my life, there was no reason for me to be bothered by my mom’s new boyfriend. I was an adult who lived far away. In the present day aesthetics of Emma’s situation, her only possible concern could be that Mr. Simpson is her teacher.

This is an easy mistake. A common mistake. But when it comes to our parents, things tend to live much more in the past than in the now. Maybe things were fine when I was a baby because there was no history to get in the way.