I'm still a ID Mom although my baby loves the death metal musings of Slipknot

This is my latest ill kept secret: 1D is my jam and videos of the 1D boys in interviews are my happy place even in my Menopausal Mom years.

For those of you are reading this blog carefully --- at this point I think that is a couple of  my sisters and my fellow Menopausal Mom, Kim and I really want to thank you all -- you may have detected a few trends.
1) I'm having a hard time my daughter growing up so fast.
2) I like to listen to One Direction. I listen to them to work out. I listen to them in the car and do some enthusiastic if not elegant car dancing.
3) The first thing I am working on. The second thing makes me both ridiculously happy and a little embarrassed.

The three are actually tied together. I started to like 1D because my daughter loved them. I remember the car ride to Wal-Mart where I was like, ok, there are five of them? Harry has brown hair? Niall is the Irish one. Who is Liam?
She laughed a lot. For months I could never get them straight. They were just a meld of Justin Beiber hair and British accents. 

 This is 1D in what fans call the "Fetus" stage because they were such babies. BTW. That's, left to right, Liam, Louis, Harry, Niall and Zayn.

And when I say she loved them. She really loved them. She spent hours watching videos of them. I think she sent Tweets and Instagram posts about them. She put pictures of them all over her walls. She bought magazines about them. She wanted desperately to see them. On the first day of high school I played their CD at car rattling levels because we could all sing along and I knew that would both distract her from panic and keep her breathing deeply so anxiety couldn't set in while we waited in what seemed like an hour-long line.

When they announced they were touring the  U.S. lthough I didn't really have the money I got her two sets of tickets, one in Lville and one in Nashville, as soon as they went on sale. The tour would be an year later but was already selling out. It was more than $300 which is more than I've spent in my life on anything other than a car or a major appliance. My wedding dress was less expensive.

This a pictures of her looking extremely happy because of the tickets to Lville.

So how did I get sucked in? When they hit it big, in the 2011, she took this ridiculously extended vacation to Florida. (A blog for another day.) She was gone for a month. We had never been apart for a month. I really missed her. I started watching 1D interviews on YouTube because it made me feel closer to her. (Weird, maybe, but not even close to the weirdest thing I've ever done as a mother.) Before I knew it, for the first time in my life, seriously, I was a fan who knew not only the music of a band, but the back story. (Don't get me started about how they aren't really a band. Just because they don't play instruments doesn't mean they aren't a band. Just ask Twitter. I dare you.)

When I was the age of the most ardent ID fans, I thought getting really invested in any celebrity was just stupid. I never dreamed about marrying one of the Cassidy boys because I knew, even at 10, that I would never meet them. I have never been an uber fan of anything. It must be some kind of pathological fear of commitment.

But soon I knew enough about 1D to help my friend's daughter make a great sign for the concert they went to, when they were four rows back from the stage that said "I Heart Niall and Nando's" a nod to the Irish-one's favorite restaurant. The sign got a thumbs up from the real Niall (OMG!) and a nod to my friend when Harry had a shout out to all the "1D Mums" who've made band such a hit.  I'll admit...I'm a little jealous Harry didn't give a nod and a shout out to me.(I let my daughter take her friend with our two tickets, although I really would have liked to go.)

I love them so that I have made her promise multiple times to play One Direction's  Live While We're Young as a surprise to the guests at the end of my funeral. (In advance, you are invited to attend. Hopefully you will all forget by then and it will still be a surprise. If not, pretend for my sake.)

Look at the boys all grown up.

But my Middle Aged Mom fan status also shows the depth and power of social media. The people handling these guys did a great job early on taking questions on Instagram and Twitter creating live stream chats. Teen and preteen Directioners are a true, fast-typing force of nature. This Matt Lauer recently learned after an apparent diss of member Zayn on the Today show. http://et.tv/1zCWLig

I think he got death threats..

But the 1D handlers were also genius in marketing  to the parents, especially Moms. In the first movie about the band there were sequences about all of their mothers and how they missed their boys. They were all so young and so scared it tugged on my maternal heart strings and I also felt for their, mostly, middle aged moms.

Being a 1D Mom is kind of a thing. So I am not alone by any measure. On Twitter girls brag about their Moms being 1DAF. Some naive moms think it means One Direction Always and Forever but it really means something that rhymes with As Duck but starts with the second word beginning with an F.  It is meant, I believe, as a compliment.

I don't know if I am that far in but I do know for certain that while my girl has moved onto the death metal musings of SlipKnot........

I'm not moving along with her.