My family clearly hates me. Because if they didn’t hate me, they wouldn’t have left me alone in the house with all this sugar! SUGAR! It’s yelling at me! Taunting me! Provoking me! The only way to get it to shut up is to eat it. And so I have.
Have I mentioned that my tummy doesn’t feel so good right now?
Anyway, I believe we have officially entered the “tween” years for my son, that glorious on-the-cusp-of-puberty boyness, which makes him swing violently from scared boy who crawls into our bed after a nightmare to too cool for you lackadaisical teen. I can’t keep up.
The other night I insisted that he put on clean underwear. “Keep your freakin’ junk clean!” I yelled at him. “Clean underwear is not optional!”
He protested that his junk is just fine dirty.
“Clean underwear. NOW!”
Finally he relented. “But you have to leave for me to change?”
Indignant I said, “You’re my little boy! What do you mean I have to get out?”
And he told, “Mom, even little boys need privacy sometimes.”
Fine. But this morning, when he woke up in my bed. Get that? In my room. Not his. I woke him up gently. Well, as gently as I could. I jumped on him and whispered in his ear, “Spell spiny,” which is one of the words on his test.
Eyes still closed, he whispered, “S-p-i-n-y.”
And that’s when I yelled, “Get up get up get up!” (This is all making you wish you lived in my house, isn’t it?). I started to get dressed myself. “Get up! Get up! Get up!”
The boy peeks open an eye. “No!” he said, closing his eyes and burying his head. “I don’t want to see that! I’m not getting up till you have your bra on!”
Twerp.
He’s also obsessed with Mad magazine, and he is constantly trying to read their jokes to me, not realizing that I read Mad as a child myself, and he’s not going to read me anything I haven’t heard. I’m pretty sure their Justin Bieber jokes are all just recycled David Cassidy jokes from my childhood. But he insists. I finally told him, “I’m cooking. I cannot understand your mumbling while I’m doing other things.”
“But I really want to read it to you, Mom!” he said.
“I can’t listen now!” I told him.
“You don’t have to listen,” he said. “Just pretend like you’re listening.” And then I suddenly realized that when I tell him to do something twenty times, and he seems to be paying attention… The gears are clicking into place. That twerp.
That boy. Did I mention my tummy? I think that candy bar on the counter might fix it. I need to get all of my sugar fixes in now, as I told Pie I’d give up sugar in the new year. But that’s a story for another day.
