I have three sons. My oldest just turned twenty and has moved back into the realm of sanity upon leaving his teen years behind. Well, mostly. Occasionally, there’s some backsliding, but for the most part, I can talk to him like a rational human being and receive rational responses back again. Oh, how I cherish those moments, because, you see, my other two boys are still teenagers.

Driving home today, I listened to an interview on the radio of a playwright whose latest movie was being released on DVD. The movie (which I won’t name) has a scene between a teenage daughter and her mother, and they played it on the radio. The mother asked a simple question, like “How do I look in this dress?”, which apparently opened her up for a ration of vitriol from the daughter. Repeatedly the mother kept saying, “Why are you talking to me like this?” I found myself saying to the radio, “Tell me about it, sister.” Not a good sign. I was glad the boys weren’t in the car with me because I’m fair certain that talking to the radio would be grounds to have me moved immediately to a home.

The sad fact is I said the very thing myself last night. I stood in my middle son’s room and shouted at him, “Why are you talking to me like this?” What prompted the spewing vomit of verbal abuse – his test scores came in lower than what he’d expected. Now, I didn’t take the test, I didn’t even write the test, but somehow I am responsible for his performance on it and in his hormone-sauced mind, I caused his less than stellar results. To further demonstrate his pique, our golden retriever, who always sleeps in his room, was banished last night. When she crawled onto my bed with a weary sigh, I said to her, “So you’re being punished too?” As of now, he’s still not talking to me. I’ve been reduced to communication by text message and you know what, I’m good with it.

However, my youngest son wanted his turn at the Mommy punching-bag this morning. I asked him to help me cart a load of books to the State Fair where I will be selling them the following day. He agreed, but once we got there, he decided to stack all of the boxes on top of the hand-truck at once. When I suggested we might want to strap them down, I got the death-stare. Like a deer being hunted, I can scent an impending explosion of verbal gun-fire, so I watched with raised eyebrows as he muscled the entire, precarious pile onto the wheels and headed for the building without even looking at the load. Of course, the boxes slid off and burst open. As he’s picking up books and tossing them willy-nilly back into the box, I said, “You know, those are sort of money for me.” Cue the insanity. Not only was I wrong because I thought we might slow the pace just a little and cause less damage, but then he shouted at me, “Who the hell puts books in boxes!” People walking by our literary road-kill looked over as I stood there just staring at him, wondering if there was even an answer to that bit of verbal madness.

Now I don’t want to give the impression that my boys are always so unreasonable. As a general rule, they are the best sons a mother could have. They’ve never given me a moment of trouble, are excellent students, and contribute to their community. It’s just that sometimes…sometimes, the teenage brain goes haywire and logic is non-existent.

Today, as I stood there amid the detritus of my writing career, feeling embarrassed as my teenager yelled nonsense at me in front of my peers, I soothed myself with the thought that I too could have revenge. I too could get even. According to him, I am far more embarrassing than he is. I envisioned myself standing in the bleachers at his baseball game as he comes up to bat, screaming at the top of my lungs, “Who the hell takes a called strike! Hit the frickin’ ball, damn it!” But instead, I’ll just sit in my chair and mutter quietly under my breath, praying with every ounce of my soul that he’ll get a homerun.

Ah, parenthood. It’s a freakin’ joy, ain’t it?