About Me

Woman, reader, writer, wife, mother of two sons, sister, daughter, aunt, friend, state university professor, historian, Midwesterner by birth but marooned in the South, Chicago Cubs fan, Anglophile, devotee of Bruce Springsteen and the 10th Doctor Who, lover of chocolate and marzipan, registered Democrat, practicing Christian (must practice--can't quite get the hang of it)--and menopausal.
Names have been changed to protect the teenagers. As if.

Thursday, December 6, 2012

My Towels

I apologize, oh blog people, for my absence. I have been frozen in a state of teenager-induced psychosis.

Why is it that parenting a teenager so rapidly reduces one to teenagerdom?

Hugh was heading back to school. The bus was waiting. We'd had a horrid weekend, a horrid week, a horrid month. As I handed him his various bags (it is amazing what this child needs for 5 days; every weekend it's like moving day), I realized he had packed my towels. The good ones. Not the ones I bought him for school but my towels. "Wait," I say. "What are these? Why do you have these towels?" He shrugs. "I don't have any towels. I don't know what happened to mine."

I'm immediately pitched into a state of outrage. "Well, FIND THEM! And you can't have these towels. These are my towels."

He shifts seamlessly into fighting mode. "I just told  you, I DON'T KNOW WHERE THEY ARE. Are you deaf? And these aren't your towels; they're MY towels."

We're in a parking lot. People are watching. People are waiting. People are judging.

"What do you mean, they're YOUR towels? These aren't YOUR towels!"

"Yes, they are! They were in MY linen closet."

"YOUR linen closet? Don't you mean MY linen closet, in MY house, paid for with MY salary?"

And on and one we go.

Needless to say, when the bus pulls away, Hugh is on it and so are my towels. And my self-respect. And the last few bits of my sanity.

God, he was such a cute baby.