Monday, March 5, 2012

I'm an idiot, did you know?

Sam is fifteen now and a full-fledged teenage boy with everything that goes with it.  He thinks he knows eeeeeeeverything and that 99.9 percent of the rest of humanity are total idiots who don't know what they are doing.  Teenagers are annoying.  I hope with all my heart and soul that this is a phase and he is right now at the rock bottom of it and on his way back up to his old careful, sweet self because frankly I'm tired of being the idiot mean mom who is ruining his life.  What do I do that is so mean?  I'll give you an example.

The other weekend he told me he had plans to go ice fishing with his friend.  Okay, whatever.  That friend lives right on a lake so I had envisioned them walking out a couple dozen yards and drilling a hole and fishing. No problem. The days leading up to said fishing trip Sam leaked out some more details of his plan.  They were going to have to snowmobile out to where they wanted to fish.  It was just going to be the two of them.  Sam was going to borrow his grandpa's ridiculously overpowered snowmobile that goes over a hundred miles an hour.  I had to put the kibosh on the plans because it was a recipe for disaster.  The ingredients:

1) stupidly overpowered motorized vehicles
2) wanting to use these machines and drive them too fast over a body of frozen water where neither one of them knows about currents and the subsequent varying thickness of ice.
3) No adult supervision except maybe the friend's mom's boyfriend-of-the-month who I've never met which I suspect was just something Sam made up to make me feel better about the whole thing, but had the exact opposite effect.
4) The tendency of teen boys to try to out-macho each other which in this case would, of course, manifest itself in a high speed race.
5) When I expressed my concerns to Sam, he assured me that he knows absolutely EVERYTHING about ice and snowmobiling on ice, even though he's only ever done it once.  And he thinks I'm an idiot for thinking that ice can vary in thickness.  (Insert sarcastic tone here) "It's all four feet thick, Mom. There's nothing dangerous about it."  I told him a story that still haunts me about a family (mom, dad, baby) driving on the ice roads on Rainy Lake about ten years ago.  Their car went over a patch of thin ice and went through.  The car sunk in about 20 feet of water.  The baby was strapped into her carseat.  The dad dove down over and over until he was almost dead trying to get their baby out, but he couldn't.  Sam's response:  "That's too bad, but that guy was an idiot.  You don't strap a baby into a carseat on ice.  Everyone knows that; and cars don't sink, [idiot], they have tires filled with air." I love him dearly, but sometimes when he talks I just want to punch him in the face.  And then I feel bad for wanting to punch him in the face.

Ugh.

So there was no snowmobile trip.  Now I'm the mean bitch that is keeping him from having any fun in his life.  I miss the safety conscious little boy who built a tree-house on the ground because he thought a rickety dwelling built in a tree by a nine-year-old wasn't a very good idea.  I miss the boy who used to do the limbo like this:


And surfed like this:


and had the humor and self-deprecation to make fun of himself and his safety conscious ways by riding around on his scooter like this purely for the entertainment of his mother:


I'm convinced that is unfounded confidence in his abilities and the ridiculous assumptions he makes about things he knows nothing about are going to get him maimed or killed, and I'm still his mother, right?  It's still my job to raise him and protect him, right?  Yes.  Unfortunately in his eyes I'm just a fun-ruining worry wart who is dragging him down.

Ugh.

Oh, and this is the year he gets his driver's license.  Is there any way I can put him into a drug-induced coma to protect him from himself for the next five or six years?

6 comments:

  1. As a mother who survived 3 teenage boys, all I can say is good luck with that!

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  2. You just wait til Kira gets there...girls are bitches and trust me, you'd rather have an arrogant, idiotic Sam than a hormonal Kira...I've got one growing now...she's 10.5, and she might not make it til 11....hormones are a bitch and so will SHE be!

    Oh, and I remember that accident...so tragic and if he can make an assinine comment about an innocent baby dying and parents losing their baby, then he doesn't DESERVE to go on that trip. Period.

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  3. Hi Eva! I've missed you! I hope you are having fun on your trip.

    Oh Stacie, don't say that girls are worse. I don't think I can take it. I think I can handle bitchiness and hormones better than I can handle people who think they know it all and think I'm an idiot. Of course, she will think I'm an idiot too.

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  4. I don't have teenagers yet. I still have about ten years until I get to that point. But thank you for sufficiently scaring the living shit out of me. How will I have patience for teenagers?!

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  5. Well, we survived 2 boys and a girl through their teen years. You will too, and that's because you're a good mom.

    I really hated that period were they learned to drive. Is there a law in your state about how many teens can be in a car at the same time? Because that's a great law.

    What a hilarious picture of Sam doing the limbo!!!! Some day he'll love it too.

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  6. what cracks me up is how when i read stuff like this i'm always, "oh, don't be so hard on teenagers! they're borderline retarded thanks to hormones and their brains being wired funky! give them a break!" but when it comes to my teen and tween, i feel the same way. exasperated and frustrated and wanting to yell, "do you hear what you are saying to me?!" common sense abandons kids when the hormones and growing hits. i'm all kinds of compassionate and patient with the kids who aren't making my house a mess and on the phone/computer for hours, and hours, and hours a day. and the eye rolling! the sarcasm! ugh. if we make it through, just think, we'll get empty houses where we can make out with our husbands where ever, and when ever we want. keep that in mind!

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