On Monday, July 17^th, my son will become a teenager. Yep, just two months after I turned 40, I’ll become the parent of someone who thinks me an idiot, who defies me just to get a reaction, and who rebels against me for the sheer pleasure of doing so. I’m truly looking forward to it.

To be honest, I find it much easier to relate to my son now that he is older. We have much more in common than when he was younger (sports, music, politics, and spicy food as opposed to Pokemon, dead bugs, mud, and boogers). Moreover, he is, in my opinion (on most days), turning out to be a decent kid: he does well in school, has achieved a second degree black belt in karate, is now working daily to learn to better play guitar, and is a young man who is decidedly dedicated to thinking for himself. He does have strong opinions and, when he is not overwhelmed with the need to express himself exclusively by using eye rolls and heavy sighs (as is wont for his age and gender), he expresses those opinions fairly well.

He does, however, have table manners that would embarrass a gorilla. And, in spite of the fact that his man-stink glands developed at a fairly young age, he has a dramatic aversion to personal hygiene products (like soap, deodorant, toothpaste, etc).

So I do the usual Mom-thing: I bitch. Sit up straight. Use your napkin. Clean up after yourself. Speak more clearly. Tie your shoes. Zip your pants—where the hell are your pants?

But I have, perhaps, been a bit neurotic about things that other moms would ignore. Yes, I'll admit that if there were a support group, on Monday nights, I’d sheepishly stand up in a poorly-lit room and introduce myself to a circle of strangers: my name is Ann and I’m a grammar Nazi.

I have been somewhat aware of this for a while, specifically because of my habit of repeating my son’s statements back to him as questions, pleading in that maternal way for him to correct his grammatical mistake. “I’m doing good?” I’ll ask, as though I couldn’t quite hear him. Sometimes he’ll realize his mistake and utter the corrected version, followed by that look that says to me that I’ve gone too far in demanding better English skills. He has learned a trick, however, that he thinks automatically resolves any grammar issue between us: he adds “Ma’am” to the end of the sentence. “I’m doing good, Ma’am.” It works only insofar as it makes me laughs, diverts my focus.

Recently, however, I noticed that my grammar-Nazi tendencies were beyond the typical parental steering of a child--I have reached the point where intervention is, perhaps, appropriate. This startling realization came to me when Fran announced, beaming, “I taught Rocky a new trick!” I asked what she’d done and when she replied, “I taught him to lay down,” I recoiled in horror.

“You did what? You are going to have to ‘unteach’ him whatever it is you think you’ve ‘taught’ him!” Fran stood there, stammering, trying to explain that what she’d done was a good thing—she’d taught the dog to assume a prostrate position be saying “lay down.” I said, in a huff, that MY DOG would not LEARN improper grammar, that he should be taught to LIE DOWN or NOTHING at all.

She was right to laugh in my face.

I have other faults, I suppose. I am acutely aware that, by simply being myself, I have done things that will inevitably ensure the wealth of my son’s future therapist: I have arm-wrestled him for the last piece of sushi, limited my communications with him during football season to trash-talking his Philadelphia Eagles, and once, in an effort to keep from going anywhere, said to him, “Momma’s too drunk to go to Wal-Mart” (as if Wal-Mart could afford to lose that many customers by requiring sobriety of its patrons). Perhaps some of this has been in retaliation for things my son has done to me, like when he was three and we were in a crowded elevator and he mimicked what I had done to him repeatedly by smelling my ass and screaming, “Yucko! What have you got in YOUR pants!”--or when he was eight years old and my underwire bra set off the metal detector at the airport and he danced in circles singing, “Mommy is a criminal, Mommy is a criminal.” I suppose I could’ve denied his ancestry, beaten him, or just walked off, but instead, I laughed myself silly.

He’s almost a teenager now, though. I suppose all of my weaknesses as a parent and as a human being are about to be exposed….and I’m looking forward to it.