He purposefully waits, I think, until we’re surrounded by the folks who will undoubtedly think the worst of me. Sometimes they're total strangers, sometimes they’re my closest friends, sometimes they’re my family, but they'll all give me the stink eye and tsk tsk under their breath when my son chants his my-mom-sucks mantra, the one he keeps bottled up until just the perfect opportunity presents itself to absolutely mortify me in the presence of others.

And sometimes, it really isn’t fair. In fact, in my estimation, it never is.

Like this weekend.

You see, on Friday, when we were quite methodically and orderly slinging our shit into the back of the car to go out of town for the weekend, I asked him to toss in his tennis shoes. “I won’t need them,” he said as he bounced his suitcase off of mine.

“What if we want to go for a walk or something?”

He pointed to his feet and the sandals that he’d worn since way back when, a time long ago when they actually fit properly. “I can walk in these, Mom—they’re fine, just fine,” and, as proof, he swung his elbows back and forth, bent his knees and picked up his feet and stomped the ground repeatedly, affecting his version of a marching-in-place that, to most others, looked as though he was experiencing a rather violent seizure in the midst of some sort of tribal bug-stomping ceremony.

I was embarrassed for him.

“Whatever, D, but please stop that crap…most soldiers know you shouldn’t march in flip flops if, for no other reason, for fear of looking like THAT!”

“They’re likely not as talented as me,” he said, puffed with that smug self-assuredness that only total assholes and teenagers have, the very attitude that gets most folks knocked flat on their butts once, maybe twice.

But I shrugged it off, decided not to fight, naively thinking that this would be his problem and certainly not mine, in spite of the fact that, when I looked down at his sandals, I saw that his toes were scuffing over the fronts, his heels dragging off the backs. There’s no way those things could be comfortable but that was what he chose to wear….and although I’m fairly certain that there’s some libidinous iguana with a foot fetish somewhere who’d be quite aroused at the sight of those things, to me, my son’s feet looked simply awful, and his undersized sandals were only contributing to the problem.

On Saturday, however, the sandals seemed to work quite well for him. He walked in the woods, rode a four wheeler, and worked in a vegetable garden with no obvious problems. But on Sunday, when we were in the car with my brother and his son, when my son was sitting squarely on his ass, his feet motionless and planted firmly on the floorboard of the car, his shoes were somehow an issue, an apparent emerging crisis, judging from the urgency and pitiable tone to his voice. “Mom, I need some new sandals—you haven’t bought me any in two years.”

I did my best to shimmy free of my seat belt while deciding if I was going to crawl in the backseat and beat him or if I’d be better off ducking under the seat and hiding from what was sure to be the judgmental gaze of my brother and of the strangers in the cars passing by, ones who might not have heard what was said but who, nonetheless, were likely to detect all of the my-mom-sucks vibes emanating from our speeding vehicle.

While I was weighing these options of abusing my child or slinking off to the far reaches of the world in search of a civilization in which bad parents are actually considered goddesses, I turned to where my son was in the backseat and noted that, damn the luck, he was seated in just such a position that it would be awkward as hell for me to reach around and smack the ever-loving shit out of him. So I tried to reason with him. “Dylan, I told you Friday that you should bring your tennis shoes,” but before I could finish spitting out the words, he’d planted his barely-shod hoof squarely in my face.

“No you didn’t—and besides, Mom, my toes are hanging off these things!”

My brother was uncharacteristically quiet but….but.

“Here, Dylan,” I said, as I handed him a wad of cash that had been crumpled in the bottom of my pocket. “We’ll drop you off—you take this money and go in that shoe store over there and buy yourself some sandals.” And then I said, “We’re going to go in and out of another store—there’s no use trying to find us—just meet us out front.” And then, I said it again. Just about then, my brother was far more generous than I would’ve been if I’d have been driving in that he actually stopped to let Dylan out (while I am fairly certain that, at that particular moment, I’d have been doing well to just slow down and shove him out the door) and, as my son flopped out of the car and across the parking lot, just for good measure, I shouted it once more through the window as we pulled off that we’d meet him. Out front. No need to bother trying to find us.

But being told the same information at least three times was, apparently, insufficient notice that we were not going to go inside the other store and stand solemnly until he joined us. In fact, he simply missed the point that we had no intentions of waiting for him in any manner, nor did we intend for him to seek us out, traversing the entire store in an attempt to find us while we were zipping rapidly about, doing our best to get our shopping accomplished as quickly as possible.

No, somehow my son missed all of that.

So by the time he found us, he was pissed.

“I’ve been looking all over this place for you,” he huffed, just as we threw the last item into our cart and started pushing towards checkout.

“We’ve been hiding over there,” my brother deadpanned as he swung his hands wildly, pointing in every direction.

While we chuckled, my son was clearly, um, not amused. So again, I tried to reason with him.

“I told you to wait out front for us, that we’d only be a minute,” I said, looking down at his new shoes that were clearly two sizes too large, wondering if he’d opted for them over something closer to his true size because they’d provide him sufficient growing room during what he’d likely predicted to be yet another sandal-purchasing drought in our household.

And then, I’m fairly certain he looked around to make sure there was an audience of both my brother and absolute strangers so that they could all hear him say, “You didn’t tell me anything, Mom. Why would I look all over the store for you if I was supposed to meet you out front?”

His logic was clear.

To him.

But to me, it was just the same mantra, the one that sometimes sounds like “she won’t buy me any shoes,” and sometimes sounds like “she’ll leave me stranded in a store hundreds of miles away from home,” but no matter, these various incantations all mean the same: my mom sucks.