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| "AMERICA'S FUNNIEST HUMOR"TM
SHOWCASE
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December 2005 / January 2006 Contest Results |
Dude,
Where's My Son?
By Jackie Papandrew
Largo, FL
My son recently
turned 13, and the last traces of that sweet little boy who thought I
hung the moon seem to have vanished. In his place is a strange,
slouching creature with a pencil-thin mustache and adolescent angst
oozing from every pore.
This extraterrestrial I once called flesh and blood, whose mood swings
dwarf the Grand Canyon, seems intent on bungee jumping from that rickety
bridge connecting a child with adulthood. And I think he plans on
dragging his rapidly aging mother along for the ride.
A drastic language change was the first indication of alien infestation
in my once cherished offspring. The rosy-cheeked cherub who used to run
to me, eyes shining with adoration and shouting "Mommy!" began to
address me (and everyone else) as "Dude."
At 13 months, he was a sponge, joyfully soaking up new words, becoming
more communicative every day. At 13 years, the hormones surging through
his body have cut a swath through the speech center in his brain; his
mouth, when it speaks at all, produces mere shrunken shreds of complete
sentences apparently understood only by other members of his species.
"S'up" is a perfectly acceptable, all-purpose phrase in an
adolescent's world. "Mom, I love you," on the other hand, would burn
his monosyllabic lips like acid and permanently corrupt his coolness.
Communication with this high-tech yet illiterate generation is fraught
with frustration. My son, who can't seem to utter two intelligible
sentences to me, airs his gripes through text messaging. Just the other
day, a message flashed on my cell phone in fractured syntax designed to
torture my English major soul.
"i no u h8 me. i try so hard 2 b good. y r u mad @ me?"
Cave men scribbling on walls were more eloquent.
Then there's the alteration in appearance. While I'm desperately trying
to avoid bags and sags, this long-haired Neanderthal living in my house
embraces them as fashion. Wearing gravity-defying pants slung low across
his scrawny backside, he looks just like a baby with an overly full
diaper. When I helpfully pointed this out, I got another overwrought,
electronic missive that ended with several lines of the text message
equivalent of a scream. This modern means of communication does keep the
house quiet.
Adolescent males seem to lose all capacity for living like civilized
human beings. This means that my boy constantly raids the refrigerator
but can't manage to close a door, that he can take 30-minute showers but
never hang up a wet towel, that he stuffs freshly laundered clothes back
into his hamper rather than putting them away.
I find sticky cereal bowls in his closet because he was too lazy to
return them to the kitchen, and the lunchbox he claimed he lost growing
whole colonies of bacteria under his bed. I now understand why some
animals eat their young.
The child who begged me to read to him daily now rolls his eyes in
disgust when I suggest we turn off the video games and pick up a book.
The angel who proudly showed me off to his kindergarten classmates now
pretends not to know the deranged woman waving to him in the middle
school hallway. My fall from grace, seemingly overnight, has left me
depressed, bewildered and prone to emotional excess.
"You could cut the apron strings without slicing through my heart, you
know," I whimper in one of my calmer moments.
"Mom," he mumbles in that teenage tone of voice, "why can't you just act
normal?"
Normal is, of course, a relative term. In about 10 years, I will
magically return to normalcy as my pubescent boy turns into an adult. At
least I hope I do. In the meantime, I'm going to hang on to those
severed apron strings.
I may need them to strangle him.
http://www.jackiepapandrew.com
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