Uh-Oh....

It started out as a perfectly normal Saturday morning in Domesticity Central. It was one of the weekends that the StepSon stays with us, so we were up late the night before watching all kinds of movies that only teenagers love (e.g., Dodgeball for the 199th time) or want to watch immediatly before going to bed (Carrie, followed by some movie so horribly gruesome I don't think the producers even bothered to name it). Satruday morning, it was breakfast followed by yardwork, which is where the uh-oh moment came in. StepSon didn't want to mow the yard. I have to admit, I'm with him - there is absolutely nothing fun about cutting the grass, only to find that you've become so sweaty that half of the grass is now stuck to your body. My husband, luckily, had the foresight to have a son so that we would not have to do such horrible manual labor ourselves. StepSon frequently disagrees with this view of the world. As his arguments escalated in pitch and volume, I found myself saying something that I swore would never cross my lips. "watch your tone...." Uh-oh. For most people, that means nothing. However, at one point in my life (I think it spanned about 5 years), my mother said those three words to me on at least a daily basis -probably because I, like many people in that age vacuum between the ages of 12 and 18, could inflect a mere two or three words - fewer, if the situation called for it - with enough sarcasm, disrespect and hostility to make a saint want to shake me. I came to hate those words. They reminded me that I wasn't quite at the point in my life where I could express myself as angrily as I wanted. I was old enough to have very definite ideas of how my life should be, and young enough to have no idea how to get there or make other people agree with me. I'm not one of those people who mind the fact that I'm saying things that my parents once said - after all, I haven't gotten to the point where I'm telling him to turn down his music. Still, it is a little disconcerting, to hear your mother's voice come out of your mouth for the first time. Maybe this weekend I'll try her famous "life isn't fair" response.....