So my teen son was flirting with a girl on Facebook. It's the usual, goofy stuff that you want to comment on, but you can't. Because you're old. You're square. Maybe you pee a little when you sneeze. He counsels me and says I can't use words like "sick." It's not cool, mom, he says.
In short, at just over the pothole to forty, I'm so old, I owe Jesus a buck.
I don't think I'm that old. I'll live to see green bananas ripen. Still, to the kid, I'm so ancient Noah signed my year book. That means I'm not supposed to use my fresh verbiage in his proximity.
I reassure him I'm not just any old mom with my hair in a bun and a post-it note trailing from my shoe (I wondered where that phone number went). I let him know that I'm down with it. I'm hip. "I'm so pimp." I worked the plosive consonants in the last word for emphasis.
He cringes and he says no parent should use that kind of lingo. It's wrong. It's embarrassing. After all, when I was in science class and they mentioned "Atom", I said, "Yeah! And I knew Eve, too."
Son exasperatedly raises his voice, because apparently pre-perimenopausal women also are hard of hearing. He tells me I don't know anything about kids, so I can't say that stuff. As a logical point, he posited that I don't even know what death metal is. In response I gave him the very rational counter: "What-ev-er. I'd rather go to a Genesis rock concert anyway."
"You mean when Cain hit Abel?"
Friends assure me (one childless by choice) that this is my payback kid, my apple that bounced off the base of the tree, rolled and hit me in my arthritic goiter. This is genetic karma born from 24 hours of labor and years of what I did to my own parents....
...who, you know, were so old they posed with the minotaur.