You're So Weird

"I can't wait to move out. When I leave, I'm never coming back to this house. Not even to visit. You are so WEIRD. You're overprotective. You're WEIRD," my youngest, soon-to-be 16 year old child lamented in the middle of the front yard, loud enough for half the neighborhood to hear.

He was pissed because he was up before noon on a Saturday. He was pissed that he was asked to do something besides hang out at his friend's house across the street, or sit around playing Halo and texting his girlfriend.

We may as well asked for a couple pints of blood and some vital organs when we had him outside helping to clean up the yard. After a couple months of ice and wind storms, compiled with the fact that the snow flew before the last of the leaves were raked, topped off with every piece of trash in the neighborhood manages to blow into our yard, we had some work to do.

The temps hovered around 50, the sun shined, and my son bitched.

I suppose my feelings might have been hurt by his admission that he wanted to leave and never come back. Perhaps, it should have tugged at my heart and made me sad. It didn't, though. I've been through this before with my other son. When he neared the tender age of 16, he thought I was the devil. I'm sure the only difference two years later is that he no longer "thinks" but "knows" I'm the devil.

"This your first day here?" I asked my son.

"Huh?" he replied, ever so eloquent.

"I'm weird. Are you just figuring this out?"

"Don't talk to me. You're weird," he said, and picked up the rake to continue on with leaf removal.

Seriously, though, it's taken him nearly 16 years to figure out his mother is weird? Was this a new discovery?

I would have loved to know what qualified me as weird in his eyes. I know I'm a bit left of center, off-kelter, out in left field, and don't exactly see things as others do. In fact, my drummer is prone to fits of epilepsy followed by bouts of narcolepsy. My beat is erratic or non-existant.

I watched my son rake as I sat there on the picnic table. More a man than a child these days, I fondly remembered when he thought of me in a different light, when I was mommy and not some weirdo he was forced to live with because of a random arrival into this world in a genetic game of Russian roulette. He was once a little boy who reveled in a game of peek-a-boo, laughed at my funny faces, and curled up beside me on the couch and fell asleep.

I didn't long for those days. I know this is course of motherhood. Babies become toddlers. Toddlers become pre-teens. Pre-teens transform into these monsters known as teenagers. It may be years before my "weirdness" is overlooked.

"I mean it. I'm moving out and never coming back," my son sneered just loud enough for me to hear as my husband rounded the corner of the house, his phone doubling as a mp3 player on his hip.

"We're not going to take it, no we're not going to take it, we're not going to take it anymore...." played out in the silence between my dear child and me.

My husband paused long enough to dance in the front yard to a song that had been an anthem of our youth. I smiled - at the reminder of my own teenage angst, my husband's dancing abilities (or lack thereof), and my son's reaction. I smiled because I'm not the only weird one.

"Oh mannnn, you're both so weird. Ugh. I can't stand it. Stop dancing. Weirdo!"