As I was straightening up this evening after dinner, I called over my shoulder to Logan, “Hey mister, Game Boy off, please, and get in the bath!”
He pointed to his wet hair and replied, “Mom? Hello? Already did.”
“Oh. Sorry. Hey, you can’t expect me to be paying attention to everything ALL the time.”
“Heh. Actually, you do, mostly.”
“True.”
“In fact, you pay attention more than anyone I know.”
“Well, except maybe for Phil.”
“Yeah. But no one could pay attention, say, a thousand percent of the time.”
“Right.”
“Except for Phil.”
I snorted. “Yeah, except for Phil.”
A few minutes later I told Logan that I’d repeated the exchange to Phil and that he’d laughed. “But you know, he says there are worse things to be known for.”
He didn’t miss a beat. “Like you?”
Man, he’s sharp. “The parental curse works. I have a kid just like me.”
“Ha! Is this going on Pear Soup?”
“No, because no one there knows who Phil is. It won’t be funny.”
“Okay. You’d know, I guess. You write so much, you know what’s funny.”
Why, why must they mock us by being just like us?
Every mother’s nightmare, a kid just like them.
The funny thing about this story is that if you had no idea who Phil was you’d think it was some euphemism for god.