My son (20) and I were laughing the other day about the time he totally flipped about a blue printer line on his homework. My God. I am a very calm woman, but he tipped me over the edge.
He’d called me at work late evening (I was working at a very hectic and important corporate dinner event). He was in an absolute panic as he’d broken the home printer. Vastly overdue homework that absolutely had to be in the next day or he would actually be DEAD.
Fine, email it to me and I’ll sort. Informs me I’d need to wait a while as he was still in the process of writing aspects of it.
Event ends and rather than go home I unalarm the office building, fire up my laptop, office printer etc and sit and wait and wait for the fabled homework to roll in.
Got home and presented this to him after 1am. Ta da! The office printer had left a thin, blue toner line on each page.
HE flipped an absolute gasket!
What followed was what I hoped would be a sobering lesson on what happens when you push your tired, very patient mother to her absolute limit. However throughout my counter tirade he smirked at me and told me I was embarrassing myself. I thought I’d actually make him eat his homework, blue line and all.
My bleary-eyed husband had to get up to restore household harmony.
Thankfully he’s lovely now and we can laugh at it as one of the few times we have properly argued. In fact, he said he had no idea how I was so patient with him during those years. My reply was that I just drank a lot of wine.