I had my youngest son a bit later in life, at age forty. Sure, I was a little more wrinkled and weathered than most of my playground peers, but it came with some upsides as well. Those wrinkles? Folds of wisdom. Weathered? Bah. No prepubescent storm could intimidate me. Whatever old lady cliché you could think of, I’d lived it: I’d been around the block. Been there, done that. Seen some things. A decade in, I thought I’d heard it all.
How wrong I was.
I run a pretty tight ship, but the world’s a big boat. By the fourth grade, the kid had already learned most of the alphabet words — you know the ones I mean.
The “S” word. (He heard that one from his father during a Cleveland Browns game. Actually, every Browns game.)
The “D” word. (My husband put the trash cans behind my car. Again. Not my fault.)
Even, I’m ashamed to say, the grandaddy of them all: the “F” word. (He has a sixteen-year-old brother and we have thin walls.)
We talked about grown-up words versus kid words. We talked about ‘time and place.’ I thought, ignorantly it turns out, that we’d gotten through the worst of it. Oh, innocent me.
Not a single one of those young moms had warned me about the “P” word. For good reason, I suppose, but still.
It was a typical Saturday morning when I first heard him utter the unthinkable. The cat was lounging in a sunbeam, the dog nestled happily on the couch. My husband was golfing; our oldest was out. It was just me and my baby at home. We’d bickered earlier that morning, it’s true — he wanted Sprite for breakfast and couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t let him eat sugar. The usual. But I held my ground and he’d retreated to his room to play a computer game with some friends.
I was passing by his bedroom door when I heard him drop the bomb. I froze. I listened. Okay, fine, I eavesdropped. I was so shocked I wasn’t sure what else to do. Before I could recover, there it was again, this time like sniper fire. This time, it felt like more than shock — it felt like betrayal.
“My mom’s perimenopause is low-key super bad today, bro.”
What the… Where could he have heard this word? Why was he trash-talking me this way? Do I confront him? Ground him? Wash his mouth out with soap? Demand to know who had taught him how to use it in perfect context?
I did what any fifty-year-old mother would do in a moment like this. I had a hot flash and went back to folding the laundry.
| 
