Oy! Teenagers!

So, last night I took Patrick to Wal-Mart to get some pants and a shirt for his Winter Concert which is tonight. Since he reached 13 he has of course been paying more attention to his appearance, but even knowing this, I was not ready for what awaited me last night. We first started out looking for pants. Black dress pants. He also needs jeans so we grabbed some pants and some jeans and I told him to try them on. That was the beginning of one of the longest hours I have ever spent.

The first batch did not fit so back out we went to the boys section. Well they did not have any larger black pants so Patrick decided he liked some olive green Dockers. That was fine I said, but then we got into what shirt would go. Yes, my son all of a sudden cared whether or not his clothes matched. Being the wonderful mom that I am I let all that go and we discussed shirt options. Would a matching green shirt go, what about a white shirt, what about a black shirt? I told him what matched and what didn't and was told that what may have matched when I was younger may not match now.

Yes, he went there. Now since my birthday is tomorrow and I am going to be 40, I decided not to take it personally and went for the humor aspect. Since he is a boy and is entering that hormonal stage and I didn’t think Wal-Mart was the time or the place to smack him upside his head.

Anyway, he wanted to make sure that the tie he is going to wear would match and since it is a Christmas tie with Santa on it, I said the green pants and black shirt would be a bit much. He of course thought the black shirt was great so we wandered over into the men’s section. That alone did not help the whole my mom is old thing. I mean how can you shop in the men’s section for your son and not feel old. Ok, so we found this really nice shiny black shirt that he really liked, but we still needed pants. I was still on the dress pants idea so I had him try on some dress pants that I found near the shirts. They turned out to be way too big and ladies tuxedo pants, but we didn’t realize this until after he had tried them on and said that Santa could fit in them with him. Needless to say he was not amused. Where does that whole sense of humor go when you are a teenager?

We ended up getting black jeans, blue jeans and that nice shiny black shirt. Now to end this whole story, we get home and I tell him he is going to look really sharp. He looks at me and says “Don’t say that.” I said “What, sharp?” and he says “Yes, that is such an ancient word.”

The million dollar question is this “Does that boy know how lucky he is that I have a sense of humor.”