“You wouldn’t survive a day without me explaining stuff to you,” my son said, the smirk on his face a declaration of war I had paid for.
He was the sixteen-year-old king of our smart home, the master of every password and device. My role was simple: to fund his digital kingdom and act grateful for the condescending tech support he offered whenever I failed to understand it.
Every fixed printer and adjusted thermostat came with a heavy sigh and an eye-roll that made me feel like an ancient, incompetent relic. My husband called it a teenage phase, a language barrier we just had to accept.
He had mistaken my patience for powerlessness, my funding for his birthright. He was about to learn that the system administrator is nothing without the person who controls the master power switch.
The Paper Jam of the Soul: A Simple Scan, a Complicated Answer
It started, as it always did, with a simple request. A paper jam of the soul. I was standing in front of our all-in-one printer, a sleek black monolith that Leo had insisted we needed, jabbing a finger at its unresponsive touch screen. Zoning variance documents for the new Northgate development were due by five, and the scanner was giving me the digital equivalent of the silent treatment.
“Leo?” I called up the stairs. My voice sounded thin, a reedy plea against the thumping bass of whatever was happening in his digital universe.
Silence. Then, a long, put-upon sigh that seemed to travel through the floorboards. Footsteps, heavy with the weight of being summoned. He appeared at the top of the stairs, silhouetted by the light from his room, his phone a glowing appendage in his hand. He was all lean angles and controlled indolence, a teenager perfected by an algorithm.
“What?” he asked. Not a question, but an accusation.
“The scanner’s not connecting to my laptop. I’ve tried everything.” I gestured at the machine, a silent, useless brick of plastic I’d paid four hundred dollars for.
He ambled down the stairs, not looking at me, but at his phone. He swiped, tapped, then finally pocketed it as he reached the printer. He didn’t even look at the screen. He just unplugged it, waited three seconds, and plugged it back in. The machine whirred to life. He tapped the screen twice, swiped, and the scanner light flickered on. He looked at my laptop, then back at me, a corner of his mouth twitching.
“You have to be on the five-gigahertz band, Mom. Not the 2.4. Your laptop always defaults to the slow one. It’s not that hard.” He said it with the weary patience of a bomb disposal expert explaining the difference between the red wire and the blue wire for the hundredth time. He turned and started back up the stairs, his duty done. The dismissal in his posture was louder than any insult he could have spoken.
The Peacemaker’s Price
Mark came home an hour later, whistling, smelling of the antiseptic air of the dental clinic he managed. He found me in the kitchen, nursing a cold cup of coffee and staring at the wall, the scanned documents long since emailed. He kissed the top of my head and opened the fridge.
“Rough day?” he asked, his voice muffled by the hunt for leftovers.
“The usual,” I said. “I had to ask Leo for help with the printer.”
Mark straightened up, a container of last night’s lasagna in his hand. He gave me that look—the gentle, placating one that always made my teeth ache. “And?”
“And he treated me like I was trying to start a fire with two rocks. Mark, the way he speaks to me… it’s like I’m an inconvenience he’s forced to tolerate.”
“Sarah, he’s sixteen. His brain is fifty percent video games and fifty percent hormones. He doesn’t mean it like that.” He set the lasagna on the counter. “He’s just good at that stuff. We’re not. It’s a different language for him.”
That was Mark’s role. The translator. The mediator. He saw two sides to every argument, which was a noble quality in a man, but infuriating in a husband. He wasn’t defending Leo, not really. He was just trying to smooth the edges, to keep the peace. But the price of his peace was my silence. It was me swallowing the lump of frustration that formed in my throat every time my son looked at me like I was a software bug he couldn’t quite patch.
“It’s the *tone*, Mark,” I insisted, my voice low. “The condescension. It’s dripping from him.”
“I’ll talk to him,” he promised, popping the lid on the container. The same promise he always made. It was a conversational period, not a plan of action.
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