Never start New Year’s Resolutions early

I spend a lot of time with my sons. It is one of the joys of my life. Much of it used to involve going places. One July, for example, my oldest and his family and I went to Corpus Christi for a family reunion. A little later, his brother came up from south Texas for a week and we went to see their youngest brother perform in Shakespeare in the Park in Oklahoma City and we toured the spectacular Museum of Natural History at Oklahoma University.

What happens is, when we are traveling together, I frequently offer helpful suggestions such as, “Turn here!”, “Don’t drive so fast,” “There’s a parking place.”

Even though the soothing voice from my new GPS was sexily informing us where to turn next, I felt it was my duty to talk louder and override her instructions with “No, no, where we want to go is …” and “I think you should take another exit instead.”

If my eldest is cooking something, I sometimes feel it is useful to point out such things as, “You should stir that now,” “That’s ready to be turned,” “Don’t slice it so thick.”

I am always surprised when, instead of an appreciative, “Why, thank you, mother dear,” I get an exasperated, “Mom, I’m blank blank years old! Don’t tell me what to do!”

I am inserting “blank blank” instead of the actual years he cites, in case he has been adding or deleting years to his age or is, as are most people, including me, just reluctant to be pinned down to an exact age. Suffice it to say, he is 20 years and 1 month younger than I.

Surprisingly, his two younger brothers aren’t as bothered by these running streams of helpful suggestions. It probably goes back to when they were teenagers and, observing how unsuccessful their older brother’s eyeball-to-eyeball confrontations with their father were, figured out to just agree with all parental advice and then quietly do exactly what they wanted to do anyway.

A spin-off of my eldest son’s admonitions to stop telling him what to do because he is blank blank years old is that his son started mimicking his father in response to my similar suggestions to him. “Grandma! I’m 18 years old!,” he’d say back then. “Don’t tell me what to do!” and then laugh uproariously.

Then I had a mini-epiphany and it occurred to me that maybe, perhaps, possibly, I was being irritating and annoying when I thought I was just generously sharing the experience and wisdom of my blank blank years. Right then and there, I vowed to change. I would give advice only when asked. This could mean, I realized, I might never be able to share my remarkable insights again on such weighty matters as driving, cooking, controlling the remote during OU football games — the list was endless.

I couldn’t wait to tell him, certain this would be cause for celebration. Perhaps even a bottle of Dom Pèrignon champagne — “but be sure it’s 1996,” I would add.

“I have good news and bad news,” I announced in early August. “The good news is that I am going to stop telling you what to do because you are blank blank years old.”

“And…” he asked suspiciously.

“The bad news is that it is going to be my New Year’s Resolution so I don’t have to stop until January 1st.”

Mary McClure is a former newspaper editor who writes a weekly column for The Lawton Constitution.