Green means go, ashbowl!!

I have horrible road rage. I just can't help it. I live in an area populated primarily by displaced or vacationing New Yorkers and New Jersey drivers who learned to drive in big cities where they had to be aggressive to get anywhere, or where they had to suffer through endless loops of driving circles to make a single left turn, so they've grown used to driving like morons and acting like the own the entire road. Driving makes me nervous enough as it is without having to deal with idiots like that.

So I scream and yell a lot in the car. Every idiot that cuts me off, every jerk that doesn't yield to my right of way, every inconsiderate prick that wont let me out when traffic is heavy and doing so would hold them up an additional three seconds. I scream at all of them. I flip them off. I think bad karmic thoughts about them. I want to chase them down and slash their tires, but that would be going way too far, and I do have an ounce of common sense left in my overwhelmed brain.

I only recently discovered how bad I really am in the car when my son started talking. I try to watch my mouth very carefully around my son. I was a Sailor's wife, twice. I am a Sailor's niece and a Sailor's granddaughter. I swear like a Sailor. Not very becoming of a lady, I know. But I really tried to clean up my language around my son. If I could manage not to swear at work around small children, then surely I could do fine around my own. And I was doing pretty well, except in the car.

It started with innocent enough proclamations from the back seat. Every time the light turned green, Jake would yell "go already! Green means go!" When we'd get behind a turtle, he'd shout "move it!" But then came the day a guy with, what else, a Jersey plate, almost hit me. He was flying down the road in my lane, coming right towards me. I screamed "you stupid asshole!" That was it. All the times I accidentally said "shit" or worse and got a free pass from the "Keep Your Kid From Repeating After You" god, it took one time for my son to latch on to that phrase. Suddenly every car on the road was filled with stupid assholes. I ignored him, I begged him not to say it in public (thankfully he never said it at school, or if he did they didn't tell me, which I doubt because they couldn't wait to tell me about the penis flasher incident), and finally I got him to lay off a bit, after several months. Now, he just says "Mommy, I'm not calling them a stupid assword, I'm not!" Yeah, I'm not getting the Parent of the Year award, am I?

I'm trying to mellow out, I really am. I was doing pretty good for a while. But I got cut off yet again the other night, and a string of expletives came flying out of my mouth. Jake asked "what did you say?" I told him "I said 'you doofus trucking ash bowl' baby!" He must have been tired because he just said "oh," and went back to singing the Ramones version of Spiderman. If he does start repeating some of my worse language, I'm prepared to say "oh, that's just how he says truck and ship!" It's plausible.

Disclaimer- I have many friends from NYC and New Jersey. They are aware that I think they drive like idiots and have no hard feelings about this. They think I drive too slow and like a sissy, so we're even. So if you're from NY or NJ and are offended, get over it. Even the insurance companies think you drive like a maniac. Oh, and thanks for that by the way, our insurance premiums are higher just because we share a border with you!