Unfairly Maligned

So I had a minor, very minor, kerfluffle with the boy last night. He was playing video games prior to bed time. The Wife had given him a 10 minute warning, or whatever. In the meantime, the lass had headed to bed and the boy remained downstairs. His 10 minutes came and went. The Wife was still upstairs, so I stepped in.

I called down to him that it was time to go to bed and to turn off the games. A not unimportant tidbit, he’d already been playing for a good portion of the day.

The whole thing should have been done right there. All he had to do was acknowledge he’d heard me and start shutting things down. Instead, he snapped at me with an impertinence I found completely unacceptable. So I yelled at him, which he didn’t appreciate. Further, he tried to turn things on their head by claiming I yelled at him because he was still playing games. He even tried to “tell” on me, enlisting the support of his mother. I corrected his misleading statement, and reiterated there would have been no yelling if he’d hadn’t snapped at me in the first place. At that point, he was in bed and I figured the whole thing was done.

Until this evening, when he was again given a 10 minute warning by the Wife. At which point, he asked her to be sure to tell me so I wouldn’t start yelling at him again.

I’m now a victim of historical revisionism. Apparently, in his mind, I went storming down there last night yelling and screaming all because he was playing video games. He wasn’t impertinent, merely an undeserving victim of Dad’s temper.