This morning I woke with a fright. My eyes popped open, my lungs inhaled a small gasp, and my brain muttered, “Gotcha!” I’d suddenly realized that I’d probably used the wrong verb in a sentence in the blog I’d written and posted the night before. I’d written my dog Ziva laid on the floor, when I should’ve written my dog Ziva lay on the floor. (My snarky brain could’ve warned me last night while I was writing, but where’s the fun in that?)

Before my eyes could focus, before my head cleared, before I even made coffee, I googled lay vs. lie. I had indeed committed a verb-usage faux pas. And before I got up from the computer, I fixed the mistake in yesterday’s blog.

Lay vs lie is my nemesis. I should’ve double checked my usage (I always do). But when I wrote the sentence, and later reviewed the sentence, I was confident I’d chosen the correct verb. Confidence can be wonderful. I work hard on being okay with being confident. Telling myself — You can do this and It’s okay to believe you can do it. But when it comes to lay vs lie, I should’ve known that if I felt confident, it was fool’s gold. You’d think that as many times as I’ve looked up the difference between lay and lie, the answer would stick, but it doesn’t. My uncooperative brain refuses to record the information for future playback.

Why did I think laid was the correct choice? Because I thought about a T-shirt that a high school classmate used to wear that pictured a smiling egg lying in a nest, with a caption that read, You’d smile too if you’d just been laid! Well, the egg had been laid and was resting in the nest, so, of course, my dog laid on the floor because she was resting there. What I’d failed to consider was the egg had been laid by a hen, but no one laid my dog on the floor. She lay down all by herself.

My classmate wore that T-shirt to high school in the 1970s. For a long time, the double meaning of You’d smile too if you’d just been laid! escaped me. But it was the mid-1970s, and I went to a small rural-suburban high school. I’d wanted to ask my classmate what her shirt meant, but I was too afraid of sounding stupid. When I finally figured it out, I was glad I hadn’t asked. I would’ve been laughed at as the naive eleventh-grade girl who didn’t get a simple sex joke. This is also the reason, even decades later, I can still picture that classmate wearing that T-shirt.

I have a dear friend who struggles with lay and lie. She also confessed that effect and affect trip her up. “Hey,” I said, “me too.” And we were both English majors and English teachers. We don’t like to publicly admit that sometimes English grammar stumps us. When we make an error, we feel the shame more deeply. We see ourselves with red capital A‘s (for Abuser of Language) blazing on our chests. We hear people’s thoughts, “Egads! She was an English major and teacher?”

For years I avoided telling people I was an English teacher because I discovered this made them uncomfortable. Once a co-worker admitted to me that she was originally afraid to talk to me. She worried that if she used bad grammar, I would think poorly of her or even correct her. She told me she was relieved when I did neither. I told her that as an English teacher, I felt an extra sense of pressure to speak perfect English, and that if I didn’t, people would think poorly of me. We became good work buddies, speaking freely without fear of grammatical judgement.

I had another friend who struggled with the use of apostrophes in creating possessives. I remember the day I first met her in the law office where she worked as a paralegal. I’d just been hired as a second paralegal, and my new boss took me back to meet her.

“Sandi,” my boss said, “this is Vickie, the new paralegal. She was an English teacher.” I winced. I wasn’t sure why he’d felt the need to include that.

As soon as the boss walked away, Sandi said, “You might as well know right now, I struggle with using possessive apostrophes.”

I knew immediately Sandi was an extraordinary person — someone who was willing to lead with her grammatical weakness, and to a complete stranger who’d been identified as an English teacher! She was a woman who faced danger head on.

“I can never remember how to use lay and lie correctly,” I said. “And while we’re at it, effect and affect trip me up, too.”

Sandi laughed, a throw-your-head-back, deep-from-the-belly laugh. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship that lasted until she passed away, leaving a hole in my heart.

Grammatical shortcomings make for better friendships than grammatical perfection.

But I still blush when I realize I’ve committed a grammatical error. I still had to correct yesterday’s blog before I could do anything else this morning.

And how’s this for confidence? I wonder if my correction: And to show her support, my dog Ziva lay on the floor and listened, is correct. (I’m using the past tense of to lie.)

I also struggle with restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses. What is your grammatical Achilles’ Heel?