After I share stories about mother or express how obnoxiously crazy she is I normally get the reactions of-
You only get one mother – yes, so? OR She’s very loving – yeah, so is my dog.
So, if you’re thinking of all the good things to say about my mother (to defend her) take a second and think about if you are defending my mother, or your mother, or all mothers.
Enjoy!
Mother
Mother is one of the most disgustingly naturally thin people I know. Though somehow when she walks, with her outrageously large flipper feet, one would think she was Honey Boo Boo’s aunt. She is a bird woman. She even squawks like a chicken. When her, grandma, and Aunt Pam are together all that is heard is, “cluck, cluck, cluck, kaackle, kackle, kackle, cluuuuccckkk!”
I outgrew her at age 15. She made sure I knew this. I remember her saying at grandma’s kitchen table one day, as we enjoyed bologna sandwiches and potato salad, “I didn’t break a hundred pounds until she was 17. It was awful. Can you imagine, Emerald? I was constantly made fun of and called scrawny!” I though, yeah, how terrible it must have been, you were so thin, how awful! I remember the countless retellings of how grandma would buy candy bars and try to entice her to put on some pounds. Years later the truth came out that the plump neighbor girl, Neeva Charleen, was getting all the candy bars in exchange for riding bikes with mom.
Mom liked to shelter me. Not like your mom might have with you, like full blown building an armor of steel around me. I was a delicate little flower with petals that instantly bruised from a side eye, mean comment, or even the most miniscule injury. Once, while playing softball in a small, teeny tiny, rainstorm my mother paraded herself behind home plate while shouting and waving her umbrella, “I see lightening! I see lightening! Did you see that? Call it! Call the game!” My friends all snickered as they pointed her obnoxious actions out to me as if I didn’t notice. All I could think at the time was, if you see lightening then why are you holding that umbrella like a lightening rod?
I had a cold in fourth grade that lasted quite awhile. I had the mom that brought in an air purifier into the classroom. She didn’t bring it in before school and discretely ask Mrs. Fultz if she could place it in the room because of the many benefits to my health. She didn’t bring it in after school to ask Mrs. Fultz. In fact she didn’t ask Mrs. Fultz at all. She stomped her feet up the stairs to my classroom at 10:30 one morning, walked right in the door, started looking for an outlet, found one, and plugged in the air purifier. Every eye in the room was on her then immediately on me. I turned a rosy red shade of mortification, and quickly tried to disappear under my desk.
Mom left the room, but not before rushing over to Mrs. Fultz with a bottle of cough suppressant with a handwritten note securely tapped to the bottle of specific instructions of how, when, and why I should have my disgusting cherry flavored cough medicine.
As a little girl I was a tomboy. Growing up with a big brother and mostly boy cousins all older than me made me very adventurous and competitive. This lead to many cuts, bruises, and frantic shouts from my mom as she came running toward me after an injury yelling, “Is it her face?! Please, not our precious face!”
Over the years I grew to resent this word – our. When I tore my second ACL and MCL my mother’s first words to the doctor reading my MRI was, “No, we cannot handle another tear of our ACL and MCL!” I thought in my head, our, we??! That thought was directly followed by how badly I wanted my mom to tear her knees all to hell so she knew what I was going through. I mean I did tear my knees up because of the Q angle (the angle from a person’s hip bone to knee), and I get my Q angle directly from my mother’s chicken legs.