Previously: The Ur-Dad story.
@mallelis When she was a nun, used the bus fare to buy cigarettes and hitchhiked back to the convent. Didn’t last long as a nun.
— Christina (@christinadslp) October 24, 2014
@mallelis I told her I’d just eaten a good meal with beans, she sent me 8 pounds of dried beans and a pressure cooker
— Seth Rosenthal (@seth_rosenthal) October 23, 2014
@mallelis thoroughly checked my homework every night, until my senior year of high school. circled what was wrong, made me figure it out.
— iscreeeeaaaaamama (@pnuts_mama) October 23, 2014
@mallelis my mum called my direct line in work to let me know she’d left a voicemail on my mobile.
— Lowri Williams (@flowri) October 23, 2014
@mallelis We were listening to “I Want a New Drug” on a road trip and my mom turned and said, “Do you know what the new drug is? It’s love.”
— The Haunt Eng (@hoodieripper) October 23, 2014
@mallelis @darth endorsed me for “journalism” on linkedin
— Ryan Teague Beckwith (@ryanbeckwith) October 23, 2014
@mallelis mailed me a card before I left for college so I would have something in my mailbox when I got there. It had a picture of me inside
— Emmuuuuurrgh Alter (@emm_a) October 24, 2014
@mallelis booked my bro and me to play a concert at a bar when i was home for thanksgiving w/o consulting us. we don’t play in a band.
— Jon Muchin (@Allormuchin) October 23, 2014
@mallelis couldn’t talk from ALS; had a chat abt what are you gonna do when I’m gone;” sat up to write this note <3 pic.twitter.com/FP2YFpwH67
— Sara Kate W (@SaraKateW) October 23, 2014
@mallelis Called me when I was in a different state to ask me where the remote control was.
— MAKEOUT DRACULA (@theisb) October 23, 2014
@mallelis The best text message I will ever receive pic.twitter.com/NhfCSaTTUX
— ambien rap crying (@gspels) October 23, 2014
@j_zimms @mallelis pic.twitter.com/REBoJMf6Oo
— official wwe pilot (@pilotbacon) October 23, 2014
a paraphrase of a recent email conversation
Me: Mum, I burned myself
Mum: am sure its gross how clean is your house are you coming on the walk
Me: I don’t think I can come on the walk, because the burn is really sore and healing slowly
Mum: it’ll be fine
Mum: *later* TAKE THAT BURN TO THE HOSPITAL IMMEDIATELY OR YOU’LL DIE
Also, she starts every email and voice message and text with ‘hello, *my name*, this is your loving mother’
This is a My Dad thing, not a My Mom thing, but every time my dad leaves a voicemail it consists only of the following: “[name of dad] (he doesn’t even call himself “dad”, just uses his name) calling, I will call back, thank you.”
It’s the “thank you” at the end that’s the best.
EVERY TIME my husband calls his mum, he says “Hey, Mum, it’s [name].”
She has one son. His voice is way deeper than his sisters’ voices.
Also, since I imported him to America, he’s lost his Irish accent, so it’s not like even if her son-in-laws call her ‘Mum’ could she mistake their voices.
My husband’s voicemail message says, “hey, this is [name]’s voicemail. Leave a message.”
EVERY.SINGLE.TIME. his mom leaves one, she starts with, “hi, [name]’s voicemail, this is [name]’s mom!” <3
I posted a picture on FB of a particularly heinous blister during training and a couple of my friends commented on the picture (pop it! POP IT).
Mom (voicemail): Honey, call me right away.
Me: (panicking) Mom, what’s up? Are you OK?
Mom: Oh honey, I saw everyone pressuring you to pop that blister and I just wanted to say DON’T DO IT. IT WILL HURT SO MUCH. <five minute description of blister healing process>
Me: Mom, I’m at the grocery store.
Two hours ago my mom sent me a text that ready, in full: “Thing. Happy friday :)”
When I was in first year of university I had a cold. My mom sent me a box with a T-shirt and a Ziploc container with Vicks, Dayquil, Nyquil, Breathe-Rite strips, and candy. I didn’t get it until I had been recovered from my cold for a week but I lugged that medicine around for like six moves and the T-shirt is in my drawer still, eight years later.
Oh my gosh, I was just coming down here to tell the story of how my mom mailed me a box of medicine for my cold freshman year of college, which didn’t arrive until I was better!
Recent text from mom (the day before my birthday):
“Enjoy your last day of being twenty-something! I’m almost over birthing you!”
And then on my birthday:
“Music please. …
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU.
..etc etc etc”
Note: she did not actually call me.
when I was a teenager, y mother would ask me to make her about three cups of tea a day. If I ever said no she’d put on the most mournful eyes and say, in a slow an deathly voice ‘I was in labour for NINE HOURS’.
Somehow I was never quite brave enough to say that after 15 years she should probably have recovered.
On my 27th birthday, my mom called to wish me happy birthday and also to tell me, “you know, when I was 27, on this day, I’d just given birth to you!” To my credit, I did not immediately fling the phone away in terror.
My mom sent me Easter baskets in college. The year I had a real kitchen she sent me one where the basket was a 6 quart Dutch oven. Later years were in mixing bowls.
OMG that is fantastic. I had actual Easter Egg hunts all through high school, but I still don’t own a dutch oven.
The cost of mailing a dutch oven. Oy.
(That was me channeling my mom, BTW.)
My mom once posted, “I love this kid!” on my Facebook page. I still don’t know if the message was for me or an announcement to the world.
My dad does this. He also comments on my pictures saying “That’s my very cute kid!”. Yes dad. I am your child. Thank you.
My mum get very annoyed when guidebooks don’t point out where public toilets can be found (because it’s vital information!). When I used some new, well-designed public toilets I immediately posted on her Facebook to tell her all about them, as I knew she would appreciate it. (She claims that having triplets ruined her pelvic floor. I have apologised.)
When I posted something mentioning fisting on my Facebook, she commented as follows: “I just asked your father to hazard a guess on what you are on about now. When I told him ‘fisting’, he enquired whether you are for or against?”
She goes to the gigs my brother and sister are playing in, but has also got really into the music scene itself and sometimes goes to the same gigs that they are attending. She has made friends with all of their friends and likes to add them on Facebook and invite them over for Christmas.
She is about to go on holiday to Rwanda, having recently gone to do volunteer work in Kenya and India (relaxing isn’t really her thing. Key quote from family holiday of a lifetime in Australia: “I hate the bloody beach!”). Posted yesterday “Researching as much as I can about Rwanda. Imperialism really screws a place up”.
Oh:
In voicemail messages, ensures she states the time and date of her call.
When I was going to stay with my boyfriend, shortly after having sex for the first time, she gave me some lube.
My mom and I love Orange is the New Black. During one of the sex scenes, she asked me, “I don’t understand, what is she doing to her? The arm motion looks weird.” So I got to explain fisting to my mom.
When my mom first got iTunes, years ago, she got really in to making mix CDs to listen to in the car. But none had real titles or playlists. It was all “Mix 3” or “Feb 2009” and such, so it was always a mystery what we were going to be listening to. One contained nothing but covers of Danny Boy.
I tweeted this last night, but the first summer I came home from college I found a three ring binder with every email I had sent her that year, all printed and carefully hole-punched and arranged by date.
Okay this one really got me.
And from a different angle: we were watching “Knocked Up” several years ago and Seth Rogen said something about a “BJ” and she asked me what a BJ was and I pretended I had not heard her and then she asked AGAIN and I had no choice but to say the words “blow job” to my (then) 62-year-old mother. (And watching “The Good Wife” a few weeks ago I had to explain what “bareback” was.) (I should just stop watching stuff with her?)
These all went the opposite way with me. One night at dinner, my brother was overlaying all the placemat corners and my mom called it a daisy chain. And then she explained to us what a daisy chain was, and then she reminded us to always use plenty of lube if we were going to have anal sex. I think we were13 and 17 for this conversation.
There is no way my mother knows what a daisy chain is. And I hope never to have to explain it to her.
My 80-year-old grandmother asked me if there was such a thing as female ejaculation, since she read about it in one of her library books.
I remember watching Will & Grace with my parents when I was a teen, and I had to explain what “STD” meant. They both went, “Ohhhh, you mean VD.”
I had to explain to my more religious mom why I would not be buying her the 50 Shades of Grey books for Christmas a few years ago.
She then asked for books on how to crochet, which I did get her, and I’ve gotten a full-sized blanket for Christmas/birthdays since then, so this seems like the right choice.
Mine did this too! And when Pegasus mail went away (shh, I am an old), I realized she’d been smarter than I had, because every bit of my college news was stored in her binder.
OMG I thought my mom was the only one who printed and filed emails! I think she’s stopped doing it now, but for the first few years she had an email address, she totally did this (though used file folders rather than a binder).
My mom did that too!
My parents did that when I came back from Germany after 12 months. Every letter I’d written to them, all in a file arranged by date. It was really awesome to read back over them.
My mom regularly sends me “care packages” that are actually overstuffed re-used manila envelopes that she has completely wrapped up in packaging tape and somehow sent for free through campus mail from the university she teaches at. They contain: 3 tea bags stolen from whatever hotel she was last at for a conference, a picture of a cute otter she has printed off of the internet, a battered copy of Real Simple, a note that says simply “YOU ARE THE BEST BABY”, a $5 gift card to Starbucks, and an entire huge bag of M&Ms. The joy these packages give me cannot be overstated.
My mother’s packages tend to be more random. I once opened one while waiting for the bus outside the post office. I slit the envelope open, reached inside and extracted a plush animal, violently orange, and probably meant to be a cute thing from outer space. I had grabbed it around one of the eye stalks when I dragged it out and I held it up, tentacles dangling, and heard the other people waiting for the bus stifling their giggles. I suppose their mothers never sent them anything weird in the post. Poor things.
That sounds like the perfect gift. I would appreciate some more variety in the packages I get, but the consistency is impressive. My mom has really decided that this combination is really the optimal set of goods.
That is pretty damn awesome. I opened a care package from my mom in the department conference room when I was in grad school and pulled out a handful of…underwear.
I once missed delivery of a surprise care package before a holiday weekend so had to wait several days till I could pick it up. It was only when an unimpressed post man handed over a soggy Jiffy bag that I discovered it contained home grown garden vegetables. Gotta love ’em.
Every time I left the house for an extended period of time – whether it was for school or work or just visiting over the weekend, she would call out “STRAIGHT A’S!” and my reply would be “Nothing but.”
I asked her to stop about a year ago because I felt really weird about it, but looking back now it’s half weird, half cute. My mom and I have a strained relationship, but we love each other.
Also, here is part of the text conversation we had when I was on my way back from Australia:
M: Just come home. No matter what you are still part of my heart.
E: Mom I’m in the dang airport I’ll be home as soon as I can, I’m not dying
M: But you aren’t here & I want you to be…
MOMS.
Two Very Mom Moments
On when she began to suspect that I was sexually active in my senior year of HS:
Two of her pharmaceutical reference books sitting on my bathroom counter, one turned to STDs and the other turned to something I can’t remember, with a note that said, “Mom loves you very much, please read these to protect yourself.” (My mom has never really gotten the hang of written English but she kicks ass in biochemistry in any language.)
Ongoing moment:
My mom still doesn’t quite get cell phones, so she only turns hers on and off when she is using it to call. She also thinks that you can only use a cell phone to call another cell phone, so she’ll call me, miss me, and then when I need to call her back I have to remind myself to call her at her house bc if I just return the call to the number she used to call me at, it’ll go straight to voicemail.
Edit: One more! My mom has demurred on my repeated attempts over the years to get her something for Mother’s Day because as she puts it, “I gave birth to you. There isn’t anything you can do to make up for that, just be an obedient child and do well in school.” It sounds less ominous in Vietnamese, I swear. (Also this attitude towards Mother’s Day is probably just a bit of culture-based perplexity.)
I regret not using that exact line on my kids earlier in life. I mean, now they’re 14 & 18 so it’s harder to tell them to be obedient. Totally using the do well in school cause I went through labor thing, though.
Oh man, bc “teenagers” are a western construct from the 50s or whatever, I still got the “be an obedient child” thing well into college, because I will always be her little baby (I’m the youngest to boot), etc.
Oh! And whenever my mom did talk about labor w/r/t my sister and I, she’d always emphasize how we have massive heads. We still do.
Totally off topic, but I got SO MAD at a historical romance I was reading last week because the hero describes his coworker as having “teens.”
My mom is both a historian and avid romance novel reader, and I will sometimes hear her angrily muttering things like, “That style of hat wasn’t popular in England until 50 years later grumble grumble, who edited this?!” (Sometimes she does say “grumble grumble.”)
I had to stop reading historical fiction the day I said, out loud in public, “But William Cecil wasn’t even IN England right then!” #historianwoes
Ah the labor guilt. My mom had 9 babies. I was her biggest (over 10 pounds). She likes to remind me how she had to “work a little harder with me” every single birthday and every single time birthing stories get shared.
My mom was a kindergarten teacher for 20+ years. When I was in college and still living in the dorms, she would send me holiday appropriate classroom decorations to decorate my dorm room. My favorite was the metallic heart and wire garland she sent to go around…our window, I guess? My roommate and I taped it to the door, around our white board, instead.
My mother once tried to convince me that all I would have to do was carry her future grandchild for nine months. After that, she’d move out to California to be near me, take the child, stop dyeing her hair and raise the kid as a barefoot, grey haired, dreadlocked hippie.
I’m single and always have been.
She denies having this conversation.
ETA: I just remembered, I asked her why I was the one who had to do this and not my sister. Her response: “Your sister wants to be an actress. She needs to keep her figure”.
My mom too! She used to tell me “just have a baby and give it to me!” She stopped cuz my brother’s gf had one and they all live with her. She’s having the time of her life. I hope they have another one soon – keep my mom rich in babies and off my back.
OMG. a) snaps on the name
b) when I was 17, my mum got quite hammered one night (she’s a lightweight so it took about 3 glasses of wine) and seriously had this conversation with me:
Mum: I have to ask you – are you a virgin, and have you kissed another girl?
Me: Mum, I have to admit that I am not a virgin and yes, I’ve kissed another girl.
Mum: OK, but you’re not allowed to be a lesbian because I need grandchildren and you’re the normal one.
I am sure that she would also deny having that conversation, but the underlying implication still stands. (FYI, she wouldn’t give two craps if I had ended up gay, just as long as I provide her with grandkids.)
My mom said to me “Honey, if by the time you are 30 and haven’t had kids, would you consider adoption?”. I was in my early 20s at the time. I’m 40 now, and she’s never pushed me to have kids, most likely because my sister has 5 and my brother has 2.
When I left home for college my freshman year, my mom made me take an entire package of toilet paper with me, I guess because she was worried there wouldn’t be any there.
I wish my mom had done that for me. Dorm toilet paper is gross.
I tried to make my son take a whole package, and he wouldn’t, but I made him take 3 rolls anyway. Only because I didn’t want my baby’s tushie tortured by the rough recycled dorm paper.
YES. When I moved into my first apartment, my mom went out and bought me the jumbo-est package of toilet paper she could find – it must have been 30 or 40 rolls. Even though my roommates had already been living there for months and obviously would have had toilet paper. (The package eventually came in very handy)
Such exquisite joy, including actual soda spit when reading. My mother once sent me a box with Xanax and peanut butter m&ms. Very thoughtful.
Your mom understands what a growing daughter needs.
Will only call my horrible ex-husband “he who shall not be named”
“Wow, mom, thanks for lending me your robe, it’s really warm.”
“It’s yours. Take it.”
“But..”
“TAKE IT.”
YES
ALSO MY MOM.
Never lets me return anything I’ve borrowed, insists it looks better on me even though she weighs less than I do.
ALL THE TIME.
“Mom, that shirt looks really good on you!”
“Oh you think so? You should have it, it will look better on you.”
“Mom no you bought that for yourself.”
“But I was thinking of you when I bought it!”
Me: “I just love Craisins on cereal & as a snack”
Mom goes to kitchen returns with 8 lb bag of Craisins from Costco.
Me: “I…I don’t want to take your whole bag!”
Mom: “Oh no biggie, I’ve got more”
Me: !!!
that’s my dad.
I can picture my mom in a lot more of the Toast dad scenarios, for sure. Especially when it comes to itineraries & using your yard to its full potential.
Mine too! Everything I compliment becomes mine. My boyfriend’s mom does the same which is how I recently acquired a very nice candle.
alwaysssss
CONSTANTLY.
now that we live in the same state again, I have to be super vigilant in my levels of complimenting of physical objects.
she will happily give me every and all of the physical objects I even glancingly admire and would probably try to secure me the metaphysical ones as well if she could.
None of these are my mother.
Instead, they are my grandma. And I will be her when I’m her age.
You know how, in “Almost Famous”, the mom yells out “Don’t do drugs!” when she drops William off at the concert, and everyone turns around and repeats it and laughs and he’s mortified? My mom thought that was the most hilarious thing she had ever seen, and she took to yelling “Don’t do drugs!” every time she dropped me off, well into my adulthood.
Also, she started crying on the phone the other day when I told her we’d be coming for Thanksgiving. We just saw my parents two weeks ago.
Everything about this is the most amazing thing I’ve ever read.
Called me to tell me she was mailing me a surprise, but she couldn’t tell me what it was. A week later, it turned out to be a card featuring an illustration of a man dancing with a frog, and the message “You’re into some crazy shit, but I like you anyway!”. Also enclosed in the envelope – a single sock I had left behind the last time I visited. Moms.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Phone rings. It’s my mother. I’m at work, 30-some miles away. We lived together at this point in my life.
Me: Hi, Mom. What’s up?
Mom: Hi, honey. Can you run down to the car and hit the button on the garage door opener?
Me: Sure… I guess… why?
Mom: I’m locked out of the house and need you to open the garage so I can get back in.
Me: Um… I don’t think that’s going to work, since I’m not in line of sight.
Mom: Oh. Really?!
Me: …
My mom raised me on seltzer water/club soda instead of soda and called it “bubbles.” To this day I mostly hate soda (except for a nice root beer) and have, when tired, asked for bubbles in restaurants and gotten very confused stares.
We also drank a lot of selzer at my house. We called it “sprudel” which is a shortened form of the German word for it. I have A LOT of trouble remembering the English word for it.
My family drinks nothing but seltzer water and coffee (occasionally juice mixed with the seltzer water). It didn’t occur to me that most families don’t buy 12-packs of lemon-lime seltzer water on a weekly basis until I went to college.
My parents and I used to refer to Diet Coke as “Hee Hoo.” Adapted from the time my dad got up in the middle of the night with sock-mouth and wanted something to drink and there was no more Diet Coke in the fridge. That morning, as I was having breakfast and my mom was washing dishes, he went into the porch, came back holding a bottle, held it up, and announced, “He who drink last Diet Coke replace bottle!”
– is completely convinced that it is immoral to ever give anyone a gift you would not like to receive yourself, even when the recipient, your daughter, is known to hate almost everything you love. three decades of birthday shawls and model train sets and craft fair nonsense with the occasional bottle of Irish whiskey blooming out of the wreckage like a rose in the desert.
– when a fugitive criminal stumbled out of the woods and broke into her house to hide in the crawl space one time, she lectured him about personal responsibility for an hour until the cops showed up to get him. when I asked if she was alarmed at any point she said no cause he was just a little boy (he was 24.)
– when one of the paramedics who came in the middle of the night circled back to the house the next day to ask if he could come by later with some pals to hunt and murder her deer, she said no, even though she grew up on a farm and claims to believe that all animals should work for a living if they don’t want to be consumed. her deer are not for shootin’.
There is so much going on in that beautiful second story, but my main take-away is that you’ve got a hardcore mom.
yeah my mom has a lot of…qualities.
Lectures on personal responsibility – awesome.
I can easily see my mom conducting that lecture on personal responsibility.
She also stocks up on small tschockes at craft fairs, yard sales, after holiday sales, etc, as a way to stock up on presents. Presents as a general concept, that is, not for any particular person. So…EVERYONE in my family has received little crafted birds and mystery novels and felted christmas ornaments in July, etc.
*whispers* I’d take the model trains off your hands.
This is too sweet.
When my sister & I come home to visit, our mom puts a little candy dish and fresh flowers on our nightstands, and then she always goes “oooooh, doesn’t it feel like you’re staying in a bed-and-breakfast?!?”
I had a really bad week at work a few weeks ago and I was sick and when I called her crying on Thursday night and said I hated being an adult and I wished I was at home she said “then come home,” so I got a last minute train to Virginia the next day and when I got there she had put out a box of tissues and a clean, empty garbage can and she fed me and took care of me all weekend and I have never in my life gotten over a cold so fast. I was fine by Monday. Moms!
Is your mom Linda Belcher?
She has a lot of Linda moments tbh.
My dad does this (sort of). When I moved out, one of my sisters (who shared a room) moved into my old bedroom, so now when I visit home I just sleep on a mattress in the basement. Often the mattress is bare and I have to find a sleeping bag. I complained that I didn’t feel very welcome and my dad got VERY SAD about that. And now every time I come home, the mattress is made with the corner folded down and a chocolate on the pillow. (This has been going on for about 5-6 years)
<3<3<3
My Ma leaves me fresh flowers and a 6-month back catalog of Life & Style (Her favorite magazine, and the only treat she gets herself on the regular. My brother tried to get her a subscription for Xmas one year but she said no, because she enjoys the process of picking it up at the grocery store checkout.) when I stay with them – pretty nice but I wouldn’t mind a candy dish too!
That makes me miss my grandma. She used to put those chocolate mints under our pillows because she stayed in a hotel once in the Bahamas and they did that and it made her feel fancy. She was wonderful.
that is SO CUTE
My mum used to do that, too, when I came home to visit. And if there were roses blooming at the time, I’d get a single rose in a vase as well.
My mother used to cal me The Vestal Virgin behind my back (because of my virulent teenage misandry). Not in a mean way, just a statement of facts.
I like it a lot.
My mom recently got her first smartphone, and celebrated by taking a two minute long video of a fire and sent it to me, then sent several text messages to make sure I got it.
Also, my mother never really got the hang of care packages or presents — one care package she sent consisted of 6 packs of lightbulbs and lots of underwear. She sent me and my then-boyfriend two GIGANTIC tins of sesame oil for his birthday, because the sesame oil in non-Korean groceries is substandard and she wanted to make sure we had the “right” kind. I got a box too large to comfortably carry of dry-roasted nuts once because she was worried I wasn’t eating enough protein. Moms!
Oh, also, before she got a smartphone, she would send texts that would always end with “Love, MOM”
plus she would try to format it like an email or a letter, where you have the body of text, then the signature on a new line, except there was no enter key on her phone, so she would use spaces instead
So I would get text messages from here that would be like, “Just checking in to see how you were! I hope your day is good! Happy Friday, yaaaay! [a million spaces that IntenseDebate can’t render] Love, MOM”
When she first met my now-fiance, before we were dating, she said “Ohhhhhh! He’s realllllllly niiiiiiiiice!” and when I assured her it wasn’t like that, she said “Oh. So not boyfriend material?”
When I told her later he’d broken up with his previous girlfriend, she said “Ohhhhh! Oh. Well. I hope it wasn’t because of you.” It wasn’t. A couple months later, I overheard her telling relatives at family Chrismas all about how it was indeed because of me, but how his ex had no right to be upset because “You know, if it’s not meant to be, then it’s just not meant to be.” This was within 5 minutes of walking in the door. I have no idea how they got on the subject.
My mom just recently got an iPhone (her first smartphone) and is already a pro with the emojis.
Also, she watched The Social Network a few years ago and hated the Mark Zuckerberg character so much that she refuses, absolutely refuses, to get a Facebook account or go anywhere near it.
And on the more touching side, she drove three hours to my college town the week before Christmas when I was hospitalized with dehydration from a horrible flu (several years ago), I had no idea she was coming. Of note, none of my college friends came with me to the hospital or visited me; just my mom. From three hours away. I definitely burst into tears when I saw her. <3 U MOM
Oh man — that just reminded me, when I had the flu a few years ago, she mailed me a care package of instant chicken soup (because it was lighter).
Me, as a child who had just had a nightmare:
“Mom, I’m scared of E.T.”
“You’re afraid of Entertainment Tonight?”
Me, watching Jurassic Park with my mother who had never seen it last year:
Addressing Jeff Goldblum’s need to wear a leather jacket on a tropical island: “Isn’t he hot?”
Mom: He’s very good looking!
I don’t know man, John Tesh and Mary Hart were pretty scary.
In all fairness to her, as a kid I totally watched Entertainment Tonight with her frequently and sometimes they would show clips of potentially thriller-y adult movies so I guess she thought something on it scared me? That or Mary Hart’s perpetually frozen visage of wide-eyed dead enthusiasm, I guess.
My mum’s crackers. These are my faves:
When my parents were visiting me in Japan while I was teaching English there, we walked to the train station. When we got there, my mum realised she’d left her water bottle at my flat.
“Don’t worry,” I said, “I will buy you a bottle from a vending machine.”
“But these are all small ones,” my mum said.
“Dad has gone through to the platform. Shout over and ask him if the machine on the platform has large ones.”
“OK!”
She turned to the platform and shouted, “Mike! What’s the time?”
He told her the time.
She turned back to me. “He doesn’t know.”
I bought the small bottle of water.
In my first couple of months at uni, I got freshers flu, and she drove up from London with a raw duck, pak choi, and her meat cleaver, and made me roast duck in the kitchen in my halls.
Once, when having an argument about how I’m not Chinese enough, she yelled at me: “You make me feel like Joy Luck Club!”
The last one is kind of sad I guess but it still makes me laugh.
Laughing so hard I’m crying at the water bottle story.
Same!
My mom is not the kind to give you the robe off her back; she’s the kind if she sees the robe on yours and she likes it she demands it. “I gave birth to you” is the reason. She hasn’t actually done this with a robe, but with jewelry I’ve purchased for myself, for sure.
The most mom thing she’s ever done was listen to the Armageddon soundtrack CD in her car, the whole summer before the one I could drive myself places. I have PTSD from “I don’t wannaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa miss a thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing.”
This. Each summer of my childhood was soundtracked exclusively by one of the following: The Body Guard, Eric Clapton’s “Unplugged,” Riverdance, Barbra Steisand’s “The Broadway Album,” Enya’s “Paint the Sky with Stars,” Tommy (the Broadway revival, not the Who).
My mom only keeps one CD in her car for months at a time, and plays it over and over again. One summer when my husband and I were visiting, it was Adele. We both still get flashbacks to my mom’s car whenever we hear Adele.
I went to my parents’ once to find a book about internet acronyms sitting on the computer table.
Once I was in vacation in Colorado, and she called me one morning at 7am (Mountain Time. My mom is on the East Coast). Then I got a text from my cousin telling me to call my mom because she was worried. I called her, and she said, “I was worried because you didn’t post on Facebook for a few days!”
My mother’s warning to me whenever I might meet or otherwise interact with strangers: “You know, Ted Bundy was a Very Attractive Man!”
MY MOM, TOO!
Was driving my sister and I somewhere and asked, out of the blue, “honey, what’s ‘bling-bling?'”
ha! This is my favourite
My mom and were sitting separaly on an airplane on the way to take a college visit. When I was walking up the aisle after we had landed there were only two people still in the front section of the plane, my mom and the lady who had been sitting next to her. As I approached, strangerlady greeted me -“Megan, I just couldn’t leave without meeting you. Your mom has told me so much about you!”. The flight was under 2 hours.
OH GOSH. No, this was the most Mom thing:
I came to their house one day, and while sitting at the kitchen table she said, “Well, Max and Fiona are gone.”
Thinking they were neighbors I didn’t know, I asked, “Who are Max and Fiona?”
“The sparrows who were living in the awning.”
100% that’s going to be me someday.
Me too, honestly. I’m more like my mom than I’d like to admit. (See also: Humming while doing dishes, which my mom and grandmother both do.)
Sent me an email once with a subject like “sad news”. I thought our dog had died. No, no. Just the kitchen spider. But this one had lived a lot longer than all previous kitchen spiders.
my mom also has a kitchen spider, named “charlotte.”
when she came back from a vacation, apparently charlotte had constructed a huge web across the front door (which leads into our kitchen) and my father plowed right through it, and she was like, “don’t kill charlotte, don’t kill charlotte!”
My mom loves to watch live webcams of various animals: bald eagles, baby animals born in zoos, etc..
I once came home from university to a note on the kitchen table saying “while you’re here, please don’t forget to feed the mouse. He likes cheese and chocolate.”
Underneath the table was a dead mouse next to a huge chunk of half-gnawed cheese. I think he died with a smile on his face.
She probably gave him chocolate, and he ate too much and died.
My mom gives me butterfly updates. And wren updates. She has a beautiful backyard garden of native prairie plants and will sit on the back porch observing. She planted milkweed for the monarch butterflies and tells me that it’s a lot of work to be a butterfly grandmother.
just two more:
forgot me at nerd camp when I was 12. like completely forgot, I had to go into the counselors’ office at dusk when everyone else was long gone and call her, and when she answered the phone, wanted to know what I was calling her for. and when I said that I would like a ride home please, she said to just hang out for while and find someplace to sleep for a day or two until she got there. (she was two states away.) rolls her eyes whenever I bring this up to try to make her feel bad, which I do every month or so.
– made me go to school the day I broke my arm. I slipped and fell on black ice, struggled up the ice-and-snow-covered driveway (it’s only an eighth of a mile or so but much of it is vertical) trying not to fall again on the broken arm, got taken to the hospital and put in the cast, and then dropped off at GODDAMN MIDDLE SCHOOL.
– defends against these and all other childhood complaints by recalling that when she was 16, she got a job as a live-in nanny to a local family and when she tried to come home on a break, found that her own mother had sold the house and gone off to nursing school & so could never go home again. and therefore neither I nor my brother know what suffering is, or grit, or self-reliance.
This makes me sad….. 🙁
aw I’m not mad about the things my mom did to make me tough, I’m only mad that she won’t acknowledge that I am in fact extremely tough, even if I wasn’t born in the 1930s on a poverty farm to religious fanatics like SOME PEOPLE. she was a terrible mother but nothing to do with those particular things, I wouldn’t list the real grudges I hold in a forum like this cause it would be a bringdown.
p.s. Eliza is my cat’s name so every time I read the Toast at work and see her name I worry that it is her, back at the apartment, fucking with me. there was an Elizabeast back on the Hairpin, that wasn’t you, was it? if not I have to assume that one really was my cat.
(if I have to be fair to her then I must note that she couldn’t have forgot me at nerd camp without having first sent me there, which she did three years in a row even though it cost a lot of money I am sure.)
Over the course of some 20 some years, we’ve made my mom into a huge sports fan. A sports fan who has serious, serious trouble with the rules of every sport, but a fan none-the-less. My favorite is when, let’s say one of our guys gets thrown out at second, she’ll say “oh! why did he do that! (taps my arm) he shouldn’t have done that! that’s not helping!”
The most mom-like thing that has happened to me in recent memory was actually perpetrated by my boyfriend’s mom, who, on a recent outing to a street fair in Kentucky, gave each of us an allowance. I, uh…. bought my own mom a present with some of it. Is that weird?
Momception!
Every time I see my mom: Your bone density. Your BONE DENSITY. YOUR BONE DENSITY!!!
My mum read something about six months ago about how men can also get osteoporosis, and I’m male, so now every time I talk to her it’s all about calcium. For some reason she thinks camembert is particularly good for this.
When I was living in Montana, I sent my mom a picture of a grizzly bear. The bear was in captivity, but you couldn’t tell that from the picture. (OK, this was possibly kind of mean of me.) Anyway, I soon got a voicemail promising to send me “WEAPONS. Weapons of MASS DESTRUCTION.”
Also, vitamins. She is constantly mailing me vitamins. When I visit her or she visits me, she sets all of the vitamins she thinks I need out by my plate and harasses me until I take them all.
My mom does the vitamins thing too! She doesn’t set them next to my dinner plate, but she’ll assemble baggies of them and force them on me when I visit. She mailed me a baggie once when I was in England because I guess she thought I was incapable of picking out a suitable local brand without her guidance. Oh, Mom.
Apparently my mom got bored with maternity leave a couple weeks in, so she would take me in to work and leave me on a blanket under her lab bench while she dissected rat brains.
In 1996, we were on vacation in a rural area with no phone access. Once a day, she would walk down to the general store to call her office. One day she came back to the cabin and announced that instead of adopting one child, we would be adopting twins because the adoption agency had asked if she wanted to.
Did your family adopt them?!
*Rolling Stones Brown Sugar plays on radio*
Mom: Do you know what this song is about? *whispers* an interracial relationship
*Watching Game of Thrones episode 1*
Mom: Why did that monk push that kid out of the window?
*In ER to take care of boyfriend after he’s in a bad bike crash*
Mom text: Watch out for ebola!!!!
Also she texted me the awl’s “How to cook a fucking steak” the other day
Hahaha, my mom came in while we were watching Game of Thrones and said, re: Daenerys and Viserys: “Why is that girl being so mean to her brother??”
“Because he DESERVES IT, Mother.”
MY MOTHER IS A STONE-COLD BADASS.
When I was in my last year of college, she sat me down and told me that if anyone ever tried to intimidate me, I should just smile at them while imagining cleaning my nails with a knife, and this would get them to back right the fuck off.
Recently I was discussing the Ferguson protests with my parents and mentioned that people in Gaza were telling Ferguson protesters how to deal with tear gas. We had the following exchange:
Dad: Tear gas isn’t THAT bad.
Me: I think it’s pretty bad these days.
Mom: Yeah, they’ve reformulated it since our day.
Then she told me the story of the time she and my dad were in a Vietnam War protest and she was appointed scout and had to alert the protest when the cops were about to break out the tear gas. “But it really wasn’t that big of a deal,” she concluded.
My parents were also in a Vietnam War protest. They occupied the Administration building at their college, but didn’t block any of the corridors, because it wasn’t the secretaries’ fault that we were in Vietnam. The secretaries brought them cookies.
It may have been the least effective protest there has ever been.
My mom has been a secretary for nearly 40 years so I’m biased but being nice to secretaries should be a ground rule for life.
There’s rarely a problem or hurdle that a secretary can’t fix if they like you enough. They run the ship. They schedule the boss and the housekeeper. They see who comes and goes. And they take detailed notes in that secret shorthand language no one but them can read.
We’re screwed if there’s ever a secretary uprising.
My mother always ends her text messages with “Love, Mom.”
My dad does this, though if my sister’s partner is on the mass text, it says “love, Dad/Tom”
My parents do this on their emails!!
My mother always writes “Hi from Mom!” as the subject headers in her emails to me.
Mine ends hers with “LM”, which is short for “love mom”. My dad does the same (“LD”).
My mom texts me every week during Scandal, usually variations on “but where is Jake?!”. She also live texts me basketball games she knows I am not at home to watch, not the score, but the emotional arc i.e.: “LeBron no one cares” or “Cousins throwing a hissy”.
She has also already bought my cat a Christmas stocking. In October.
My mom came to visit us a couple weeks ago and brought an entire bag full of cat toys and cat treats. She adores our cats.
“Cousins throwing a hissy” is such a beautiful text and summation of DeMarcus Cousins that I really want to watch an NBA game with your Mom.
We tend to vacation together during the final rounds of the NBA playoffs, everyone is terrified of watching games with us because we get so emotionally involved in it. My mother was a damn drill sergeant in the army, but I have seen her cry at the injustice of a bad call.
I was heading out the door to break-up with my college boyfriend, and my mum looks at the family dog sadly, and says “Y’know, [dog’s name] is sure going to to miss him”
I didn’t break up with him (and later married him).
Wow, you really went the distance to keep that dog happy.
He’s a very good dog.
Completely valid.
“It makes you sound incredibly left-wing when you say $100,000 is a lot of money.”
Occasionally prone to saying ridiculous things, but overall pretty rad.
Mom: “I was going to call you last week, but instead I decided to wait and see if you would call me. You didn’t.”
I, just now, was sent, four times, a link to a NY Times article about organization from my mom. “HI This is my dream!” (Direct quote for each of the forwarded links.) Four times. Very mom-ish.
Also, so many of these are making me cry. In a good way, though.
haha i signed up to comment for the first time just to say i know exactly which article your mom sent you, because i loved it too! these comments almost make me feel like it’s time for me to become a mom.
In high school I was totally obsessed with this boy and we dated briefly before he ditched me for another girl. We remained in the same friend group and I remained obsessed until he and the girl broke up. I did not update my mother about any of this. Summer after my junior year, we were both in the wedding party for our mutual friends and we went out to shop for a present for them, the first time we’d been alone together in probably a year. It was a Saturday, my mom wasn’t home, and I drove my car to pick him up. I could’ve been literally anywhere, including in the house.
My cell phone rings.
Mom: “Are you with [Boy]?”
My mom would’ve been able to do that when I was in high school, but only because she hardcore snooped around on my computer while I was sleeping.
Yeah, my mom doesn’t computer very well, and I didn’t have my own computer in high school anyway (perhaps I am an Old) so I was pretty careful. I’m pretty sure she was just creepily psychic sometimes.
I changed my profile picture on Facebook and within 5 minutes my mom had left me a voicemail telling me to take off my chipped nail polish.
Mom retired from the state police and then later a men’s medium security prison, so whenever I moved into a new place (including my new home) she taped box cutter blades under all of the furniture and made me lay on the bed to see where arm’s reach was for me and put a pair of heavy sewing scissors under the mattress at that spot. There is always a baseball bat I’ve never seen before tucked beside the washing machine. And the frequent pop quizzes on if I can guess height, weight and age range of random strangers in public. And if I don’t answer my cellphone, the immediate thought is I must be dead in a ditch.
My mom STILL congratulates me on never having slept with my high school boyfriend.
got a bunch of sex books — titles included “The What’s Happening to my Body Book for Girls,” “I’ll be Home Before Midnight and I Won’t Get Pregnant,” et al. — and put them on a high shelf with no explanation. in later years I demanded to know why I never got a formal sex talk such as one hears of in television programs and such, she said, “I bought all those books and told you not to read them, so I knew that you would.”
she also said it was a family tradition to give your daughter a confusing book about biology and never say a word about it, and that I should have seen the book about periods she was given by an embarrassed Victorian mother in the 1940s if I wanted something to complain about. lots about chickens and eggs, she said.
My mom bought the same books and just left them out on the coffee table when she deemed me old enough.
In 4th grade my best friend’s (nurse) mom bought one for her and, after discovering we were obsessed with it, alerted my mother (or probably checked with her to make sure it was okay). A few days later I had my own copy.
My mom hid them under HER bed. I don’t know what it says about me that did in fact find them and read them.
My grandfather was a minister, so I got a lot of my education by reading the marital guides on the top shelf at his cabin.
My mom showed me http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Miracle_of_Life when I was *6* and she was pregnant with my brother (I remember watching a cartoon more targeted at children 3 years earlier with my sister’s birth, but I don’t know what it was called and I can’t find it! I remember there were sperm in top hats having a swimming race and the winner danced with the egg in a bridal gown) By the time I was the age one typically gets The Talk, I didn’t need it.
The only show my mom and I both watch is The Good Wife. Last year, when that very bad thing happened, she called the next day to make sure I was all right.
I was waiting till the episode was over to watch it and started getting frantic texts from my mom as soon as That Thing happened. (I also get “she’s too thin” commentary from my mom whether we’re watching together or just texting during.)
This is a double-moms moment. After my grandma had surgery, via text:
Me: What has grandma been doing to keep herself occupied? Can I get her anything – books, puzzles, movie?
Mom: Apparently she has a good looking male PT coming every day. That’s keeping her pretty occupied.
It’s like this is MY family!
Some blank verse about my mother:
She has recently discovered emojis, and every communication is now littered with little piggy faces, ghosts and three different types of chick.
She calls the internet the website; she also occasionally reads the timelines of people I talk to on Twitter and then rings me to tell me what they’ve said to me. I asked her to stop doing this, and she said ‘why? Oh no, can they see me?’
Every time (every. time) she gave me a lift somewhere as a teenager, she would put on Sex Bomb by Tom Jones and open all the windows. If I asked her to turn it off she’d just cackle.
She rings me to ask what the yoghurt situation is where I live, because she thinks of everywhere outside London as a demilitarized zone with scavengers and zombies and nothing but Danone low fat for miles.
She, to my knowledge, hasn’t read one of her book club books for the last ten years. Instead she either gets me to read them and write her a summary, or she straight up wikipedias it, then comes up with a devastating pithy analysis which deliberately kills all further discussion of a book which she has not read.
#mums #mums #mums
If I asked her to turn it off she’d just cackle.
HA! This made ME chuckle.
She always, always, gets the names of her children wrong on the first try. For example, if my sister’s name is Brittney and mine is Ashley* my sister is usually ‘Ash-Brittney,’ and I am ‘Britt-Ashley.’ My brother’s name gets similarly mixed with that of my mother’s brother, I assume because they are both The Only Boy.
*not our actual names
Ohh yeah, mine does this with my two brothers. I’m the only girl, so I get called the name of her favorite little sister, and occasionally the first female dog we had, who died about 10 years ago.
I commonly get called the name of my mom’s youngest sister and the name of the dog my parents had when I was born.
I get called one of my brother’s names all. the time. When I correct her, she then goes down the list of all my other siblings until she finally gets to me.
My mom has a daughter (me), a brother (Jon) , and a bichon frise (Brody) she’s had for 10 years. I was visiting recently and she scrolled through “Jon–Brod– ALLI!” when asking me something. I MEAN. A DOG.
Haha! Solidarity fistbump!
It is not unheard-of for my parents to run through the names of all five of their kids before getting to the right one. One memorable time my mum called for all four of my siblings AND THE CAT before getting to me i.e. the one she was looking for.
My parents gave my sister and me very similar names (same number of letters and first letter), but they are absolute champs at getting our names right. Every teacher I had in high school, not so much, but my parents rarely mess it up. Which I appreciate, since the confusion is really their fault.
My sister and I had the same, usually followed by “Fred-George-Mervyn!” for some reason. #moms
My mother would always start with the dog, then her husband, THEN start on the kids’ names. What does that mean??
This made me SO CRAZY as a kid/teenager and I summed it up to being one of four children and also probably our parent did not love us. Anyway, I gave birth to my first and was still in the delivery room and I asked for my husband by first calling him both of my brother’s names. I have had trouble ever since.
There are so many things! I love my mom.
-When she wants to give random advice, she always says it’s “in case a piano falls on me”
-Favorite random advice is “a baby can drown in any amount of water” (I do not have any children)
-When we were visiting colleges, used to say that everything was part of the entrance exams, e.g., not being able to get paper towels out of the dispensers in the bathroom
-When she first signed up for Facebook, she used her unsmiling work picture as her profile pic and accidentally put her entire name in both the first and last name boxes so it said Firstname Lastname Firstname Lastname
-Is very religious, once was asked what Jesus’s favorite insect was, said “that’s blasphemous……..probably locusts”
My mom says, “In case you get a head injury.”
Whenever we go to a restaurant, no matter how fancy or good/ bad the service is, my mom gathers the plates and hands them down to the waiter.
SADE AND MICHAEL BOLTON FOREVER.
On the other hand, also Bonnie Raitt, the woman I realized years later was my first crush. So thanks for the badass-ladies-with-guitars-thing, Mom; signed, your lesbian daughter.
I went through a braless phase in late high school, early college. My mom’s reaction on seeing me nipping out in a black tank top: “Maybe you should wear a bra. It’s very HARD for boys. Get it? HARD.”
My mom, on the other hand, DID NOT TELL ME that this was happening when I liked to wear those shelf-bra type tank-tops in high school. When she finally did bring it up, I was like “uh thanks for letting me walk around like that,” and her response was, “I thought you were doing it on purpose.”
What.
I did this too and my mom was pleased and subsequently spent a lot of time reminiscing about the 70s.
My mom sends me recipes she clips out of the newspaper and signs everything to me M(O drawn as a heart)M. My freshman year of college, she called to ask why the computer wanted her to “give it a cookie”.
My mother-in-law gives my partner and me matching pajamas every year for Christmas.
During the spring months she calls me at all hours to tell me what’s happening on the Eagle Cam.
She wears those bike shorts with the padded butt all the time, even when she doesn’t plan on riding her bike, because they’re so comfortable.
She believes that the cure to all ills is to drink a glass of Gatorade. Once she sent me a care package that contained nothing but powdered Gatorade.
Mom addendum: she lives within driving distance of the actual eagle nest from the eagle cam, and sometimes goes up there with binoculars to see the baby birds for herself. She has personally contacted the wildlife manager in charge of the nest on multiple occasions to express concern about the eagles.
Apparently she’s not alone in this; I read an article about how the wildlife people are sometimes inundated with calls from concerned people, presumably all moms.
“But it’s cold! Are you sure they’re warm enough? You should probably check and see if they’re warm enough. I made these little scarves, in case you want them. It’s ok if you don’t, but it’s pretty cold out.”
Oh, STILL TALKS fondly about the time in the 70s when she was in college in Pittsburgh and the Steelers were in the Super Bowl and she got to go on her walk “right down the middle of the street!” because everybody else was watching the game.
After our dog passed away my mom took to leaving food (mostly cherries & almonds) for the chipmunk in our backyard. We called him Terry, and my mom demanded that we only give him the cherries with the stems still on them, because they would presumably be easier to carry. One night she also left a tiny doll tent outside in case Terry was cold. Still unclear as to whether he actually used it.
My mom doesn’t do a whole lot of super Mom type things, or at least, she doesn’t to me, perhaps to my other siblings, except for this one thing. The house we moved into when I was in middle school came with a lot of weird stuff in it, random jars of screws and bolts, a tire track in the middle of the hardwood floor in the living room, a wooden stick with a spoon bent at a 90 degree angle nailed to the end of it, and a miniature sphinx statue that sits proudly, and prominently in the front yard.
My mom hates that fucking sphinx, but I think it is wonderful, and we made a pact that she doesn’t get to remove it until it completely falls apart (which it is getting close to doing and makes me sad). Once she begrudgingly accepted it as part of our lives, she began dressing it up for holidays. It has a witch hat, a santa hat, bunny ears, a little Uncle Sam headband that is appropriate for any patriotic holiday, and a graduation cap for whenever one of us kids manages to finish some type of schooling.
She also writes epic facebook statuses about her battle with a bird who keeps trying to build a next above the front door.
My mom wouldn’t allow us to use the front door through most of my high school career because birds kept building nests on the wreath she hung there.
In recent years, my mom has gotten very into hip hop music, and vehemently anti-censorship on the radio. To the extent that when they play the radio-sanitized versions of songs, she will yell the correct lyrics at the radio. “It’s ‘Sexy BITCH’, not Sexy Girl! Get it right!”
She’s also just joined Facebook, all so she can post embarrassing photos of me and my sister once a week “for #tbt!”. She also has a Twitter account (and we follow each other), but never posts, instead emailing me tweets she thinks are funny.
During college orientation, as we passed the health center, the following exchange occurred:
Her: Oh, the health center’s very close to your dorm! That’s good. You should take advantage of it.
Me: I will, if I need to?
Her: Your father and I…we used the health center at school. Before we got married. It’s okay.
Me: MOM STOP
And now I need to call my mom and say I love her.
‘she will yell the correct lyrics at the radio. “It’s ‘Sexy BITCH’, not Sexy Girl! Get it right!” ‘ Actual LOLs
While I was in the hospital recovering from gallbladder removal, informed me that her nurse friend had told her most gallbladder patients were “the Four F’s: fair, female, fat, and forty,” then, when I said something like “Well, I’m definitely fair and female, haha, 2 out of 4 ain’t bad” said “Huh, have you LOOKED at the scale lately?” I mean, it wasn’t exactly a shining moment in our relationship, but it was Very Mom.
(Edit: I feel like I should add that actually we get along very well and she is generally not an asshole. This was a rare slip for her.)
Oh, I’m LOVING reading these. So much.
One birthday, Mum asked what I wanted, and I told her a book I’d like. So she bought me a book about back pain (the book I had wanted was fiction) and told me that she hadn’t bought the book I wanted, because my sister had it, and I could always borrow it from her.
And then the next birthday, she got me another book, and when I opened the present, I said, ‘Oh, this looks great! I’ve heard of this one! Thanks!’ and she said, ‘Oh, I thought you’d already read it!’
WHERE IS THE LOGIC, MUM.
She was also in her fifties before she realised that the rude finger was the middle one.
Once wrapped and gave me a box of aluminum foil for Christmas and cackled at my confusion (it made the number of presents equal between my sister and me) (also I apparently needed aluminum foil squares).
Gives me regular updates about Larry when I call. Larry is the lemon tree in their backyard.
Often cleans the house while blasting Wilson Phillips.
We have a pine tree named Santa’s Little Helper, like the dog on the Simpsons. Sometimes when I call my parents I get an update about “SLH.”
My parents had a small evergreen bush outside the garage, which my sister named Mr. Bush. When they had the front walkway redone, they had to uproot him, which led to an all-caps text from my mother reading “MR. BUSH IS DEAD.”
Imagining the Secret Service intercepting this and showing up at your parents’ doorstep.
YES. My parents had a tree named George, and they still sigh over his loss.
My mom also swears that there is a poltergeist in her house, also named George. Whenever something is lost, even at my house, we blame George.
Last Christmas my mom gave me one of my presents while we were alone on X-mas Eve, because she’d gotten more presents for me than for my sister. My sister and I are both almost 30.
My mom once gave me a bottle of fancy olive oil for Christmas. I was 17.
It turned out she had gotten the olive oil (wrapped up in a box) as a gift in her office’s Secret Santa. She hadn’t opened it, but realizing that the contents were liquid, assumed it was a perfume and regifted it to me.
My mom is unable to correctly pronounce any word she did not hear spoken before the age of ten. She calls the Roku box “the Rokuku,” and her attempt at the silly pronunciation of Target (“Tar-jeh”) is “Tar-gay.”
She refused to send in her copy of the 2010 census early because “what if I die before April 1.” Full disclosure: I had done the same thing. Apple – tree.
My mom pronounces Chipotle as Chipotel.
Oh my god.
Had the following conversation with my mom a while back. For background, she is fairly adventurous about food and is well-acquainted with Japanese food.
Mom: Oooh, let’s get some…some edame.
Me: Edamame?
Mom: Edamee-mee?
Me: …Ed-a-ma-me.
Mom: Edamama?
Me: Ed…I give up.
And the very next day:
We’re at the airport. My mom comes running up to me.
Mom: The store over there has that General Tso’s chocolate you were talking about!
Me: …Do you…do you mean Tcho chocolate?
Mom: That’s what I said. General Tcho’s chocolate.
ahahaha! I know I’m late to the party, but my mom says “Tor- TILL – ahs” and no amount of coaching will change that. When I try to correct her, she just emphasizes the middle syllable.
My mom doesn’t swear or tell dirty jokes much, but when I started watching Star Trek Enterprise with her, she kept commenting on T’Pol’s giant boobs. Like, one scene one of the guys was talking about how she had a nice ass, and out of nowhere my mom yells, “Bet that’s not the FIRST thing he noticed!”.
Also, whenever she sees guys she thinks might be gay, she says they’re “a little light in their loafers.”
Little light in their loafers is the best phrase ever
My mother is the queen of care packages. She still sends them to my brother all the time (I’m currently living at home, but at college I got them all the time) and the contents range from actual things he could use to random shit she just throws in to leftovers. One example of a box’s contents: “his portion” of several boxes of uncooked pasta, a couple printed out recipes that she liked but edited to single person portions, some coupons, an eyeglass wipe with a transit map printed on it, a spy novel she just read and thought he’d like, not just clippings but whole sections of the Sunday paper, bite-size Snickers (because she knows he feels guilty buying them for himself), a ratcheting screwdriver, a t-shirt my dad got at a work conference, spices in baggies that she’s afraid the post office will mistake for drugs, and a church key to open cans of coconut milk or condensed milk.
My prudish, sweet mom watched Trainspotting with my brother and me when we were dirtbag teens. Described it as “Not a feel-good movie.”
Once, after my brother moved out, he called her from his new place saying he found a spider and asked her to come kill it for him. He said she was quiet for a moment and then said, “Okay, honey.” He was joking with her, but knew she’d say yes.
Oh, and she cannot tell a joke without laughing all the way through it.
There are too many. But: when my brother was little and I was even littler, we both “liked” video games but neither of us wanted to play them because the whole “dying” thing was really stressful.
So mom would sit us on her lap and she would play the video games for us, letting us direct her on what to do. I think this lasted from Commander Keen through like… Deus Ex.
Awwwww, this one is so sweet 🙂
I was about eight years old and my cousins from out of town were visiting. We were all reading in bed and as my mom passed my bedroom door she overheard me say “Jesus Christ” (obviously not in prayer). She promptly came in and bawled me out for taking the Lord’s name in vain in front of my older cousin Lisa.
After that she went into the third bedroom where my other cousins were tucked into bed and she must have stubbed her toe. From my bedroom Lisa and I heard her holler “JESUS CHRIST!!!!!” Lisa turned to me and said “Did you hear THAT?”
We still give my mother the business about it every now and then.
So… my mom is a bit of a shopaholic, which means that my sister and I have gotten very good at smiling politely at large bags full of pretty random stuff. But she does try to make it at least nominally appropriate (“You have a cat! Here is a book about cats!” “You are writing a dissertation! Here is a book about yoga!”).
But my very personal favorite was my freshman year of college, when she mailed me a gas mask for my birthday. My birthday is in October. I went to college in New York. In 2001.
Kept only two CDs in her car for over nine years. One was Neil Diamond’s Greatest Hits and one was Barbra Streisand’s Christmas album.
I can still sing ALL of “turn on your heart light” and “forever in blue jeans” and “j-j-j-j-j-j-j-jingle bells” by heart.
Barbra Streisand’s “Jingle Bells” is TERRIFYING.
My mom still has The Eagles Greatest Hits Vol 1 and 2 in her car after about 15 years.
My mom listened exclusively to Neil & Barbra for YEARS and I still find myself softly humming “Song Sung Blue” quite often.
SO MANY Mom Things:
-There was a big stenciling craze in the late 80s, and she would make custom stencils for people’s homes. My room had a stenciled border of me with my favorite things: my dog, my doll (that she made me), my cat, a stuffed duck and my dollhouse, also framed stencils of my favorite characters from books.
-A couple years later, she made me a farm for my dollhouse out of felt and paper mache, with various barns and stables and chicken coops made out of popsicle sticks.
-Was pretty much sure that my sister and I would break our neck if we did somersaults, but still let us take gymnastics. Absolutely did not let us go on trampolines.
-A few years ago she told me that she was always a little worried that I’d become a drug addict because I enjoyed swallowing pills as a child. You know, the main reason people become drug addicts.
-Pretty much bulldozed over my dad’s objection to any pet she wanted to get for us because he always cuddled with them in secret anyway and she had the firm belief that children who grow up without pets grow up weird.
-Grackles managed to get into a vent in the attic and build a nest. She thought for about two minutes about kicking them out, and thought for much longer about maybe stringing a net from the attic to the nearby tree so nothing bad happens if the babies aren’t quite ready to fly there. The grackles have now nested there for about 6 summers.
-Up until last year, when I said ‘That’s not a THING’ she frequently warned me not to sleep with a fan pointed at me lest I get Bell’s Palsy,
-One Christmas she gave my sister and me a recipe book of favorite family recipes, complete with sarcastic idiot-proof instructions. Another Christmas she designed a scavenger hunt that involved putting together a puzzle she had made, and solving the riddle on the puzzle, which was a poem made up of family in-jokes and favorite references.
-Kept a choice selection of my middle-school fashion mistakes for several years so she could take them out and tease me about them. Recently admitted that she loved my heeled glitter jellies.
-Refuses to admit that her cell phone is broken because it can still technically receive calls. It’s just that the screen is broken, so if you call and she doesn’t pick up, she can’t see that anyone called and also cannot use her contacts list.
-Sends irritated emails the morning after Antiques Roadshow about the high auction price of some heinously tacky item.
-Before she got a Kindle she would call me from the bookstore to ask if she’d read a book she was thinking about buying. Usually she had and they’d just changed the cover.
-Has been telling me for approximately twenty years that my headache would go away if I’d just eat some damn protein. Is generally right.
I could go on and on. My mom is the best.
Oh, grackles!!
One time, when I was about 11, I was home sick from school and watching Sally Jessy Rahpael on the couch, and my mom came home from work. She tool one look at the people on the TV, and then looked at me, and with a very serious face said “stay away from white men with dreadlocks.”
Best advice she’s ever given me.
This reminds me of when I was about 12 and we were watching a football game (we didn’t normally watch football, but this was the first year our city’s team had ever gotten to the Super Bowl) and they were showing pictures of the players and my mom said to me, very seriously, “Never date any man whose neck is wider than his head.” Also good advice.
Any time my mom saw me watching a talk show of the SJR, Rikki Lake, Montel variety she would without fail say, “Oh, watching educational television I see.”
My mom is 5’10”. When I was getting tall, she said, “Short men will either think your height is very attractive or they will hate you for it. Be careful around them.”
My mom got hardcore into Farmville while I was in college and only stopped playing because SHE HAD RUN OUT OF STUFF TO DO IN THE GAME. As in maxed out all the crops, and they hadn’t added anything new in terms of functionality/goals/objectives/whatever by the time she had done so.
She also sends flowers to every party I have at my apartment because “I want it to look nice”.
She is the best. I am teaching her how to eBay while I’m home for Thanksgiving at her request, and I am very scared about what kind of Pandora’s Box I am opening.
As I have now fled the nest, and my 21-year-old younger brother is hardly ever home, my mother has decided her Shih-Zhu and terrier dogs, Quincy and Eddie are her surrogate children.
She has several pictures of the dogs with the Easter bunny, Santa Claus, and posed in a nativity scene.
Moms <3
When I was a sophomore in college, I got a tattoo and sort of dyed my hair (my hair is black, it doesn’t really dye). My mom was coming to visit in a week, so I decided these things could wait until she was there IN PERSON to break it to her GENTLY. I did let slip to my brother, though, and, bless him, for once he actually did try not to tell all my secrets, but when my mom said she was thinking she was too busy to go visit me, he said, “I really think you should visit Emma. I think she wants to see you.”
Five minutes later I get a call from my mom, who begins the conversation with, “ARE YOU PREGNANT? DID YOU GET A TATTOO? DID YOU DYE YOUR HAIR?” And I was like, “Well, you know, two out of three. The less dramatic two. If you think tattoos are less dramatic than pregnancy, which possibly you don’t. How did you knoooooow.”
She also once signed an e-mail to me with “I love every part of you including your atoms and also your soul.”
I love every part of you including your atoms and also your soul.
!!!!!
This is incredibly adorable.
No lie, that email signature made me tear up a bit!
It made me laugh a lot but also feel very moved?
(Presumably her love included my atoms, but not my tattoo(s), which she still side-eyes constantly.)
Perhaps the logic is that the tattoos are not actually *your* atoms?
Mom once got in a car accident while she was visiting me in Austin because she was trying to take a picture of a sign for Groovy Automotive while driving. Later she posted on Facebook the picture of the sign and her invoice for dent removal from them which got 42 likes from her high school friends.
ALSO: My mom is one of those people who has the face that makes people talk to her. So she makes new friends absolutely everywhere she goes. My mom is that person who strikes up friendships with people at the smoking bay, waiting for luggage, at the grocery store, etc. Her crowning moment was when she came to visit me in Ottawa one year and befriended an extremely elderly Inuit woman who spoke very little English and had only half her teeth (as in, she had a full set of top and bottom teeth, but only on the right side of her mouth?), who was wearing a fantastic fur-and-skin embroidered coat, and she and my mom had a long talk about sewing and embroidery techniques.
Signs all of her text messages, “Love, Mom.”
Mine recently stopped doing that in texts but still ends all our gchats with it. <3
About half the duration of all phone calls to my mom just are her holding the phone up to the dog or my baby nephews ear and telling me to say hi. Neither of them enjoy this – the dog because he’s a dog and the baby because he doesn’t get it, and thinks she’s showing in the phone but not letting him have it and that pisses him off. Most of these calls happen while I’m walking home so I am forced to baby talk to into the phone as I walk through crowds of people. “hiiii braaaady, can you say hiiii?” *bradyden wails then hangs up the phone* When this happens she calls back and says to try again. It’s pretty annoying but I could never tell her that because clearly she’s just thrilled with the whole thing.
At some point when I was a teenager my mom promised that when I was in college she’d tell me what drugs her and my dad had tried. I totally forgot about this but sometime my sophomore year she supplied “I tried pot once, but I didn’t inhale. But your father, it’s a surprise you kids didn’t come out all messed up from all the stuff he did!”. Then I tried to explain that trying LSD in college does not, in fact, lead to birth defects years later. My mother is a midwife.
My mom was having a conversation on Facebook with one of her college friends in which she made reference to all the shit they got up to in college. I asked why she never told me any of those stories and she told me she “didn’t want to give me any ideas.” Bless her. So the only story I really have from my mom’s college days is “the time she got dysentery in Soviet Georgia.”
Sent me an email referencing an article on this very website, which she referred to as “Toast.”
Also, once she said “We have a great new restaurant in town — Five Big Boys!” She meant Five Guys and now we all call it that.
My mom not only told me what kind of lube she & dad like best, but she showed me the bottle. In case I needed a visual. (Thanks, Mom, got the visual covered.)
AHHHHHHHHHH
She also tried to make a Facebook so she could make events for the Mother’s Group she leads for new moms, but didn’t want to have any Facebook friends. Then she got a message that said “You can’t make an event if you don’t have any friends”. Now I manage her Facebook account, so she has friends but doesn’t have to talk to any of them.
My mum finally had to make an fb account. After all was set up and she knew how to use it, she spoke the following immortal words:
“But what I still don’t understand is why I have to see what everybody is saying and doing…”
When my boyfriend was visiting me during our college spring break the rest of the family were leaving the house for a school play. As she left, my Mom said, “Just know we conceived your brother on that couch, so be good!”
Also will there be a separate Dad thread? Because my Dad once looked up from the New York Times and said, “you kids aren’t doing these, um, meta-amphetamines, are you?”
The Toast always has Dads covered: http://the-toast.net/2014/10/09/ur-dad-story/
LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL
I’d forgotten one:
Mummy: so is your dude at yours this weekend?
me: no, he’s got rehearsals
Mummy: oh right, yes, his play. Does he have a large part?
me: *sighs* mum, can you
Mummy: *interrupting* AND DOES HE HAVE AN IMPORTANT ROLE IN THE PLAY.
More cackling. My mother is the dowager duchess of cackling.
I came home from school when I was seventeen and saw lined up on the kitchen cabinet: My Parliament lights, Visine and a roll of duct tape. Next to them, one hacked Mom. She “was just putting my socks away” (TOTALLY SNOOPED) when I was seventeen and found all of these in my room.
The argument and the excuses and the yelling commenced. I was totally doomed for the cigarettes, sure. The Visine, I SWEAR, it’s just because I have allergies!
Finally I asked, “What do you think the duct tape is for?”
“YOU KNOW.”
“No. What. Tell me. What do you think the duct tape is for?”
“For. PIPES?”
I started to laugh. I had the duct tape to make a wallet because I was a Very Cool Teen.
She turned red, she had no idea. “WELL YOU STILL SHOULDN’T BE SMOKING.”
“For. PIPES?”
Brb dying.
My mom will show me things she’s recently purchased or received as gifts – clothing, jewelry, perfume, whatever – and if I express even the faintest admiration (“Oh, that’s nice”) she’ll immediately start trying to convince me to take it.
My grandma was the queen of this. She had this clock she bought (from the Amish?) where on the hour the face would open up and the pieces would whirl about and there were lights and music. It was quite the clock. She showed me and my husband. We had to admire it enough not to hurt her feelings, but not admire it so much that we got one. My mom and her sisters all got clocks like this, so we knew the risk was high. We managed to get out of the situation with her old, normal clock.
My grandma also used to give me clothes she had bought for herself. My mother-in-law made out like a bandit because I passed most of this stuff on to her.
Yep, my mom and grandma both are constantly trying to give me purses. They have eased up on this somewhat since I bought an indestructible vintage Coach bag at the thrift store, for some reason.
Mailed me homemade apple pie cross country when I was in my first year at college (sad part- it was moldy)
Out of curiosity, did you tell her that or did you just say it was great?
No I told her what happened only so she didn’t go through the trouble of sending it again. She sent chocolate chip cookies next time and that worked a lot better.
I am way late to this party, but oh well.
My mom has this weird habit of sending me a FB message “I’m coming up for a visit next week!” (She lives a few hours away.) I’ll then respond with specific plans and she will immediately cancel because “the flowers won’t be in bloom” and then reschedule for 6 months down the line. She’s done this every year since I moved away 8 years ago and has never visited.
She once called me after she’d seen my high school boyfriend in the neighborhood Wal Mart 15 years after we broke up: “He still has that nasty mustache.”
My mom tells me a lot of gossip about her neighbours and coworkers (who I have never met) and then follows every story with “DON’T POST THAT ON FACEBOOK.”
You know, because my Facebook friends are desperate to hear about my mother’s theories on the Johnson’s pending divorce or whatever.
My mom doesn’t do many of the typical “mom” things, so I was charmed when she made me wear my body armor while video chatting while I was in Afghanistan (I am not in the military and was not in any danger whatsoever).
She once put the Christmas lights up on December 26th, but left them up until February to make up for it.
So when I was 17 my mom came in to my bedroom and sat down next to me and said “you know that I love you and that Ill always support you and you can always talk to me about anything. Is there anything you want to talk to me about?”
Dumbfounded, I shook my head.
She sighed and said “ok in other news, I just found your contraceptive pills”
LOVE YOU MOM!
I’ve never seen Downton Abbey (which my mom knows), yet she emails me the day after new episodes to tell me what she thought about what happened.
When I was 16 I left for a road trip, then a few minutes down the road realized I’d forgotten my birth control and turned around. My mom was in my room sorting my spare change.
It was around this age I also arrived home with a friend, stoned and excited about watching a dumb movie and stuffing our faces with greasy Chinese food, to find her defrosting my mini fridge with a hair dryer, wearing nothing but sweatpants and a bra.
After being divorced and not dating at all for 20 years, my mum stealthily drove me past the house of her high school boyfriend. He was in the driveway, so she slumped waaaay down in her seat and made me tell her what he was doing, and what I thought of how he looked. That was roughly the 10th time she’d driven by. She swore me to secrecy. She finally worked up the nerve to talk to him, and now they live together!
Well.
If nothing else, this pair of tweets/posts has made it painfully obvious that I think of my dads with fondness and exasperation, but I think of my moms with irritation and love-despite-resentment. I feel like there could be some fairly productive analysis on that by way of gender roles, social expectations, and so on…
But mostly it’s because my interests align more with my dads’ (and I’m very similar in personality to my stepdad) and my mom inadvertently taught me a lot of disordered behaviors, and I was already dealing with mental illness from a young age. Then my smom, I didn’t live with her until I came home from college, and we just didn’t have that bonding to grow close. I love them all, but there’s this clear divide in how I think of my dads vs moms.
A couple months after I moved from NC to NYC, my mom called me to tell me about a story she had heard about: apparently a man was walking around the streets of Manhattan listening to very loud music on his iPod, and the music was so loud (HOW LOUD WAS IT?) that a literal airplane dropped out of the sky and fell on him and he didn’t hear it because his music was too loud.
She had never stopped to doubt the feasibility of an AIRPLANE falling out of the sky and directly on top of a person walking around Manhattan. (In my head this looks a lot like the Wicked Witch of the East.)
Omg this just reminded me. I moved to NYC from Indiana 7 years ago, and last week I called my mom while walking to the subway around 10pm after a work event. At the end of the conversation I was like “okay I’m at the subway, gotta go” and she was like “are you walking by yourself at this hour?” Mom. I have lived here for 7 years. How do you think I get places?
These are amaaazing. I love my mom and moms so much.
Once while driving into Olympia, WA: “Ooh! Is that the capitol building? Oh no wait, that’s a tree.”
Also signs all of her texts and facebook messages with “love, mommy”
Sends care packages full of Costco-sized tubes of Airborne so I (and now my spouse, who has become like her second child) don’t get sick, ever, even though I have like 6 unopened tubes from previous packages.
Used to write me birthday cards from our old kitty, and would then trace her paw as the signature.
Drinks margaritas and/or mai tais for dessert
Has sworn off all men.
My mom once wrote “Happy Mother’s Day!” on a piece of printer paper and propped it up against my cat. Posted it on Facebook, tagged me in it, and captioned it “Mika misses his mommy!”
A couple of days ago she posted to Facebook a picture of a collage she’d made of the Virgin of Guadalupe entitled “Our Lady of the Sacred Vagina.” Yeah.
Actual quote from my mom (who up until that point was always misplacing her phone) on her iphone when she got one a couple of years ago. “We’re like Siamese twins joined at the hip who had the surgery to get separated but are still very close”.
She’s back to misplacing it a lot which means it’s probably time for an upgrade 🙂
One night, I’m in college but asleep by 2am when I get the call from my mother, who is out and about (presumably leading the life I should have been at 21.)
“I thought I’d call my college daughter to ask her a question.”
“….?”
“What does RIDING DIRTY mean?”
cue lots and lots of giggles in the background from martini drinking friends
I had to look it up on Urban Dictionary and my mom was disappointed with the actual meaning. “I thought it was something SEXUAL” she said.
God, I love this woman.
When I was 14 I had to go on birth control for health reasons, and I was not even remotely thinking about becoming sexually active. Nonetheless, my mother decided it was necessary to give me The Talk and explain that I was conceived while she was on the Pill, and my dad was conceived while HIS mother was on the pill, and ended with my mother shouting, “YOU COME FROM VERY FERTILE PEOPLE. YOU HAVE TO BE CAREFUL.”
I had almost the exact same conversation with my mother! Except it was about how no method of contraception works, so I should just NEVER HAVE SEX. “We were using condoms when I got pregnant with your older sister! And then I went on the Pill and got pregnant again! And I was using a diaphragm when I got pregnant with your little brother!” etc etc, I have 5 siblings, 4 of whom were unplanned, so there were a lot of contraception failures.
Oh man. My mom is a church lady who hosts quilting bees. She has a swear jar on her desk, and everyone at her work puts a quarter in every time they swear. Still laid the sickest burn on me.
Background: her mother is really and truly evil.
Teenage Me (being awful & bratty): “You’re just like your mother!”
Mother: “SO ARE YOU!”
ETA: Bought me a rape whistle with my chosen university’s logo on it as a high school graduation present.
In explaining this to a co-worker, he laid a real gem on me. We work in the theatre, and his mom tries SO HARD to be supportive that she gets them tickets for a local show whenever he comes home to visit.
HOWEVER, it is only Mom Theatre in his suburban hometown, so their most recent venture was to a gem entitled “Waist Watchers!” Wherein all the songs are show tunes with the words changed to be about weight loss. The opening number? “God I Hope I Lose It”.
My mom emailed me to ask if I was familiar with the song ‘All About That Bass.’ Then, when I didn’t respond fast enough, she called me to ask the same question. Because it was very important to know if I knew the song.
So many mom moments! Some favorites:
When she discovered flat rate shipping boxes at the post office, she started sending me the heaviest things she could pack into them because it was such a great deal. One year it was all the canned goods and spices associated with Thanksgiving (pumpkin, squash, cranberries, Bell’s), and she was so thrilled that it got from Maine to Alaska for only $5.
Every fall, laminates beautiful red maple leaves she finds in her yard and mails them to me so I can hang them in my window here.
Bought a Goodwill discount card, uses it daily. When I was 14 and highly susceptible to consumerism, let me go into Abercrombie&Fitch for back to school shopping, then, while I was in the changing room, declared stridently, “This store goes against everything I believe in!”
When I lost my virginity, told me: “Honey, I’m so proud of you! This is a really good time in your life to be having casual sex!”
Once declared, “Flirting is my hobby!”
my mom is a master of embarrassing me in public places. On the afternoon before my reluctant foray into HS prom (I planned on wearing a suit, despite the fact that my private school in the South was more than a wee bit tyrannical about gender norms), I was buying a corsage for my friend whose first choice had not worked out. My mom announced to the lady at checkout (proudly, I think?) that I was going to prom that night. The lady politely asked me what color dress I was wearing. Just as I was about to say “black”, my mom interrupted “Oh no! She’s wearing a SUIT”
what may actually be worse is that the other day I broke my glasses and we drove to costco and as I went up to the eyeglass counter to ask about fixing them she told the lady “also she’s in a bad mood and very grumpy” so I truly felt like a functioning adult in that moment, let me tell you.
My mom and I have a bunch of in-jokes around how independent and unwilling to accept advice I am. This drives her crazy..
One time around Halloween the grocery store by her house was selling Halloween-themed stuffed animals. We both thought the idea of a stuffed vulture was hilarious so she took one home and named it Henrietta. We have an agreement that when I need to be left alone and she’s hovering over me trying to help out I can turn to her and make a face that’s a terrible impression of Henrietta to get her to back off. We invariably both bust out giggling.
Oh, this makes me so sad. Immediately after her cancer diagnosis, my mom left me a voicemail saying that she was going to be fine and I shouldn’t worry about her. Didn’t know until she was dying that her diagnosis was Stage 4, metastasized to her brain. I still have that voicemail.
Made a big deal out of Valentine’s Day family dinners every year when we were kids. We’d all make each other crappy little kid-handmade valentines. Then she would give us all chocolates and these beautiful cards she had decorated with things like butterflies hand-cut out of decorative Cambodian paper she’d gotten on a work trip. They’d have special messages for each of us and snippets of e.e. cummings poetry on them. Didn’t realize Valentine’s Day was about something other than familial love for much of my childhood.
Annnnd writing this has made me tear up at work thinking about how great my mom is. She’s really great.
Oh and she also once waded and then literally SWAM through the streets of Bangkok during the monsoon to get to a hospital for a checkup while she was like seven months pregnant with one of my sisters.
Aww, how sweet! I also associate Valentine’s Day with familial love because my mother would always give us candy and little presents for it.
My mom calls me to gossip about the neighbors on our small cul-de-sac (none of whom lived there when I lived at home, so I’ve only met them each like, once, if at all). “Did I tell you what Mark did this week?” “Mark? Who’s that? Oh, the dad who lives next door?” “No! That’s Tom. Mark is the toddler.”
(Answer: rode his BigWheel into our other neighbor’s flowerbed. Soon to come, updates on whether she was mad or not, I guess.)
My first care package from my mother came during my second year at university. I opened a large Amazon box to find 32 tins of sardines. No note or explanation. When I texted her a picture to ask why, her response was “you send too many emails late from library. bad for your health. Fish oil is good for you, and because it is cold, it will improve your uterus”
I ate them all eventually, so I guess my uterus is super improved.
Text conversation between me and my mum when I was really disappointed post getting an essay back
Me: Hey mum, kind of bummed, got a 2.2 on that essay I worked really hard on…
My mum: Oh no, that’s too bad. You’ll do better next time. LOL.
Me: ?? What??
My mum: ?
Me: LOL??
My mum: Lots of love?
My university friend’s mum used to do this as well! My friend knew about it, but he said it was always quite jarring on first read.
Example one: ‘Just so you know I found all that hair removal cream under your bed. LOL’
Example two: ‘Sad news today, the cat passed away. LOL’
This story actually did make me laugh out loud.
I have a text message from my mom. It reads: “Check your email. Love, Mom.”
I saved that one. It’s just so ….mom-ish.
My dad will text my younger cousins to tell them he sent an email.
*Picture of cats* They just told me they miss you, sweetie!!!!!!!!
In pre-parents on facebook time, I was studying abroad and whenever I’d post an album she’d hijack my sister’s account and write me messages in all caps on all the pictures – signing them LOVE MOM. This gem for instance, on a picture where I said a monkey was creepy because I’m not a fan:
LISA,THIS CUTE LITTLE MONKEY IS NOT A CREEPER….YOU HAVE MONKEY ISSUES…….YOU & MEGAN SHOULD GET HELP ABOUT YOUR MONKEY/TURTLE PROBLEMS….LOVE MOM
(Megan is my sister and has an odd fear of turtles)
My mom doesn’t have Facebook. Fortunately, my Aunt Kathy is there to pick up the slack, commenting on year-old pictures of me, just to say how much fun it looks like I’m having, or what a lovely young lady I’ve become.
* Calls smart phones “intelligent phones”.
* Makes a dish with chicken in it, so considers it healthy. Rest of the dish is canned cream of mushroom soup, milk, sour cream, dried beef, and bacon. Served over white rice. It is delicious.
My mom’s most her thing she’s ever done was text me using a lot of capitals and 90s textspeak to say that she used a roadkilled raccoon to lure a huge vulture into the yard and take pictures of it. She also set up a tripod so she could record video of a fox that would walk by our yard.
The most mommish thing was sending me via amazon a bunch of skirt hangers after I mentioned ONCE that I was having difficulty finding them, and then informing me by phone on my birthday that those were my gifts.
My favorite mom stories:
In the theater watching Black Swan
me, incredulously: WHAT is HAPPENING?
mom, in all sincerity: she’s turning into a swan!
when my friend and I were leaving from my house for Bonnaroo right after college, “remember, have fun and never consent to a search!”
she refers to Kayak.com as ‘that canoe site’
in college she sent me a steady stream of mail, including letters from the dog with charming misspellings, “time 4 treetz!!”
my mom is still very proud of the solution she discovered for keeping icepacks on my face after wisdom teeth removal: a leg of panty hose knotted in the middle, stuffed with ziplocks full of frozen peas.
One day, my mom sent me this series of out-of-context texts:
Mom: Just watched a giant stuffed shark named Shark McGuire in a dance contest with the other team.
Mom: Now a giant clam named Roger Clammons ate the umpire.
Me: I have to ask– did you drop some acid tonight or something?
Me: I mean, what?
Mom: Next is CentiPete Rose who farted on the field.
(Turns out she was at a minor league baseball game and was describing the between inning entertainment.)
She’ll also text my brother, his girlfriend and I a blow-by-blow of what she is seeing while on road trips. Like, random towns she passes through.
Mom: Salisbury
Mom: passing that Pizza Hut
I was with my parents visiting Savannah once and we were getting ready to go to dinner. I was ready to go before they were, so I said I was going to walk to the restaurant since the weather was so nice (March in Savannah and I was living in a northern city so I was like “yesss give me all your sun/flowers/warmth”). My mom somewhat uncharacteristically FREAKS OUT about this like I am immediately going to get snatched up or brutually murdered somewhere along the 15 minute walk and wants me to just ride in the car with them. I, in my mid-20s, became a petulant teen again, going “MoooOOOmmmm I walk by myself, in cities no less, all the time, jesus christ I AM A FREE WOMAN” and stormed out. That was like 7 years ago and I’m still kind of annoyed about it.
A couple of years ago, when I was working morning shifts at Starbucks, my mother told me to be sure to vary my routes walking to and from work, in case anybody was following me to learn my routine. What? No, mom, seriously, what?
My mom likes to use bleach so much when doing laundry that she had ruined many articles of clothing over the years — by using it as a spot-treatment on stains with such zeal that it burns a hole through the fabric.
She added me on facebook a while ago but then called to say that “you don’t have to be my friend online, if you don’t want to” (I did add her).
Upon arrival home, from anywhere, every single time, she would yell “Super Mom’s home!” as she came through the door. If no one responded, she would continue to call out “hello? hellooooo…” until receiving some half-hearted teenage “hey”s from somewhere in the house.
Tells me to talk to my sister more because “sisters are forever”. Will also say this with a heavy sigh about her own sister.
Framed a photo of me and my boyfriend and placed it in the living room among other family photos. She kept it there even after we broke up. Its been 2 years. I think she’s trying to tell me something.
when i go shopping with my mom and she wants me to buy something, she turns the lyrics of heart’s “crazy on you” into “but it looks pretttttyyyy on you! PRETTY ON YOOUUUU!”
When my parents were out of town, it was my job to take care of the dog. It was raining pretty much the whole time, so I wasn’t very good about picking up the yard, trying to tell myself that the rain would take care of most of it.
Anyways, once I’m back in school, she calls and yells at me about how she couldn’t believe that I wouldn’t pick up all the poop and she had picked up at least 3 poops, and all that. I just took it quietly.
She than calls back and leaves a message, “oh yeah,” and sang happy birthday to me.
-Asked me if I was pregnant seconds before I came out to her (to be fair, I was having a hard time getting the words out and she had resorted to guessing what I was so worked up about)
-Yelled at me: “Do you even still believe in GOD?” at top volume, in a packed diner
-Wrote an incredibly touching essay about her feelings re: Ellen Page’s coming out and then posted it on Facebook
I was late to the twitter party and now late to this one but I will repeat mine here because I feel like sharing lately:
*lightly coughs at dinner table*
Mom: “ARE YOU CHOKING!?”
My mom still wants me to call her to make sure my plane arrived “OK” whenever I fly. I am over forty.
My mom’s most her thing she’s ever done was text me using a lot of capitals and 90s textspeak to say that she used a roadkilled raccoon to lure a huge vulture into the yard and take pictures of it. She also set up a tripod so she could record video of a fox that would walk by our yard.
Most mom things:
-whenever she goes to CVS or something she’ll see tabloids and when I get home she’ll ask me if X celeb is pregnant
-thinks that Kanye West is married to Beyonce and that Jay-Z is married to Kim K.
-constantly uses a similar-but-wrong word and then gets mad when I don’t understand her. Ex. asks me if I want to watch Sherlock with her when she means Elementary, or if I want to download a show with her when she really means stream it.
-goes EVERYWHERE with her ipod clipped to her jeans and her headphones either in or dangling out from her mock-turtleneck.
Drinks $9 large bottles of Chardonnay only, usually in plastic glasses (crystal if people are over!) filled almost to the brim with ice, then specifically asks for the cheap stuff at restaurants with a glass of ice on the side. Gets offended when the server forgets – they almost always do.
Signs off Gchats with “Love, Mom”
I used to ride horses competitively from age 7-19. I quit until last year (I’m 34 now). In July she flew in to be my Horse Show Mom for my first show in 15 years. Then last month she drove up here to Ohio where I live from south Texas, with my aunt that she roadtrips with because said aunt won’t fly anywhere, upon my mentioning I had another horse event I was doing that weekend. She drove me crazy while here, but, love her. She can still wrangle the dang horses while I’m trying to get myself ready, too.
My boyfriend’s mom does the wine thing! I thought she was the only one!
This isn’t my mom but my coworker said that her mom called her first week in college and she told her,”Yeah we’re just hanging out and burning CDs and stuff.” A week later her mom called back and said “Your dad and I are very worried about this ‘burning CDs’ business! You could start a serious fire.” She had to explain what the phrase actually meant.
My mom dressed up the decorative duck in the yard in a graduation robe when I graduated from law school. She put a sign on it that read “Juris Ducktor.”
My mom just doesn’t use exclamation points in texts, so I’ve recieved replies to texts I sent like “I have an interview tomorrow” that consist only of “Yeah”. Not Yay, not yeah! or anything, just “Yeah”.
When the Giants went up 3-0 in the top of the first on Tuesday she just texted me “Giants”. She can find the ? why can’t she find the !
Oh and! My brother and I were prone to panicking that Mom had left without us if we lost her in the drug store (we’d hang in the toy/book aisle while she shopped) until she finally drilled into us “I will NEVER leave a store without you”.
Last year at Christmas we were in CVS and I think I went back for something while she was checking out, and once I paid, I couldn’t find her, so I poked my head outside and was immediately met with “I KNOW I SAID I’D NEVER LEAVE A STORE WITHOUT YOU…”
Mom text, in response to my asking that she just tell me she loves me rather than tell me more ways I can fix my mental illness by just trying harder: “”You is kind, you is smart. You is important.” Mae Mobley, The Help (pg 443) And…I love you.” It was both tremendously appropriate and inappropriate to the situation at hand. The page citation really made it sing.
She also asked, out of the blue on the way to the grocery store, “Do you know what a “safe word” is?”
Oh god, forgot about this one: a few months ago, I got a text from my mom in the middle of a work day that just says “Do you have a minute… to talk?”
I immediately FREAKED OUT internally, wondering who died or what horrible tragedy had happened, ran into the hallway and called her, my heart beating like crazy.
She picked up and I heard her in the middle of a laughing fit, and I’m totally baffled. “Ahhh I’m so sorry!” she said, through continued laughter. “I accidentally pressed something on the phone that put the ellipses in there and didn’t notice until I hit send!”
I was planning my wedding at the time, and she just wanted to ask me a question about flowers. FLOWERS
Oh gosh, my mom is the best. Here are a few favorites:
– She rarely gets drunk, and is hilarious when she is. Once she attended a brunch with my sister, drank a bunch of Prosecco, and proceeded to talk/flirt at length with an attractive man named Jack who was about my sister’s age. Approximately half of this conversation consisted of my mom repeatedly saying, “You know who else is named Jack? Our DOG!” and then collapsing into giggles.
– Last time I visited home, we went to the health food store together and she bragged about my job to the cashier, whom she had never met before.
– She greatly embarrassed me when I was in high school and we went to see Lord of the Rings together by whistling whenever Orlando Bloom came onscreen, and when The Eye of Sauron appeared she exclaimed, “It looks like a giant fiery butthole!” She now claims to have no recollection of saying that.
– Every time I post a picture of myself on Facebook, she comments, “My pretty Annie!” or similar
I should call her.
For a while after I moved to a different state, Mom had a bad habit of calling me from the road to ask me to look up directions to things. Despite the fact that she always, always tells my sisters and I to never ever ever ever text and drive. She hadn’t done it in a while, though, so I had decided not to mention it here.
I just got off the phone with her asking for directions to her doctor’s office. “I normally would drive around looking for it, because I know the general area, but I have to be at my appointment on time because I can’t be late for your sister’s dance concert.”
Conversation included, “And now I’m doing that thing I always tell you not to do and talking while driving on the highway.”
My mom was working on a project at my house and planning to come over to finish it but couldn’t because of car problems. When she called to tell me this she said, “I bought an interesting new sandpaper that I was really excited to try but now I’ll have to wait.”
Whenever I have lunch with my mom during my work day, she always brings me an assortment of random things, such as socks, headphones, snacks, newspaper articles, and small toys. (I’m 30 and I work in an office.) Once she brought me this triangular fabric item which, she explained, you can snap around your bra straps to conceal cleavage. “It’s like an instant cami! I thought you could keep it in your desk.”
Okay, Mom.
That’s so very Mom! I live across the country from mine so she can’t do this, but she sends me the occasional “care package” with an assortment of things- usually candy, a book she just finished reading and liked that is of no interest to me, candles that I won’t burn, and something random. Once, it was a bag of cocktail umbrellas.
Any visit with my mom means acquiring a new pile of useful and useless objects. A while back, I started telling her to imagine, since I live in a small apartment, that I actually lived on a boat. Functional, ergonomical. I told her, the next time she grabs a whimsical spaghetti strainer or pack of cloth headbands, “hmm, will this fit on Runcible’s boat?”
It’s actually cut down gifts to mostly newspaper clippings and snacks!
Also, she can’t not clip articles for me. I have been trying to convince her about the magic of digital media, but so far no dice.
I did well on my SATs but thought it was tacky and obnoxious to brag about it. So my mom gave me a T-shirt with my scores printed on it in huge letters/numbers. At my birthday party, in front of all my friends.
She sent me a big box of valentine candy every year of college. One February day I picked up my mail at the campus center and then went straight to the library, where I ran into a professor I had a huge crush on. She smiled archly at the red ruffled heart-shaped box and asked who it was from. I was too flustered to be coy or flirtatious so I just blurted out that it was from my mom, and then was mortified forever after.
She also let me have the cast party at our house one year in high school, and agreed to stay out of the way upstairs, despite that party’s reputation as a wild free-for-all. She said if I thought it was getting out of hand I should go to my room and call her on the other line, and she’d call the police and pretend to be a neighbor complaining. It went off perfectly and I got to be popular with the theater kids for one shining moment.
p.s. I saw the call for these on Twitter yesterday but didn’t respond bc my mom follows me there and I was too self-conscious.
I made my mom a mix CD when my parents were going camping with my aunt and uncle. She called later to tell me how much she liked the song about the K-Mart. I told her that it wasn’t K-Mart, it was “Gay Bar”. She reported this with glee while cackling to the rest of the car, told me they had to go listen to it again, and hung up on me.
Also, this summer, I was walking around Denver (2000 miles away), minding my own business, when I received a non sequitur text saying, in full:
I am going to bed bath and Beyoncé to get your daddy to ass pillows
Beyoncé was intentional, not autocorrect.
OH and displayed prominently in the basement are pictures of my mother lying in the middle of the Piazza San Marco in Venice because she’d drunk so much wine she couldn’t stand up. This was pre-me, but the pictures are definitely still up.
Oh my goodness ‘I want to take you to the K-mart’ is just hilarious. My mum is the queen of misheard song lyrics (which the whole family will then adopt), but this is priceless.
My mother once called me with the question, “You know that song, “Are we human, or are we dancer?” What does that mean?” Because she knew I liked The Killers, and she had been hearing that song at work and thought there was some sort of code in the lyrics.
Also, when I was in middle school, she affectionately called me an allegedly Polish word that I cannot seem to translate “Pupja” (pronounced poop-ja), but she began to shorten it slowly to just “Poops”. It was sweet just in the family, until the day that she called out across a crowded parking lot, “Hi Poops!” And she never shortened it again.
My mom can never remember the set up to a joke, only the general idea of it. So she’ll muddle though that “unimportant” bit and then deliver the punchline perfectly and laugh delightedly at herself while the rest of us sit there, bemused, trying to figure out what the set up was supposed to be in order to make the punchline funny. My favorite memory of this is a joke that I still don’t know, but the punchline is something like “He licked all the chocolate off the peanuts!”
According to Google, it is the Gift of the Magi, only opposite.
Here’s one version –
“A preacher went to visit an eldrly woman from his church who had just had an operation.As he was sitting there talking with her, he noticed a bowl of peanuts on the stand next to the bed.He began to eat them, and soon it was time for him to leave.When he got up he noticed he had eaten all of her peanuts.”Sister Jones,”he said” I’m sorry I ate all of your peanuts.”She replied “That’s okay pastor,I already sucked all of the chocolate off of them.”
My mom, as we’re driving down the highway: “You see that building? We’ve never been there.”
Oh my god. When we were kids, my sister & I would get kumquats, cherries, oranges and an asian pear in each of our stockings. This came to be referred to as Christmas fruit. A couple of years ago, my parents (to be fair, mostly Dad) took it upon themselves to spend who knows how much money to ship us Christmas fruit via REGULAR MAIL from Pennsylvania to New York and California. My sister was out of town and I live across the country, so both of us opened well-meaning boxes of rotten and moldy fruit. It was gross/adorable! Needless to say, we struggled with tactfully telling our parents we were fine on fruit, thanks.
Just this morning, an e-mail exchange.
Mom: What did you do in Maine?
Me: I went to eat
Mom: “How long did that take? Good job son……..
So, probably the most specifically Mom thing that my mother has ever done was to ask, each morning in high school, if I wanted a piece of cornbread. I did not want a piece of cornbread because hers was awful and also, cornbread is not for breakfast. So every morning she would ask, I’d say no thanks, and I’d open my backpack to find a piece wrapped in foil and crumbling all over my textbooks anyway. I had a lot of cornbread in my locker for a while. Sorry if there were rats, guys.
Oh! There’s another thing. This is more current. Now that she has a smartphone, she’ll go somewhere, take a bunch of pictures and send it as an email to everyone (my dad, who lives with her, my husband and my sister’s husband, my sister & me).
When we were visiting the zoo she kept taking photos of the trees, flowers and various plants lining the walkways and nothing else. When I told her “Mom, we’re at the zoo. Not a botanical garden.” she answered “Well, I know which animals are here and what they’re called and I can find all the photos I want on the internet. But I don’t even know what these flowers are called!” She ended the day not having taken a single non-botanical photo.
one time in sephora, my mom smelled a bad perfume and said (in a conspiratorial [but still loud] tone) “it smells like cunt. an unwashed one, too.”
edit: @thestonefruit and her own mom’s cunt comment.
Mom will occasionally find some aspect of popular culture so amusing that she parrots it constantly in an unbelievably adorable way.
My favorite examples:
Signing every text message for months with “totes mah goats”.
Singing and finger dancing to “Hot in Here” by Nelly.
Her ongoing, years long, lady-crush on Ellen.
She is also, at times, terrifyingly devoted to care taking:
She recently offered to fly to where I live to be a live in nurse FOR MY CAT.
The first summer I lived away from home she showed up at my apartment unannounced to inspect my fridge because I hadn’t bought any groceries with the credit card she gave me for over a month. I was working full time, I bought my own groceries, told her I was buying my own groceries, and she still had to make sure I was not starving to death.
She refuses to let anybody arrive at a train station or airport unmet. She was there at to pick me 2:30am on a Sunday (fuck you, Amtrak) every time, without fail. She once made the two hour drive at 6pm the night before “just in case they closed the roads”.
– Every Valentine’s Day since we moved out, without fail, gifts me and my siblings with Hershey’s Hugs & Kisses. Though they are inferior chocolate, I accept her devotion to habit and symbolism.
– I am a professional singer. At concerts, it is her favorite thing to introduce herself to my conductors (or colleagues, or unsuspecting strangers) as Singstrix’s Mom, and then corner them to discuss how great I am. I make apologetic faces at her victims while slinking away as fast as possible.
– My mother regularly trots out what I and Mr. Singstrix refer to as her “ghost cat” story, which involves an exasperated “Really, Ashes?” about our first cat ~sending a sick stray kitten to my parents’ back yard two weeks after she’d been put to sleep.
My mom likes to send me care packages for Valentine’s Day and Halloween. There are always silly socks, and cat-related greeting cards that she saves up for me, and probably a weird cookbook. I love them.
Drove 8 hours through a snowstorm to see me perform in a musical. Did not tell me she was going to do this (apparently made the decision that morning), called me halfway through the drive to say “The performance is at 7, right? The snow is pretty bad but I think I’ll make it.”
Whenever she sees boys I had crushes on in high school she texts me about it and occasionally takes pictures of them without their knowledge to send to me. When she saw my math teacher in a coffee shop (he was British and 30 and had amazing eyes, okay?) – 7 years after I graduated high school, mind you – she took about 10 pictures of him, with her grandson in the foreground as pretext for having her camera out, and texted them all to me. It’s….sweet, in a sort of terrifying way. She also got a cease and desist letter from Tina Fey’s lawyer once.
Also, the hardest I have ever seen my mother laugh was at a picture of a chocolate Santa lollipop that looked exactly like a penis when it was unwrapped.
Wait. Was this cease and desist letter all in the pursuit of photographs for you??
Oh man I really should have elaborated on that more. It was unrelated, just in the vein of “my mom is really creepy.”
So, we live near-ish to where Tina Fey grew up. Our little town has a book festival every year, and the organizing committee is always trying to get famous authors to come and speak and sign autographs, and they are not afraid to shoot for the stars. So my mom, figuring we’re within 50 miles of Tina Fey’s hometown (???) decides she wants to get Fey to come as a guest (?????). But she didn’t want to write to her fanmail address, oh no, she’d never see that letter. So her totally reasonable solution was to look up Fey’s parents in the phone book and write to their home address asking if they could please show the letter to their daughter and ask her to consider attending the book festival.
Naturally, this resulted in a “please do not stalk my client’s family” letter.
Naturally.
Actually, I could see my mom doing some variation of this…
You need to tell us about Tina Fey’s lawyers!
My mom is a librarian and a WASP, so you better believe I didn’t get any kind of direct communication about puberty and sex. I only had the books she left in my room, fanfiction.net, and Sheroes (oh man, was anyone here on Sheroes? The Toast readership seems like a demographic that would have been) to educate me.
-Glitter and confetti in every card she sends me, mailed using the pre-printed address labels she’s made for my home address by the sheet. It’s wonderful and delightful.
-The first time she held my kid, her first grandchild, “One of the best things about her being here is that now you understand how much I love you.”
Love her.
My mom recently told me to adopt one of those bunches of extra Mexican (not extra-Mexican) babies that are running around all over here in California since I was not yet pregnant at 32.
My mom loves to mail people notes. She has all of my friends’ addresses and mails them happy new apartment/happy Halloween/hang in there things will get better cards. She will also knit them scarves upon request.
My mother is a flower hunter. She kept and keeps sheers and scissors in her car, and would often pull over while driving me back from school to clip a fresh bough of cherry blossoms or a clump of bush sunflowers.
While I was alright with robbing the highway, i’d argue and shout against CLIPPING THINGS from LANDSCAPED YARDS. It did not matter and seemed to add to her general delight. She just, i don’t know, she loves stealing flowers?
She still does this. Her local bank has a beautiful selection of roses on an island in the parking lot, though I honestly don’t know how any are left, because I see them in vases around her kitchen all the time. It is probably bad that when I stop by now for lunch or tea or just to pick something up that I can pretty well identify where she’s stolen things from.
The only advice I got from my mom before I went to college was “You know, you can still be a feminist if you shave your underarms. Don’t let anyone peer pressure you into not shaving if you want to!” (This was out of nowhere, while buying groceries.)
Embrace that third wave, mom!
Every year, my mother sends ME a Mother’s Day card.
My mom sends me a check each month to help me out with my student loans (because my mom is the best, seriously), and encloses a note, a newspaper article she thinks I might enjoy, and several coupons she thinks I might find useful. Note: I find none of these coupons useful.
Oh, and the check at Easter time always comes with a package of marshmallow Peeps.
One time my mom proudly told me about how an old English teacher of hers gave her class an assignment to write a page-long sentence, without it being a run-on, and she was the only one who could do it. Then a few weeks later when I was at summer camp she sent me a letter that ended with “have you been counting the periods?” There were none.
Also my sister once told her she’d be staying out late and my mom instinctively responded with “No, you can’t, you’re three!” My sister was twenty-one at the time.
I had to reply to this because my sisters were a surprise package deal, too! (Though not twins.)
Talking about PBS period dramas: “Oh! Do you like to watch Abbington Downs?”
Me: “….You mean Downton Abbey?”
Mom: “Yeah that”
I came home to find my room reorganized.
Me: “So you found my vibrators.”
Mom (looking mortified): “I’m just glad you’re healthy. Masturbation is healthy!”
“I made my own peanut butter. It’s so good for you! I couldn’t get the ratio right so I kept adding more peanuts and now I have gallons of peanut butter and peanut oil. I’m sending you home with a few jugs.”
In the mid-90’s, with a very worried expression: “We talked about raves at work today. Do you go to raves?”
Anytime I watch anything dramatic on TV with my mom, as soon as the dialogue begins, rather than watching/waiting for the plot to unfold she’ll start asking questions about the characters’ motivations: “What’s his deal?” “Why is she doing that?” “Where’s he going?” and then soon after come the questions like “What did he say when I asked where he’s going?”
Also whenever we’re watching Mad Men and Don Draper (or any other male character) does something shady: “Oh, well he’s just a jerk!!”
OMG OMG JUST REMEMBERED. At least once, my mom has called me, left a voicemail message, and then called and left another voicemail message because she wasn’t sure she had said it was her calling.
My mother is a badass. A PhD, she can hang sheetrock, works full-time as an ED of a non-profit, long-distance runner, elected to the “old boy’s club” at her church.
She is a woman of many talents, but then this: have I “heard of this meat called mortadello”, asked me why “Google Chrome doesn’t like me”, mails me marshmallow peeps every Easter even though it is my dad who likes them, and wears rampant reindeer ears at every opportunity after Thanksgiving.
I asked her once why she wore jeans skiing and she said without missing a beat: “Because -I- don’t FALL.” SNAPS.
I would like to clarify my mom is awesome and the best & a heroine of mine. Also a huge influence on who I am. She’s a huge sci-fi fan and an amazing influence on my tastes.
But when I said I was going to see the original Planet of the Apes, she asked me, in all honesty “DO YOU KNOW HOW IT ENDS?” This was probably 2000ish — so a good 30+ years after the original had been released. Yes, mom, I know how it ends because I have lived in the world.
My mom is the cutest.
Yes. The Statue of Liberty is a ghost, and Darth Vader was his sled.
My mother called my land line, and when I answered she asked if I was at home. I said “obviously” and she didn’t understand what I meant.
Turns to me after dinner and asks “You know this Space Guardians movie?”
“Guardians of the Galaxy? Yeah.”
“What’s a groot?”
When I was in high school, my mom cottoned on to the fact that I was gay at least 4 years before I officially came out to her. Her way of trying to show me that it would be all right for me to come out was to not-so-casually say things like, “Oh, do you remember our old pastor/my former co-worker/your dad’s cousin whom I have never previously mentioned? Well, she’s GAY. She likes WOMEN. She has a FEMALE PARTNER.”
To which my reaction was always “That’s…nice? I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this information?”
Had no clue what she was getting at until loooong after I was out.
In fact I think she had to explain to me that bringing up Lesbians She Has Known was her attempt to be supportive while allowing me to come out on my own terms.
I’m still not officially out to my parents, but it’s pretty obvious to anyone who isn’t hanging out with Annie Sullivan by the water pump. My mom does the same thing. “Casually” buys me rainbow things, sends me emails about queer events in the city with vague notes like “just thought you might find this interesting,” etc. At this point I don’t want to come out because her attempts to be supportive without actually saying anything are just so precious.
My mom, in addition to sitting through roughly a gazillion horrible metal shows while I was a teenager, recently spent a week here with me helping me set up my new (first) apartment. Thursday night I worked and decided to go to my boyfriend’s to spend a little bit of time before heading home. Friday morning Mom and I were having coffee and I mentioned that I had a bit of a sore throat. She set her coffee down, stared at me, and said, “Well that’s what happens when you canoodle.”
My mother is a Veteran Internet Researcher, especially when it comes to vacations. She has whole notebooks/ folders filled with information about hotels, tours, and sightseeing for places that she will probably never go (I have promised when I finish grad school and make some money that I will send her and dad to the Virgin Islands, because she used to live there and really wants to go back). And, whenever we do go anywhere, she always brings a notebook, several Lonely Planet guides, and a folder full of printouts with phone numbers of different, off-the-beaten path attractions. My family has some truly kickass vacations.
Prints out useful internet articles and mails them to me.
My mom is awesome, but not much of a Mom![TM]. A few Mom-ish incidents:
– In high school, after my best friend did a dirtbag thing, instead of forbidding me from hanging out with her, Mom made a rule that we could only hang out at our house or when she (Mom) was around. This led to things like the three of us going to Walmart together. It is a testament to how much of a non-dirtbag my friend actually was that she didn’t really mind.
– After she moved to the UK, my mom still sent me care packages of homemade cookies, with custom tags marked “baked goods.” By the time they got to me the cookies tasted like waxed paper & home.
– The one time I’ve seen my mother slightly drunk (after 1.5 glasses of wine at a family Thanksgiving), she attempted to take out the trash. We have never let her live it down.
Turned to me at the breakfast table when I was about ten and told me firmly never to hook up with Mick Jagger.
My mom thinks that you can be electrocuted by your appliances if lightning hits the house during a thunderstorm. She once yelled at me for continued to work on my (unplugged) laptop after she’d told me it was about to storm. I was 23, and had not lived at home since I was 19.
My mom does not have a smartphone or a Facebook account. However, she continues to send me both inspirational and fear-mongering e-mail forwards– the last two were about how Alexander Fleming’s dad once saved Winston Churchill’s dad from drowning, and about gang members who hide under your car while you pump gas and then cut your Achilles tendon when you are about to get back in your car. I continue to patiently link her to Snopes articles debunking her forwards.
When I was thirteen, my mom’s best friend told me that if there was ever anything I didn’t feel comfortable talking to my mom about, I should feel free to come to her. “Because I love her, but honey, your mother’s a square.”
Oh, and I hope we do a Peak Grandma thread, but in case we don’t: while visiting the Breakers in Palm Beach (not to stay, just to gawk), my grandmother mused, “You know, you can marry more money in five minutes than you can earn in a lifetime.”
Sent me a care package during midterms week in college. I sobbed. I am tearing up now thinking about it. lol.
Mine had a dream that she wanted grandkids (which she has), and therefore decided to non-consensually impregnate me with me uncle’s sperm.
It wasn’t true.
A couple of weeks ago, I was on the phone with my mom. About half an hour after we hung up, she called me back: “I just realized that I forgot to say that I love you.”
Text message from my mom: “Have you seen my Good Sweatpants?”
This is the best.
My mom was driving us around and someone cut her off in traffic. She asked. “would one of you please give him the finger?”
Once painstakingly cut out several pictures of amusing llamas from the newspaper to mail to me at university. Am unsure if she understands that newspapers have websites and I have an email address.
I stole a green silk shirt that she never wears from her several years back. Acidly compliments the green shirt every time she sees me wear it. “That’s a lovely shirt, it must have cost you an awful lot of money”, etc. I have offered to give it back and she staunchly refuses.
Fed me coffee from a sippy cup as a toddler because I was jealous of hers.
In a family game of Articulate, when given the clue “Lice”, clued it to me thusly: “Sometimes you get them in your pubes?”
<3
First my mom and now my sister have tried the “Fine, you want to try my coffee/red wine? Let’s give you a taste and see how you feel then” with their small children.
In both cases it backfired spectacularly when the small children turned out to LOVE coffee and red wine.
My mum gives my siblings and I stereo-control in the car, so has been exposed to a lot of ‘contemporary’ pop music. She’ll learn a couple of names from each genre, and assume that all similar songs are one of those few people, which leads to great. She frequently doesn’t learn the names properly, so there are many bands with subtley different names in our household e.g. Cliffy Biro instead of Biffy Clyro, to the extent that I have been known to refer to them as such in pubic.
Similarly, she picks up ‘young’ slang from shows like “I’m a Celebrity” and proceeds to use them liberally, and in any situation that they could be even remotely suitable for.
My mum is AWESOME at doing the whole “down with the kids” thing in a mildly embarrassing manner, that we all know and love.
My mom and grandmother decided that my wedding had to have favors, and proceeded to make 150 miniature jars of jam from strawberries they picked themselves. Mom texted me a picture of the overall mess this made with the caption “We’re jammin”
My mom did this ALL THE TIME when I was in high school, and for a while in college.
I am straight.
In high school printed out the entirety of my prom date’s LiveJournal, highlighted every drug reference, and gave it to me.
She also makes the best/worst inappropriate puns and gives me everything in her fridge when I come home.
In high school printed out the entirety of my prom date's LiveJournal, highlighted every drug reference, and gave it to me.
She also makes the best/worst inappropriate puns and gives me everything in her fridge when I come home.
My momma has been dead for 12 years now, but she was awesome, and she was the best.
My favorites:
I am my paternal grandmother’s clone. I am short, curvy, and very chesty. My mother was 5’8, with long, long legs, and very small busted. There is an Alan Jackson song called “Little Bitty”. If you aren’t familiar, the chorus goes “It’s alright to be little bitty.” My mother would walk around the house FREQUENTLY singing “It’s alright to have little tities.” Which was and STILL is awesome.
Each and every member of my family had a personalized, made up, song. This included cats and dogs. Mine was entitled “Tinnie Tiny sugar dumplin'” I was sang this song even as a 23 year old, laying in bed with her, when she was sick with cancer.
I always received a new coloring book and crayons when I was sick. The year before she died, when I was 22, she brought me over a new coloring book and crayons, with chicken soup, and every trashy magazine sold, along with a Harlequin romance novel. She then cleaned my house.
She spent my teen years trying to convince me I was going to “end up in someone’s trunk!!”
She loved me so much. I loved her too. I miss her. I would love to see her handle texting.