Stories like this make me wonder, yet again, why you need to pass a test to get something so simple as a drivers license, but there are NO apptitude tests for parenthood.
At least she’s honest. Most people won’t admit this. As someone who works in the media and deals with television in many ways, I quake in fear.
Nothing like you guys have had, but once during a family dinner, my mom just came right out of left field and asked me, “So, how have your bowel movements been?” She got really confused by my Dad and Sister laughing their asses off.
From “The Road to Wellville”
If we find you are making this family stuff up, sir, a mob of dopers will be traveling south to beat you about the head and neck with a burlap bag filled with small cans of shoe polish.
I have one in a slightly different vein:
As young teenagers, a friend and I noticed just how many girls attended these dance classes my sisters went to. So we joined a dance class to meet girls (worked for my friend, anyway).
So my Mom says, “Make sure to wear socks!” Hoo boy. Just the sort of comment that feels right at home in this thread.
“What?!?”
“Dancers cut their feet on those wood floors all the time. There’s lots of gay dancers and there’s some horrible blood disease going through the gay population.”
“Yeah, sure, Mom, whatever.”
By my best reckoning, this was the winter of 1981-82. AIDS was barely a blip (if anything at all) on the map of mainstream suburbia. The very first CDC report on a rare strain pneumonia suddenly appearing in SF gays was probably barely 3 or 4 months old. There had been a couple of NYT articles about it by that time, and it didn’t yet have a consistent name. I doubt anyone was 100% sure how it could or couldn’t spread by then.
But there’s my Mom, the armchair doctor, ready with advice.
It actually gave me a deeper respect for her awareness of the world, when I looked back on the incident years later. She was wrong, of course, about the risk, but the only people who might have known better at the time had long lists of abbreviations after their names.
Which is just the sort of ammunition all your crazy-ass Moms need for self-vindication! 
I can’t remember any conversations with my parents at the moment (I’m sure I’m blocking them out in defense of my sanity) but there’s one conversation I had with my brother that still makes me :dubious:
At the time I was about 16 and he was 10. Out of the blue he says:
“I think you should marry ____”
I was taken aback, because I did have a crush on the guy in question. Oh my god, was I so transparent that a ten-year-old boy could figure it out?! “Why do you say that?” I asked cautiously.
“Because! I never got to have a brother.”
“And?”
“And you’ve got to marry someone nice to me, or it wouldn’t be fair! He’s nice to me. You should marry him.”
“You know I’m 16, right?”
He waves dismissively. “When you grow up.”
“I’m not going to marry someone just because he’s nice to you.”
“You have to! I never got to have a brother, so my brother-in-law has to like me!”
It still strikes me odd that a little boy gave my hypothetical husband such thought… Alas, I still need to find someone who’ll be nice to him
First, TErrifel, I laughed so hard at your story i almost fell out of my chair. My mother is pretty bizarre as well but nothing beats your story. LSLGuy, Why did this guy have teenage sex pics on his computer to begin with? Of course he got in trouble, it’s illegal!!! The child porn online hysteria, does need to be dealt with and here is why. I saw this story a week or so ago and stories like this make the hysteria all too real and why people like Cybertipline are going after child porn predators.
Man faces child-porn charges
A Tallahassee man was arrested Tuesday and charged with having child pornography. He faces charges for 89 counts of sexual performance by a child, a third-degree felony, according to a news release from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Larry Ball, 61, was arrested after an investigation began last August, when the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received information on Ball through their “CyberTipline” from Yahoo.com, according to the release. The tip said 23 images suspected to depict child pornography had been uploaded to Ball’s Yahoo account. Using the Child Victim Identification Program of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, FDLE helped identify 10 different children depicted in Ball’s images. Ball was taken to the Leon County Jail.
My mother, the day before my wedding while we were out picking up the wedding cake and food:
“Dave’s a wonderful man. Don’t screw it up.”
I do realize she’s coming from the perspective of a mother of five with three fuck-ups and one daughter who’d been married and divorced and re-married to a dinkus, but WHAT THE HELL? I told her she was delusional and hit her with a bag of grapes.
I do love me a good Sampiro post. I just woke up the baby laughing.
My freshman year of college I recieved a nice little package in the mail with “iodine supplements.” What could these be, I wondered. Not daily vitamins, because there were only six. I called up my dad in confusion.
Apparently, dad had read that when a nuke goes off, people get throat cancer from radioactive iodine collecting in their bodies. In the event of a nuke I was to take a tablet, so my body would pass iodine through my system and I would be saved. I told him that if someone dropped a nuke on Manhattan my bigger problem would be not having any skin or flesh. **
“You couldn’t get away really fast?”
“No, dad, I take the G train.”
He didn’t forget about them. When I came home he asked me for half the tablets, enough to cover him and the kids. I should’ve told him that any terrorists showing up in Buffalo would assume someone had beaten them to the punch and would move on.
**This is typical of my responses to dad’s more ludicrous worries. I basically have a mental form letter that goes:
Dear dad,
Thank you for your concern. In response to your query, in that event I would be dead.
Best Wishes,
Your daughter.
When I was 14 or so and a hopelessly bookish dork in a very, very small town dominated by Mormons, I was sitting in the living room and picking at a couple of large pores in the crook of my elbow that had developed into blackheads. My mother comes by and says “mischievous, are those trackmarks?” :eek:
Now, as a 14 year old in a isolated, religious, small town I had heard of trackmarks, but I couldn’t immediately bring to mind what they were. I was thinking of something along the lines of marks made by track shoes, i.e. cleat marks. So I looked at my mom very strangely and said “No, how would I get trackmarks on my arm?”, and went back to what I was doing.
Approximately an hour later my brain goes “WAIT! TRACKMARKS!?!?!?”. I panicked, wondering what I had done that made my mother think I might be a junkie. I gave serious thought to going down and having a long talk with her about her concerns. In the end, I decided that my initial cluelessness was probably more reassuring than any denial I could make.
mischievous
As a former Buffalonian- ouch!
Actually, I grew up being told not to worry about the aftermath of a nuclear attack since Niagara Falls is a ground zero so we’d be dead anyway. :rolleyes:
Buffalo, the happiest place on earth.
[QUOTE=audreyayn]
My freshman year of college I recieved a nice little package in the mail with “iodine supplements.” What could these be, I wondered. Not daily vitamins, because there were only six. I called up my dad in confusion.
Apparently, dad had read that when a nuke goes off, people get throat cancer from radioactive iodine collecting in their bodies. In the event of a nuke I was to take a tablet, so my body would pass iodine through my system and I would be saved. I told him that if someone dropped a nuke on Manhattan my bigger problem would be not having any skin or flesh. **
"You couldn’t get away really fast?"
"No, dad, I take the G train."
He didn’t forget about them. When I came home he asked me for half the tablets, enough to cover him and the kids. I should’ve told him that any terrorists showing up in Buffalo would assume someone had beaten them to the punch and would move on . . .
Re: the bolded portions: You. Are. So. Screwed.
Damn. I was hoping that for your 50th birthday, you’d had a tattoo of a pot leaf inked onto your forearm.
You know. Just… because. 
Now that’s funny!
Let’s see, there was that time when I was 16 or so when my mom “accidentally” came across my early, feeble attempts at writing S&M stories. This was around 1982, so no Internet and no computer; these stories were all handwritten in spiral notebooks and hidden in the bottom drawer of my nightstand.
I think that’s the reason why, every time I mention that I’m interested in so-and-so, she tells me some variation of “Hmmm, I don’t think she’s the right one for you.” She must be afraid that I’ll be a wife-beater or something. It was just incomprehensible to her that a woman might enjoy being tied up and whipped 
Proof that I am certifiable: I just spent a week with my parents on a so-called vacation. Never again. I’m still decompressing. Maybe in a week or so I will come back to this thread and share all the new material.
Ah, like PoorYorick I too was raised by my grandparents. One of my grandmother’s classic moments comes to mind…
In her last years, my grandmother battled with several chronic comditions, and was in and out of the hospital quite a bit. She still lived fairly independently, in her own house, along with my youngest brother. I was her primary caretaker though, and stopped by almost daily to clean, do laundry, etc. I also did her grocery shopping and often pre-cooked her meals for her. She was capable, but I think she liked the attention, so I did it anyway.
Once when she was in the hospital after a bout of pulmonary edema, the nurse stopped in while I was there to tell her that she could go home the next day. With a huge sigh, grandmother looks at the nurse and says, “But I don’t want to go home”. When asked why not, she says, “Because there’s no food there. They never feed me, you know”. :eek:
Thanks, lady…the person who shops and cooks for you is sitting right there, and you do the Oliver Twist routine.
Next thing I know, there’s a social worker in the room, wanting to know what’s going on. This does not sit well with the grandmother, who flings her National Enquirer at nice social worker and tells her to get out, because who sent her in there anyway!
No, she was not *that * old, and no, she was not any thing resembling senile. Yes…she was from the South. Why do you ask?
Wow. Are you my brother? My parents spent most of my adolescence plying me with comments designed to tease out my sexuality, culminating with my dad’s point-blank “Are you gay?” when I was about 20. (It was then that I knew what the phrase “struck dumb” meant.) They have also passed on messages, via my sister, that if I am gay, they’re OK with it.
/not actually gay
My mother and grandmother have both been kind enough to tell me that they’d be supportive and still love me if I were a lesbian. It’s almost a shame, because if I were a lesbian I’d get laid all the time.