So we all have moms. And therefore we are all familiar with one of the defining characteristics that all moms possess:
A perpetual preoccupation with your untimely death, dismemberment, or catastrophic injury.
There are the run-of-the-mill prophecies of doom: “You’ll put your eye out!” And there are the WTF predictions. “Don’t take your wallet to the mall. You could be robbed.”
And I’ve heard a few humdingers in my youth, but today… ah today I heard a new one. A Doom Prophecy for the 21st Century.
I sent an urgent package by FedEx. As we were leaving the FedEx depot I called the recipient on my cell phone.
Mom_Crayons: “I hate it when you do that.”
I raised my eyebrows as if to say “huh?”
Mom_Crayons: “When you use your cellphone while walking.”
That’s right “walking” - not driving - walking.
Crayons (agog): “Are saying that you think I can’t walk and talk at the same time?”
Mom_Crayons: “You’re not just walking and talking, you’re doing something. You could get distracted and trip and fall.”
The weirdest thing is that she’s very independent, well-educated, well-travelled, very intelligent, and known as one of the best mediators and councelors around. She’s treasured by the community in our hometown and her cousins respect her to the point of reverence. She was the “cool kid” of the big family.
It is such a strange oxymoron to have a very smart mom come up with such weirdness.
I’ve never known a very smart person who wasn’t also very weird. Heck, my brother earned the nickname “Oblivio-Boy” due to his general obliviousness when he was younger.
I didn’t mean to imply that your mom is stupid. Just, as you had pointed out, oblivious.
My mother told me repeatedly I would be dead by 16 so don’t worry about school or dreams or anything like that. Somehow the ancient family doctor was convinced this was the case and reinforced the messages. Everyone knew and planned (or didn’t)accordingly
What? Okay, this gets a high score on the bizarre-o-meter.
My mom used to tell me not to eat too much sugar, as it would make me diabetic. Now, poor dietary habits can lead to Type II diabetes, but what she was referring to was Type I, which is very common in my family (my mom has it), and is not caused by eating badly. When my dad told me that eating sugar wouldn’t make me diabetic, my mom switched her tactics to “don’t eat sugar, or you’ll have too much trouble giving it up when you become diabetic.” Gee, thanks, mom. Way to be uplifting.
Never mind that growing up I ate far less sugar than most American kids (this is what happens when your mom is a diabetic, you get used to sugar-free everything), and I’m hypoglycemic - the opposite of diabetes.
My mom always knew she was being overprotective, but it never prevented her from issuing warnings. Of course, being who she was, she made up a joke about the whole thing. She’d say that we’d end up “Knifed in an alley” if we didn’t watch out.
“You know, you shouldn’t go near chickens. Once, I had this colleague, he would have been very handsome if it wasn’t for his right eye. You know why? A chicken pecked his eye out! (goes into long, involved, detailed story about how tragic it was, the small village her colleague used to live in, how that incident impaired her colleague’s life and so on)”
Sometimes, if you’re lucky, she’ll relate the sequel to you. It’s called How I Got Scratched By Evil Stray Cats When I Was Six.
We always called it “Remote Possibility Disasters,” aka RPD.Today, December 28, 2003, would have been my Mom’s 75th birthday. In her memory, I’ll relate her most (in)famous RPD:
The family vacationed at a cottage in western Maine. One summer, when my youngest brothers were 10 or so (and I was in college), my Mom’s brother and SIL visited with their two kids–the youngest was about 4 or 5. Mikey stayed in the room with my two younger brothers, and that night my Mom went into the room and told one of my brothers that he’d better close the window, because… “Mikey could roll out of bed, out the window, down the roof, onto the ground, out onto the dock, and into the water and drown!” She was serious … and the window sill was about 3 inches -above- the bed.
On another occasion, she told my youngest brother not to walk to close to the curb, because …“A car might come along, jump the curb and run you over!”
I must confess, I myself have had these RPD thoughts … it’s just got to be some gene that kicks in when you’re a parent … yeah, that’s it.
My favourite one has always been “Don’t stick your tongue out., The wind could come along, freeze your face, and them you’ll go along all life with your tongue hanging out.”
The “Don’t play with it, or it will fall off” warning also ranks high up there.
AAAaaaahhhhh! Come on now… it is clear that none of you are mothers of this persuation. I used to say very similar things about my mom until I started my family brood of three kiffa-ettes all born within 11 months of each other [older brother 16, and twin brother and sister 15]. Yes, we moms say/think stupid things like:
Baby Death Fears: Having a dream the first night home with number one son where his bellybutton thingie fell off and he deflated around the bedroom like a balloon.
Sounding like your own mom, inappropriately: Telling a two year old to stop acting like a child and grow up [that one makes my eyes roll up into the back of my head].
Exhibiting bizarre unnatural behavior not within the normal pattern: I used to be somewhat of a rebel … like almost going to the senior prom so I could dress up in a tux while my boy friend … well we didn’t. Now I take a special trip to shopping city [Johannesburg] to buy my daughter a, that’s right, A PROM DRESS because she needs to experience all kinds of things. Sigh.
There are times when our hearts break because we see our kid hurt and we know it is better not to interfer at the moment. I have a long list of “this is a life learning experience” moments such as when my oldest son [four at the time] pee’d against the American Ambassador’s palm tree during an Easter egg hunt celebration [we live in Central Africa and our kids were more cultural Africans than Americans at that time]. A bunch of older missionaries brats yelled out “Look what that kid is doing”. Well, it’s hard to change what you are doing mid stream so my kid sidestepped around the tree while everyone watched him pee. Son disappeared for about 5 minutes until he came out for the egg hunt originally planned for about 30 minutes later. My heart broke for him, but I knew it wouldn’t severely cramp his style; we now laugh about that story.
So, yes we moms know we say things that might sound silly to you [many times they sound silly to us as the words come out of our mouths], and yes we moms know we think horrible things about death and destruction of our children and yes, we can be aggrevating bitches as well. But there is a reason: we are involved in your lives, we want life to be great for you, we want you to learn from our mistakes.
One Christmas Eve when I was a teenager, my mom and I were driving home from a crazy night fighting all the other shoppers at the mall when we passed a church. My mom was instantly inspired for us to pull over and go in to pray on this special night. I whined and complained the entire time while she located a parking space and we walked across the street, me muttering how I did not want to go, I was tired and so on and so forth.
We get to the main doors and my mom pulls on them and they are locked. She keeps trying , pulling and holding to make them open. She walks to the side to see if she can get in with no success. I find her efforts hilarious enought to just about fall on the grass as I hoot with laughter and tell her, “see mom, even God doenst want you to go in, ha ha” When she admonishes me, “NVME! Stop laughing! What is wrong with you has the devil gotten into you?” And for a brief moment, I paused as the very possibility scared the crap out of me since my laughter WAS maniacal. But then I returned to laughing and we went home.
Once during a bad thunderstorm in tornado season (in Oklahoma) my mom woke me up in the middle of the night. “Get your raincoat on. We’re going to the cellar. The sirens have gone off.”
I dutifully and sleepily complied. (We did not have a cellar; it belonged to a neighbor, so some walking was involved.) We left the house in this raging thunderstorm, with sheets of rain, and walked down the street. I followed her until we were three houses past the neighbor who had the cellar . . . nobody else was out . . . I hadn’t heard the siren–but there was a lot of lightning and thunder . . . and across the street the severity of the storm set off the horn in somebody’s car. I finally said, “Mom–what are we doing?”
She said, “I don’t know,” and we turned around and went home and back to bed.
Mom hates it when I eat raw cookie dough. She’s convinced that I’ll get salmonella and die. What on earth does she think cookie dough is FOR? Baking? I don’t think so…
