My mom is the queen of casual cursing. You know that amazing well spoken woman who guest posted here a few months ago? The turkey hunter with a Phd? Yup! She will drop damns and shits like nobodies business. And every now and then we get a son of a you know what thrown in for good measure. That’s generally where she draws the line, I don’t think I’ve ever heard her drop an f-word or anything like that. She likes to keep it casual.
When my little cousins Hannah and Savanna were little we would ask, “Why aren’t you allowed to go to football games with Aunt Cindy?” Their response always brought about laughter, “Because she says bad words.” A good football game would always bring about a litany of four letter words. As a result I have had quite a time trying to curb my own tongue since Noah has started talking. This past spring my dad and stepmom were visiting and helping us do some yard work. A HUGE roach ran out of some mulch and dad said “Step on it!” My response was an emphatic ” Oh hell no!” Later that day we were standing by my dad’s truck, which is big, and I asked Noah if he wanted to sit in Papa’s truck. His response was “Oh Elmo!” I laughed thinking how funny a response that was, until my dad pointed out that he had probably just copied his mama and said “Oh hell no!” Oops! Bad mama!
I also promised to share some of my mom’s sitcom stories. So here’s one of my favorites!
Roughly 10 or so years ago my mom and my Aunt Linda, mother of Hannah and Savanna, took a little vacation to Savannah, GA. You’ve gotta love the south. I also had a great grandmother named Georgia, which I think is a totally awesome name. My mom lobbied for me to be named Georgia but was outvoted 3 to 1 by my dad and brother and sister. But I digress, back to Savannah, the town. Mom and Linda were in Savannah for a short weekend and a trip to the old southern town is not complete without a ghost tour. They decided to take a walking tour that started at dusk and continued well into the evening.
It should be noted that while my mother is incredibly smart and able to multitask like nobodies business she can be incredibly single minded as well. She gets so focused on one thing that the rest of the world ceases to exist. While this can be somewhat annoying if you are her daughter trying to tell her a story and she’s just replying “uh huh, uh huh” over and over, it also provides for amazingly funny stories. So the ghost tour is being led by a young man, dressed in mid 18th century garb and he is carrying a lantern to light their way. As he would progress through the old squares full of oak trees and spooky spanish moss, he would stop in front of houses every now and then and place his lantern on the ground and the participants of the tour would form a semi circle around it as he regaled them with stories of the long since dead, yet still lingering, inhabitants of the homes. As they stopped at one particular house my mom noticed a cat on the wall in front of the house. She leaned over to my aunt and pointed out the cat. My aunt being the good listener that she is, barely acknowledged my mom and continued listening to the tour guide. My mother on the other hand decided to go see the cat and begins to walk straight through the semi circle in between the crowd and the tour guide. Now if that’s not bad enough about half way along her route she literally punts the mans lantern across the ground and of course the cat, scared by the loud noise, takes off. My aunt said she wanted to just crawl in a hole and die from embarrassment.
Oh and if at this point you are thinking what a bad daughter I am for sharing these embarrassing stories about my mother to perfect strangers? Well, she’s had it coming for some time. I had to endure years of her sending out Christmas letters to literally hundreds of people which included embarrassing stories about me and my sister. She even included a story about how I decided to “borrow” her car while they were out of town when I was fifteen. And I’m not talking about last years Christmas letter, it was written a few months after it happened! I think I might have still been grounded!
Payback’s hell and I Love you mama!! 😉