Happy Mother's Day, y'all! What with the pandemic we've been through, it should be a good one. I can just imagine the joy shared by duly vaccinated moms and children who are able to get together and enjoy one another.
My mother is gone, but I'm blessed to have a "mother-in-love" who reminds me a lot of her. Hubby and I made plans to celebrate today with her at the home of Dre's brother and sister-in-law in Houston.
Mother's Day is usually a day when we look upon Mom as a saintly type who we imagine apron-clad, lovingly cooking up epic meals in the kitchen and serving her smiling children at the dinner table; seeing her brood off to school with homemade, perfectly prepared lunches; reading them bedtime stories and singing lullabies with perfect pitch.
Riiight. Well, some of this goes on, but it's more often than not peppered with Mom's threats to take her kids out of the very world she brought them into.
Nothing evokes memories of motherhood like those threats made to misbehaving children ... threats that, back in the day, both impressed and terrified young 'uns with their creativity.
You might catch those of us who benefited from old-school momhood cracking a smile sometimes when we think about our mothers telling us not to make them pull this car over or threatening to give us something to cry about. We shake our heads and chuckle at memories of their telling us we had to do this, that or the other "because I said so." We marvel that our faces didn't freeze permanently in whatever expression they insisted our faces would freeze in if we didn't get rid of said expressions.
Some of us came up benefiting from varied and sundry "off-brand" threats. I believe I have shared before my mother's threat to beat my keister "till it ropes like okra." (At some point, I finally realized what she was talking about: watching okra being boiled, I observed that, by golly, it does separate into "ropes!")
Needless to say, it's we old- schoolers who are cringing when we see that macaroni and cheese mix commercial they're running right now ... the one where the mom tells the little boy and girl that they have to stay at the table until they clean their plates, and the little girl pops off, "Fine. We'll sleep here." No, l'il girl. If you had our mom, you'd be sleeping, all right ... with the fishes. Or you'd be wandering somewhere around Next Week, which we were routinely told we'd be slapped into.
And when our moms weren't threatening us with bodily harm, they were usually calling us creative names. My mother, an avid reader, could be quite Dickensian: one of her names for me was "ill-mannered wretch." (She'd also remind me that "ladies don't bend from the waist," and other things ladies did or didn't do. So yeah, I'm Black and grew up poor in the '60s and '70s but was raised to be a debutante in Regency England.)
But we turned out all right, or many of us did. We're happy to show the world that we weren't born in barns; we wouldn't jump off a cliff if everybody asked us to do so; we know that money doesn't grow on trees and we didn't get our mouths washed out with soap.
And those of us who went on to be parents did, ahem, sort of repeat Mom's threats and admonitions, telling our children that as long as they lived under our roof, they'd better live by our rules.
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Some moms may be more bark than bite, at least according to "15 Things Moms Say ... And What We Really Mean," an article by Brook Hall at scarymommy.com.
Take the saying "Don't make me turn this car around!" for instance. Hall's interpretation: "I am totally bluffing; if we turn around now, we will be going home without any groceries, diapers or wine. We need to keep this car in route to its destination, so please just fall for my bluff and I'll give you a cookie at the grocery store."
Or the saying "Because I said so." What Mom really means, according to Hall: "And I can't think of another reason."
"Yeah, whatever," say those raised with the moms who'd say nothing — or give one warning — before they started clobbering.
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This Mother's Day, I would like to bestow an Honorary Mom Award. I bestow it upon the man who was Sunday shopping in Kroger a week ago today.
I overheard but one side of the phone conversion being carried on by this tall, athletic-looking gentleman, who didn't look that old himself but who had to have been the parent of a teen or preteen. His end of the conversation went something like this:
"Look, you need to stop talking back to me every time I say something."
Then, a second or two later and a little louder: "You don't run [bleep] up in this house!"
If this man's departed ancestors were in a place to look on, they'd probably have had their arms crossed, nodding approvingly, at that moment.
Especially the women.
With due apologies to Johnny "Guitar" Watson, send a real mother (of an email) to me: hwilliams@adgnewsroom.com