(Contributed by Alli)
Life doesn’t come with a manual. It comes with a mother.
My mother is quiet, warm, thoughtful, intelligent, and articulate with a vast reservoir of big words. I like all those qualities except the last one because she can insult me using large words and I’ll just say “thank you.” She can bake the best biscuits. Ask her about her recipe and you’ll soon realize that a perfect biscuit is all about how the dough “feels.” One day I’ll have enough time to figure out exactly how to listen to the dough, but, I’m in graduate school right now so Pillsbury frozen biscuits practically sing the Hallelujah chorus (sorry, Mom).
Oh, my mother loves a good turtleneck sweater. Maybe it’s because her neck is long and swan-like. Maybe it’s because she was too lazy to blend her foundation into her neck so the turtleneck hides the fact that her neck might be a shade or two lighter than her complexion. Who knows. She tried to force her love of turtlenecks on me as a child before I decided that they made me look like a human snapping turtle.
Ask anyone that knows both of us well and they’ll likely tell you that she and I are opposite on basically everything. I’m a talker; I’m a bit of a bulldog (both as proud Mississippi State alum and someone who likes to run over anything that opposes me); I probably take too much glee in arguing for the heck of it, and I am unafraid to be blunt no matter the situation. I think one of my personal philosophies would be “The truth will set you free, but don’t get mad when it hurts your feelings in the process.” However, I did get my mom’s good teeth. I’m 25, only have one cavity, and I definitely don’t floss enough, but thanks to those dental genes, I’m covered.
All my life my mother has repeated a certain phrase, “If you get in a hurry, you get behind.” She has repeated it until I never want to hear it again. She tells her freshman college students that. She told her senior citizen computer classes that. She’s probably told the check-out person at Walmart that at least once. I don’t like the phrase if you can’t tell, but just because I don’t like it doesn’t mean that it’s wrong.
I will now share a brief example that happened to me today. I was cooking dinner in my apartment and the recipe called for fresh garlic. I don’t like messing with fresh garlic, so I got the already minced garlic in the jars to make my life easier and to somewhat maintain the integrity of the recipe. Things got to moving quickly from browning the beef to adding the tomatoes to realizing I forgot some spice to prying open a can of Diet Coke because the pop tab had broken. Yes, I realize Diet Coke had nothing to do with the recipe, and trying to open one while all the other things were happening was totally avoidable, but I’m Southern, leave me alone.
Regardless, I picked up the jar of minced garlic and promptly dropped it which sent a spew of minced garlic all over my kitchen floor. One cannot possibly fathom how many tiny pieces of garlic come inside one jar until the little specks cover a dark brown wood floor. While the sheer area that the garlic pieces covered was problematic, the smell was worse. I live in an apartment, there’s not much room for that stench to go. I surveyed my mess for a second and I’ll be darned if that phrase didn’t pop into my head, “If you get in a hurry, you get behind”. I cleaned up the garlic, lit two candles, “Febreezed” my whole apartment, and then I called my Mom just to tell her she was right.
I am not sure what the point of this rambling is except maybe to highlight the fact that mothers are normally right. They are typically right about how long to cook something or which cleaner to use to get that stubborn stain off the couch. They’re right when they tell you to send handwritten thank you cards and when they tell you to floss your teeth. They’re so right all the time, you can probably call yours from a Walmart in Oklahoma and ask where the picante sauce is and she’ll be able to point you in the right direction. However, be wary if they start to push their love of turtlenecks on you, that’s something that’s never right.
