The older I get, the more my mother’s admonitions and/or words of advice—to my younger self—seem to come back to me. Some I remember with a gentle smile while others reverberate through my skull as if I were standing under a large bell.
One of the classic laments of mother-dom, “you’ll shoot you eye out,” is now a classic thanks to A Christmas Story. One of my mother’s was always, “You’ll break you neck!”
Get down from there or you’ll break your neck! Stop climbing up there or you’ll break your neck! Quit running around like that or you’ll trip and break your neck!
Now available in paperback and for Kindle!
I don’t think I ever heard this next one from my mother, but we all knew that doing that would cause blindness. Could explain my extreme nearsightedness for the past five decades.
When we would gather at my cousins’ house every 4th of July, my mother would always begin rounding us up for the ride home with, “…everyone go tinkle! It’s time to leave!” And each of us would moan that we didn’t have to go. She knew better and never let it happen that we got on the road without every one of us having made an attempt. “Just try before we leave,” she’d say. And you know without me telling you that each time I’d told her that I didn’t have to go, I gave it a shot and, sure enough, I did.
Now, as a senior citizen, I hear her words in my head every time I’m about to leave the house. It only took a few times of not remembering to try before I left, and subsequently needing to make an inconvenient pit stop only a few miles down the road, and I no longer forget. In fact, when I’m out, I rarely pass a public restroom without giving it a try. Saves a lot of embarrassing and frantic panic later in the day. Or even a few aisles over. I think I may be banned from a Walmart in Dubuque, Iowa for running through the store, one hand tightly grasping my nozzle and the other straight-arming shoppers out of my way.
Other things Mama used to say to me remain a bit confusing. Apparently I had to finish my dinner because children in China were starving. I could never get my head around how finishing my spaghetti would keep kids in China from starving but, you can tell by the fact that there are over a billion Chinese, I did my job! I hope they appreciate their lives and my Type II Diabetes.
I have grown to appreciate her guidance. At one point I had a wooden sign in my home which said, “If at first you don’t succeed, do it like your mother told you…” So, for the most part, now that I’m an adult, I can see the wisdom in her words. Most of them did ring true and many remain so. The aforementioned “…try before you get in the car…” is still paying dividends. While I never broke my neck on the jungle gym or shot my eye out with a BB gun, those of you who know me well and see me on a regular basis can attest to how accurate and prophetic was her warning to me to “…stop making that stupid face or it’ll stay like that!”
