There are two types of Moms in this world: The ones who gently peel off a Band-Aid to minimize the pain, and the ones who rip them off your delicate skin in one swift go, maximizing pain, while utilizing time efficiency.
Which could possibly be a young girl’s first encounter with waxing
There are sub-categories too: Moms who use common sense, like maybe applying a bit of baby oil to loosen the Band-Aid from the skin vs. Moms who think it’s a good idea to slather some oily natural peanut butter on it thinking that will do the trick.
Mine was the Band-Aid ripper-offer type. She was also the type to cut chewing gum out of your hair rather than using peanut butter the way it could be used (not on Band-Aids), and certainly not on a sandwich, that would be crazy.
My mother never packed my sister and I a normal lunch, say, with peanut butter sandwiches. Nope, she thought it would be a good idea to pack her kids’ lunches with a can of sardines, a handful of some walnuts and golden raisins, and a stale chunk of baguette.
If you’ve never smelled fishy during the second half of class and gotten your ass kicked after school for being a weirdo who eats fucked up lunches, you haven’t lived! Had my mom embodied the foresight to know if you pack a lunch like that for your kids, it would create serious social issues, then maybe she would’ve reconsidered.
Maybe
By the way, back then, cans of sardines had to be opened with a key that was attached to the top of the can, and if it was missing… well then, you’d be pretty hungry by the time three o’clock rolled around… loser.
She was also the type of Mom who consistently made poor judgments based on techniques that had no scientific evidence whatsoever. For instance, she believed the best way to treat burned skin, was to rub a cold stick of butter on it, which for the first two seconds, felt really good.
I don’t know about any of you fucking scientists out there, but to me, adding grease to a burn is not a good way to treat one. It is a great way to cook the skin however, especially if you like that smell mixed in with melted butter and your child’s screams for mercy.
Oddly enough, she would make us sandwiches from time to time, just not normal ones, and of course, never for school lunch. She would make a peanut butter sandwich, but spread butter on the bread first, which I never understood because all my friends’ moms would add jelly or jam, which sounded way better. As you can imagine, I always got an upset stomach after eating one of them because why wouldn’t I?
I don’t understand parents who worry about leaving their children alone in the department store because I didn’t grow up that way. Your kids should remain right where you left them while you went about your business of shopping two floors up.
Believe me, your kids will come looking for you when the terror of abandonment sets in after they haven’t seen you for two hours, mainly by approaching a nice saleslady and asking if she’ll page you over the loudspeaker. Thank God we were able to convince my mom to tell us what her first name was, so in those circumstances, we wouldn’t be forced to admit we didn’t know it.
She was a foreigner, so maybe things were done differently in England, I don’t know. Certainly she would scoff at the idea of giving cells phones to an eight year old.
I can hear her now:
“Why the fuck do these kids keep bothering me with this phone whilst I’m shopping?”
Clever Girl Writes... 
Ah, nostalgia. This made me chuckle. I knew moms like that, but luckily mine was not.
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Mom never left you in the toy aisle?
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Um, well… yes, you got me there. I did have to have her paged over the store intercom a time or two. That was just part of being a kid in the 70’s and 80’s. 🙂
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It wasn’t a childhood without it
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haha!
my mom was the result of generations of german women. she put butter on all of our lunchmeat sandwiches. i only recently have been able to eat butter as an adult. i was convinced that a person goes deaf when talking on the telephone because my mom was so so so good at ignoring me when she was on the phone. sometimes i catch myself saying a her catch phrases:
the road to hell is paved with good intentions
people in hell want ice water
no rest for the wicked
she was a delight–& yes, an RN who was a total bandaid ripper & do not let her near you with a hairbrush.
(yay, moms!)
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I feel your pain
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This reminded me of my grandmother. a cure to EVERYTHING could be found in her garden or in her fridge. Everything from a burn to a knee scrape was met with, “Put some butter on it”. As for the Band-Aid, my mother was a master of the quick yank. Off came the Band-Aid as well as the scab, but so fast the Band-Aid was off before the pain reached your brain. The delay would always be met with a, “Quit being a baby. It didn’t hurt a second ago”. . . Of course, now a second Band-Aid was needed since the wound was now reopened. Ah, childhood. . .
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The only thing butter cures is a craving
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Ha!
I love me some butter with my pb… maybe its an English thing…:)
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It’s completely a British thing. Butter and Marmite, maybe?
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Ooh yes. or pb n marmite! With butter.
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Nooooooo
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My first thought when I read this was that someone needed to kick her ass. The second thought was that I hoped she was still alive so you could treat her the same way she treated you while she was in the worst ‘home’ within a hundred miles. Sorry, that was uncharitable, wasn’t it? Still…
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lol… No, she’s dead. But it’s all good, no worries. She had a good side, just well hidden
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Didn’t have to deal with any of that. The parents in my old neighborhood let both children and dogs run free. If you didn’t like what one house was serving for supper, you showed up at another. Everyone had so many kids, no one kept count.
Same with dogs.
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Those were the good days
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Ah, memories. And I thought that was just my mom…LOL!
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My mother was Scottish, but raised in England. I had peanut butter sandwiches, carrot sticks and juice. I got normal food, so who knows why I ended up so twisted. LOL
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It’s a British thing; make your kids weird
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My mother was weirder than me. Super funny though.
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