In My Mother's World

It’s that time of year where family members are cooking away wither it be for Passover or Easter or whatever other holiday is near. Of course, for my family it is for Passover. The Jew powers instilled inside of us need to cook up a storm, and have enough food to feed an army so the cooking started early Thursday for Friday night’s Seder. The matzoh ball soup was Thursday’s task for my mother. A simple thing, really.

Matzoh ball soup is something cooked for every holiday in this household. My mother has made it countless times. I even made it a few times. It was almost done, and ready to be transferred into containers to store in the fridge. The job was almost complete. Until my mother’s obsessive cleaning took over. She just had to wipe the counter… and leave the paper towel near open flame. I was in the basement painting, and I was walking up the stairs and I just see a bright light in the corner of my eye. I look up and I see paper towel burning on the counter, ashes flying, and my mother screaming as she picks up the paper towel and throws it into the sink.

A+ mom, A+. Fire safety 101 cover what is on fire, no oxygen, no fire. Even throwing water on top of it would have been smarter than picking up a flaming piece of paper towel. About ten seconds later, she just says “oh I ruined the counter.” I go to look at the counter and I see no difference, no burns, nothing. She then spent the next half hour cleaning up after her potential kitchen fire mishap, exhausted and asks me to cook dinner. I cooked an entire meal, my first attempt at Chicken Marsala, no fires or problems.

I am a very curious person and love learning how to do new things. If someone offers to teach me how to do something, I will more than likely take them up on their offer. Especially because I am a very visual person, I learn by doing. For years one of my friends has offered to teach me how to drive stick. I took him up on the offer once about two years ago, had one small lesson that got interrupted and did not try again until recently. I asked my friend for more lessons because in the near future I will be getting a car of my own. I will never need a car alarm, stick shift is America’s best anti-theft system. It is also safer to drive, the car usually cost less because not a lot of people know how to drive stick and slightly more fuel efficient. The biggest plus of all would be that my mother would NEVER learn how to drive it. Teaching my mother how to drive stick would be just as efficient as:

Naturally my father was surprised (but in a good way) when I told him I was learning but I decided to keep him updated with my progress while my mother was around. She had no idea I was learning and her reaction was another priceless moment.

Me: “I can now drive stick at 20mph!”

Dad: “Oh, that’s what you did today.”

Mom really confused: “Who has stick?”

Me: *says friend’s name*

Mom still confused: “Since when? I didn’t know they still sell them.”

Me: “Since always, why would they stop?”

Mom: “No one drives it.”

Dad: “Not true, they are cheaper, and more fuel efficient.”

Me: “And you have more control of the car.”

Mom: “And why are you learning it?”

Me: “So you never drive my car!”

Mom: “I wouldn’t drive your car.”

Me: “Well I’m just making sure of that.”

If you have ever spent more than 20 minutes with me you know I have a corny sense of humor. If you ever spent more than 5 minutes with my father you will know where I got it from. Needless to say our dinner conversation is usually nonexistent but when it happens it usually happens because of whatever topic is being discussed on talk radio. It is also usually my father and I putting our two sense in or making fun of it. As my mother just… I don’t know what goes though her mind but when she speaks…oy.

One night the conversation topic was hockey fights. I don’t remember what exactly they were discussing, but I do remember my father’s horrible hockey joke.

Dad: “It’s like the old joke, I went to a boxing match and a hockey game broke out.”

My mother: “What?”

Me: “You expected her to get that?”

Dad: “I said: ‘It’s like the old joke, I went to a boxing match and a hockey game broke out.’”

My mother: “Are you trying to tell a joke?”

Dad: “I thought that was implied by ‘It’s like the old joke.’”

After living on a college campus for four years, first going out during late hours in the night is normal. Go to bed in the early morning, wake up at noon. This pattern tends to stay when your job does not have scheduled hours. I work when I want, as long as it all gets done it should not matter if I work at 2pm or 2am. After a day of working for many hours in a row, I needed to go out. So after dinner, I went out with a group of friends. I returned home at 11:15pm but only to pick something up before going to another friend’s house. This is how people who have met this friend view him:

What my mother thinks:

Mom: “Why is the door still open? You forgot to close it. Go close it!”

Me: “I’m going out again. To fabulous’s house.” Yes that is what we call our friend, he deserves the title, trust me.

Mom: “Why so late? I don’t understand. What does he do? Does he sell drugs?”

Me: “No, why would he sell drugs?”

Mom: “What makes him so fabulous?”

Oh Mom. She has met him, she knows he is gay. I guess there is a generational lingo gap there. She didn’t even have to question it when he left my house (the one time he was in it) she said to me “I don’t even have to ask I know he’s gay, and so nice!” So apparently in her mind fabulous means they supply me with drugs, because I totally do those. Has nothing to do with him being flaming (not that there is anything wrong with that). Her first thought should totally be I’m going out to get high because it’s 11:15pm, and she does not really know where her children are.

When a lot of people go food shopping they usually write a list, and purchase the items on their list. They also usually read packaging to make sure the items they have picked out are indeed the items that are on their list. Even the visual learners (like myself) might look at the pictures on the packaging first and then read the text just to make sure they have the right item. One place where this skill called reading is most useful is the frozen vegetable isle. With so many different kinds of vegetables they can look the same. The item on my mother’s list: green beans.

The item that arrives in our home, and in our freezer: edamame. Now even when I was rummaging through the freezer to see what my mother purchased, I noticed it was edamame. I figured she purchased it thinking it was a new vegetable and that she had no clue that it was soy beans.

Sure enough when I go downstairs for dinner my mother realizes she forgot to make a vegetable and grabs the edamame, opens it, pours it into a dish, and only when looking up the cooking directions realizes “This is not green beans!” She shrugs it off and cooks them anyway. I question if she ever read the packaging. Her response: “No, I just looked at the packaging. They were green and beans. I thought they were green beans.”

The edamame is now out of the microwave, and sure enough the first thing she does is put some on my plate. *Insert lots of cursing for trying to make me eat something that I am allergic to here* Her response: “It doesn’t have soy in it!” My second to last words to my mother: “EDAMAME IS PURE SOY BEANS!” She then digs through the garbage to read the packaging. My final words: “Oh now you read the packaging, AFTER you purchase the wrong item, cook the contents, and throw it out.”

Then of course my father just sticks a fork in one and before it can reach his mouth I yell “Don’t eat the peel! Just remove the beans and eat those.” This of course causes my mother to read the packaging again, to once again see that I am correct. She then asked how I know all of this when I am allergic to them as I just roll my eyes, facepalm, and leave the room because at that point I was already done eating my meal.

So in New Jersey like most states, when a group of 19-25 year-old’s are together there is suddenly not much to do during the winter time. The options are usually: go to the mall for no reason, spend an arm and a leg to see a movie, go out to get food, go mini golfing at the same mini golf course, and/or go bowling. We can’t go clubbing because clubs are 21+ and that would exclude people. If we drive a half hour away ice skating and laser tag are an option.

When my friends and I do something like go laser tagging we become very competitive well because…

So we plan on going laser tagging. We drive to the ice skating rink that usually hosts it, and it turns out we missed it by a half hour. There were also no public ice skating sessions that night. So we just decided to go bowling instead. I get home later that night so I went straight to bed. The next morning when I was making my breakfast my mother asks “How was laser tag?” My response: “We didn’t go laser tagging, the plans changed. We went bowling instead.” Her response still puzzles me to this day: “Good you got more exercise.” I just facepalmed and walked away thinking:

“I know bowling is a sport and if you do it professionally yes, you have to work out. However, how is picking up a 14 pound ball and hurling it down a lane 40-41 times over the time frame of three hours (not even repeatedly) while drinking beer more of a workout than running around, crawling, rolling, and staying low to the ground for 20 minutes intervals for three hours more exercise? I think I consumed more calories from the beer than I burned. Last time I went laser tagging I left sweating, only drank water, and had battle wounds. After I went bowling all I did was notice that I broke a nail.”

Everyone has their own likes and dislikes in life. For example, I like chicken salad. I dislike tuna salad. The smell makes me nauseous beyond belief. I have tried the ignore the smell and taste it. I puked, it is just something that I can not eat. Everyone in life also makes mistakes, and usually these mistakes are noticed quite quickly by others.

This mistake was not made by my mother, however she never really noticed it. At the supermarket deli she ordered me some chicken salad. I saw the container got some bread and was ready to make one of my favorite sammiches. I noticed some of it was missing, and the second I opened the container I knew something smelled fishy. Literally, it was not chicken salad, it was tuna salad. I said to myself “alright I know I tried it before but I’ll try it again.” I took a fork and put the tiniest bit on my tongue and started to puke. Nope, still can’t eat it.

My mother ate it for her lunch that day which is why some of it was missing. A few days later when I went to the kitchen to make lunch she informed me “there is chicken salad, why haven’t you eaten it?” My response “THAT IS NOT CHICKEN SALAD!” She had a look of confusion on her face and said “I knew it tasted funny, but what is it? It can’t be tuna. I just thought it was funny tasting chicken.” When I said tuna, she of course did not believe me. She had to open up the container and stick her nose in it. It was as appetizing as it sounds as her nose started to run as she sniffed. She agreed with me after sniffing it for a good minute.

What concerned me on this one the most was the “funny tasting chicken” …really? So she thought it went bad, and told me to eat it several days later? THANKS MOM!

When I was younger and just got my permit like all teens I was ecstatic. I was one out of three students that passed the permit test in driver’s ed. I counted down the days until my birthday so I could go get it. We scheduled a driving instructor and I completed all of the necessary hours. However, my father really wanted to make sure I knew what I was doing so he also took me out for driving lessons. He would not let me take the driving test until I could perfectly parallel park. I’m sure a tiny bit of him also wanted to make sure that I don’t drive like my mother.

My mother took her driving test once when she was a teen. She failed the test because of one small mishap.

She was living in Brooklyn, and in Brooklyn the driving tests are done on the streets unlike in New Jersey where it is done in a coned parking lot/obstacle course specifically designed for driving tests. Her obstacle: parked cars. Yes she hit a parked car. Not side swiped, not love tapped, she drove right into a parked car.

While living in New York she never tried to get her license again. She did not try again until she moved to New Jersey in 1994. I was already 5 years old when she got her license. To this day she is a nervous wreck when she drives. She doesn’t even drive that far or on any major highways.

Needless to say, I do not drive like my mother. I passed my test the first time I took it, and did not hit a single cone or curb. I still to this day have not hit anything. I still fear for my life every time my mother insists on driving, never know when a parked car might just jump out at her.

tumblrbot asked: WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE INANIMATE OBJECT?

tie between door knobs and sporks.

Allergies come and go. Some people never have any, other people (like me) have many. The most recent allergy that I discovered was a food allergy, soy. I discovered it when my throat swelled up after drinking soy milk at a friend’s house. The reaction was not too bad so I did not go out of my way to avoid soy. Soy is in almost everything, especially in my college’s food. After the prolonged exposure to soy in my college food, the allergy became worse. By the time I returned home from college, I could not consume any form of pure soy. What soy looks like to me:

My mother of course, not knowing how to cook decides covering chicken in soy sauce and water is an acceptable meal. She forgot about my soy allergy, however she still tried convincing me to eat the dish.

Mom: “You’ve eaten it before, there can’t be a lot of soy in it.”

Me: “You covered chicken in SOY sauce, and you say there isn’t a lot of soy in it? Seriously? My allergy got worse, I can no longer consume SOY sauce, because I am allergic to SOY!”

So I made myself the good old pb&j and called that dinner. A few days later, my mother does not cook dinner. I was out with friends, and was the last to throw together some leftovers to eat for dinner. When I asked my mother what was left…

Mom: “Chicken dish that I made a few days ago that I don’t think you had, we ate all the other leftovers.”

Me: “Oh the chicken dish that is COVERED IN SOY, THE ONE THAT I DID NOT EAT FOR A REASON!”

Good thing I like pb&j… not the best dinner… but it won’t kill me.