As a mother, choose your words and actions carefully, for eighteen years! Mom to three grown children, I still hear about the horrible things I said and the awful things I did to them as children.
Oldest daughter with her dad’s dark heavy eyebrows: me, to her as a teen, “You might want to pluck them.”
What she heard, “You look like Groucho Marx.”
Youngest daughter, about ten, too busy to stop playing to come downstairs and eat a hot brownie out of the oven: what I said, “Come have a brownie.”
What she said, “Just a minute.”
What I heard, “”She doesn’t want any.”
Two hours later, when she finally came downstairs, “Where’s my brownie?”
What I said, “Oops, I guess I ate it.”
That’s the last time I made a pan of brownies.
My son in third grade: what he said, “I don’t like baseball. I don’t want to go to practice. I don’t want to go to my game.”
What I heard, “Take me out of baseball.”
So in 4th grade, when I didn’t sign him up, what he said to everyone for years to come, “Mom made me quit baseball.”
And lastly, the scariest moment of all, when the oldest child went missing at the San Francisco zoo for ten minutes at closing time, and I ran around screaming her name, sure she had been kidnapped, and then I found her at the exit –she thinking we had left without her — and that moment when she ran into my arms and we both cried, that’s what being a mother is.
You see, no matter what you do or say, it will eventually come back to bite you in the butt. So choose your words and actions carefully.
They never forget a thing.
FIRST DATE, WORST DATE EVER! 