Today I mentioned his mother to my husband. He responded with a groan and snide comment: “She would probably tell you to hit me across the butt with her fanny warmer just for general principle.”
He was referring to the blue paint paddles she kept in her desk drawer. You know the ones; they are the thin strips of wood used to stir paint. She had several of them labeled FANNY WARMER, and she gave me one before we were even married. “Use this on him whenever he gets out of line.”
You should have seen the smirk on her face when she said it.
My husband’s mother died suddenly after we had been married a brief four months. As mentioned in a previous entry, I found her fun and amusing, and after all these years, I still feel cheated in a fashion.
Don’t take me wrong because his dad later married another lovely woman. I also consider her my mother-in-law and grannie to my kids. As a matter of fact, because I experienced excellent interactions with two mother-in-laws, a friend once said, “You deserve to be pelted with stones.”
But to move right along, Husband’s mother knew things about him that no other person will ever truly know. Most of what she knew she failed to tell me before she died, or probably, she chose to keep it to herself.
“I really want you to marry him,” she once told me.
As do other mothers of children with ADHD, she was the expert on him, and I sometimes need expert guidance.
For one thing, has he always seen a rabbit in the moon instead of a man in the moon?
Rather than the eyes and mouth of a human face, Husband clearly sees the form of a rabbit with long ears, especially when it is running up the left side of a full moon. He even has me seeing it.
Did his mother see the rabbit in the moon?
Now that you know about it, I challenge you to look for it, too.
For another thing, did he always space out when putting on his shoes and socks? I ask you, would he put on one sock, sit for several minutes and stare off into space? How many times would his mother remind him to hurry up?
What would she have done if she had been with us in the restaurant last week when he retrieved a lemon seed from his tea and shot it across the room through his straw? Our daughter said, “That was the most ridiculous thing a man of your age could have done!” Husband looked somber while I laughed. Would his mother have laughed or ignored him?
I want to know has he always gotten mad easily and held onto grudges? Has he always been short on patience? Is this an ADHD thing, or is it behavior he learned from his mother?
How many times did he make promises to his mother that he never intended to keep? For that matter, did she know he would do the same with me?
If she were available, I would ask her concerning a couple of stories he has told regarding her. Did she really send her kid to the car for a swatter when the restaurant was full of flies? Did she really use it?
Is it true father-in-law once asked her how fast she was driving, and she said 75? Did he really casually tell her to show it down to 80? Did she know her kids were willing to swear she was driving at 110 mph?
For the final and most important question, did his mother know the concept of follow through, and did she attempt to teach it to her son?
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