My mom has a short temper and is really easily irritated by anything she sees as incompetence. I’ve pretty much stopped volunteering to help with chores, because the more I do, the higher the chance is that something won’t go perfectly and I’ll get yelled at.

One day, I go to the store to do some shopping of my own. Because I don’t learn well from experience and I sometimes speak without thinking, I also ask my mom if there’s anything she needs. She tells me she needs ink for her printer, so I write down the printer’s details and head out. 

At the store, I find a box of ink that says it’s suitable for Mom’s printer, but I’m wary of bringing back the wrong thing and getting in trouble for it. I take a picture of the box and text it to my stepdad — Mom still only has a flip phone — asking him to show it to Mom and confirm that it’s the right ink. He texts back that she said yes, so I buy the ink and head home. I put away my own shopping and give Mom the ink. She heads back to the spare room where the printer is and comes back out a few minutes later.

Mom: “This is knockoff ink! It’s the wrong brand! How could you not realize that?!”

I didn’t know the brand mattered, as long as it worked with the printer, so I hadn’t even checked the brand. More importantly, I KNEW that I might not recognize the ink Mom wanted, which is WHY I ASKED FOR CONFIRMATION.

Me: “There must have been a miscommunication somewhere. I wasn’t sure whether that was the right ink, so I sent [Stepdad] a picture and asked him to show it to you. He said you said it was right. You didn’t?”

Mom: “Yeah, but I was busy! I didn’t look at it! I just said yes, and now we’ve got this stuff that probably won’t even work in my printer!”

Yes, “probably”. She hasn’t even tried it yet. She stomps back to the printer, puts in the cartridge, prints a test page, and then stomps back out.

Mom: “See?! It didn’t print right! How could you think this was the right ink? I noticed it was wrong as soon as I looked at it!”

If that were true, none of this would have happened! But she’s right that the page didn’t print right. I still don’t believe that this is entirely my fault, but I accept that the ink is wrong and I’m scrambling to make things right, offering to go back and get the right ink, to pay for both, whatever she wants. Then, my stepdad goes to look at the printer. I’m upset enough by this point not to remember the details, but he points out that the ink cartridge was, in fact, not installed correctly. He fixes it and prints another test page, which comes out perfect. Mom goes back to the spare room again to print out whatever she needed the ink for.

Me: “So, summing up: I bought ink that will work with the printer. Mom didn’t tell me she wanted a specific brand, confirmed it was right without looking at it, and put it in wrong.”

Stepdad: “Yep.”

Me: “Ten bucks says somehow this is still my fault.”

Stepdad: “No bet.”

A few minutes later, Mom comes back out into the living room to chastise me some more, even though at this point it’s clear that a) there is absolutely nothing wrong and b) we only THOUGHT there was something wrong because she couldn’t be bothered to look at the picture I texted her or at the ink cartridge’s instructions. How does her lecture start?

Mom: “[My Name], you’ve got to pay more attention!”

My aunt used to run an in-home daycare. One day, my two youngest brothers, both under the age of seven, were refusing to finish their lunches. One didn’t want to eat his vegetables and the other didn’t want to eat the rest of his sandwich. My aunt told them that they couldn’t leave the table and go back to playing with the other kids until their food was gone and went back into the kitchen to clean up.

While she was starting on the dishes, my brothers swapped plates and ate each other’s leftovers. My aunt figured it wasn’t worth preparing more food and fighting them on it, so she let them go. To this day, I admire their problem-solving.

My parents got divorced when I was ten and both remarried soon after. My mom married a man several years younger than her. By coincidence, the wedding was two weeks shy of her fortieth birthday, and he joked that he’d scheduled it for that date because “I wasn’t gonna marry a forty-year-old!”

Several years after that, Mom got really into genealogy. She was adopted as a baby and was never particularly interested in finding her birth parents, but as she was researching her family, she did find records related to her adoption.

In particular, she found out that in our state, at the time she was adopted, kids got a whole new birth certificate when they were adopted. She’d been given a new name, new parents, and a new birthday — the day on which her adoption was formalized. With a little more digging, she found her original birth certificate, which showed that she was roughly three weeks old when she was adopted and, therefore, was roughly three weeks older than she’d thought she was. She’d turned forty the week before her wedding.

We still tease my stepdad sometimes about how he married a forty-year-old after all. Since he’s now in his fifties and happily married to a sixty-year-old, it doesn’t seem to bother him much.

I’m driving back from the first day of my first ever job. As I’m sixteen, I’m still a very new driver. Between both of my parents having their own cars, their own work schedules, and the fact that we have a very narrow driveway, we have to shuffle cars around a lot in the evening so we aren’t getting up earlier in the morning. 

I call my dad via the hands-free option on my car when I’m only a few minutes out so he isn’t scrambling to come out to move his car for me.

Dad: “Oh, you’re calling me for this? Why don’t you just text me like your mother?”

Me: “…”

Dad: “Never mind, I’ll be ready when you get here.” *Click*

In my mother’s defense, she has a smartwatch she uses speech-to-text on, but still!

My store has a parrot who belongs to the owner and is our resident mascot. I help take care of him, and today, I decide to clip some herbs from the garden to take in for him as a treat. Unfortunately, I leave them at home and don’t realize until I am clocking in, so I call my parents who are still home. My dad picks up.

Me: “Hey, there’s a bag of herbs on the kitchen counter that I forgot to bring. Can you stick it in the fridge?”

Dad: “Wait. What, what, what was that?”

Me: “There’s a bag of herbs in the kitchen. Can you put it in the fridge?”

Dad: “There’s what?”

Me: “Herbs.”

Dad: “Okay.”

Me: “Can you put them in the fridge?”

Dad: “Where are they?”

Me: “On the counter.”

Dad: “In the kitchen?”

Me: “Yup.”

Dad: “Uh, where?”

Me: “In a small plastic bag.”

Dad: “Okay, I see, it’s like some kind of powder—”

Me: “No? Fresh herbs. The ones I picked this morning.”

Dad: “It’s in, like, a green-type bag—”

Me: “No… small. Plastic. Ziploc.”

Dad: “Ah, all right, I see it. What should I do with them?”

Me: *Pauses* “Put them in the fridge, please.”

Dad: “Okay.”

Me: “Okay. Thank you.”

Finally, we finally hang up. I immediately turn to my coworker.

Me: “Wow, that was like taking a customer call.”