My family frequently goes skiing in the winter. We typically end up staying at a nearby hotel for one night per trip.

One weekend, I have to share a fold-out bed with one of my younger brothers, who is taller than me and quite lanky. I’m awake long after everyone else is asleep, being an insomniac. My brother sprawls out and I don’t want to touch him, so I’m basically clutching the side of the bed for dear life to keep from falling off.

Eventually, I get fed up with the awkward position and move to the floor, which at least has more room. Once I attempt to lay down, I realize that there is a freezing draft down there and remember seeing an extra blanket in the closet on the other side of the hotel room.

I wrap myself up in the white hotel blanket and slowly shuffle across the room, not wanting to trip or fall because I’m tired and walking in the dark without my glasses. While I’m making my slow trek across the room, my mother wakes up.

She told me the next morning that when she saw a shuffling figure all dressed in white and thought that she’d seen a ghost! I told her that no, it was me trying to get another blanket because my brother was being a bed hog. We had a good laugh about it.

(One of my sons is divorced, another one married. Whilst shopping, I run into a neighbour. After some small talk, I get this gem:)

Elderly Neighbour: “I’m so sorry that [Married Son] got divorced, too.”

Me: “Excuse me? I saw both [Married Son] and [Daughter-In-Law] yesterday and they are still happily married, devoted to their daughter.”

Elderly Neighbour: “But, but he is seen with this blonde woman all over the neighbourhood.”

(It was then that I realized that my daughter-in-law had recently lost a lot of weight — as my son put it: she’s only half the woman he married — and had her hairstyle changed — badly, I might add — and had changed from dark to blonde. We had a good laugh about it when I told my son he should me tell me when something important happens in his life.)

(It’s the day of a major American holiday and my sister and mother are spending the day cooking that evening’s dinner. With limited counter space, four full burners, and a massive bird in the oven, things get messy and a little smokey. As the afternoon progresses, we assume the smoke is just from all the cooking until my sister opens the utility room door and a cloud of smoke billows out. The culprit is a pile of laundry which has been quietly smoldering. My sister had tossed a rag she used to wipe up some grease on top of the pile earlier, not noticing that one of the corners had caught fire on the burner. The laundry is hastily evacuated outside, doused with water, and stomped on for good measure. It’s as we’re looking to see if there’s anything left to put out that my sister spots something else.)

Sister: “Hah, I found what started the fire!”

(My sister lifts up a blackened elastic band. All of the cloth has burnt away but I recognize the band as belonging to a pair of my underwear.)

Mom: “[My Name], what have you been eating?!”

(My family has never let me live down the day I nearly burnt the house down with a pair of dirty undies.)

The Matrix came out when my brother and I were children, and my family loved it. Even though it was violent, even my conservative mother approved, so we watched it constantly. One day, my brother and I were watching TV by ourselves when Bound came on. We didn’t really get the plot, and this was a heavily edited, made-for-TV version, but we were entranced by the cinematography. 

Later, on our bi-monthly Blockbuster run, we begged my mom to rent Bound, telling her it was just like The Matrix and that she would love it. We had to really wear her down to convince her, but finally, she relented.

We sat down as a family together and… Wow, we didn’t remember these scenes in the version we’d watched. My mom turned it off very quickly and yelled at my brother for exposing me to it, assuming I hadn’t watched it on TV at all and was just parroting him. Neither of us could convince her otherwise. My brother was grounded for a week.

I am the idiot in this story. 

I had just finished leading a rather active Cub Scout meeting, and I was ready to go home and put my feet up. It was 8:30 at night and I was done for the day. I went out to the car, opened the driver’s side door, and tossed my Scout stuff into the passenger seat. When I pushed the start button, though, nothing happened. I got a “key disabled” message, and couldn’t get it to work at all. I called my older son to bring me another set of keys, figuring that the battery had run out in the key fob or something. 

I sat there in the car, reading stuff on my phone, idly noting that the car was even more of a mess than usual and that I was going to have to get on the kids about that. After ten minutes, my son pulled up in our second car and looked out the window at me with a puzzled look. I got out of the car to grab the keys from him when he spoke up: “Mom? That’s not your car…”

I turned around to find that I had, indeed, gotten into a random SUV that was in the space I usually parked in, that was approximately the same size as my car. It wasn’t even the same make of car, nor the same color. I have no idea why I thought that was my car, other than the fact that it opened when I tried the door. I quickly dashed over to my own car, profoundly grateful that the actual owner hadn’t come out, which would have been an awkward conversation.