I’m with my two-year-old at a playground. As she’s two, I’m keeping pretty close to her, in case she needs anything while she’s running around. 

Another girl, about four, is climbing on the playground equipment nearby. My daughter goes past her to get to the slide — just near her, not touching or cutting in line — and out of the blue, the other girl hits her.

Me: “Don’t hit.”

Girl: “You can’t tell me what to do. You’re not my mom.”

She moves as if to hit my daughter again.

Me: “DO. NOT. HIT. PEOPLE.”

Girl: “You’re not my mom!”

An older woman comes over, looking tired and distracted.

Older Woman: “Is there a problem?”

Girl: *Pointing to me* “She’s trying to tell me what to do, Grandma!”

Me: “I told her not to hit my daughter after she did so unprovoked.”

Older Woman: *Sounding dazed* “Oh.”

Girl: “But she’s not Mom!”

The older woman shrugs and wanders back to the benches on the side of the playground.

Other Girl: “See?”

Me: *Pointing to my daughter* “I am her mom, and I can tell you not to hit her.”

The other girl pouted and, finally, left to terrorize another part of the playground.

I don’t remember it, but my mum loves to tell this story whenever there’s a discussion of racism going on. 

When I was growing up, our neighbours on one side were Indian, and I was occasionally invited into their garden to play with their younger child who was a few years older than me.

When I was about four, the whole family went back to India to see the extended family still living there. While they were away, they arranged for their cleaner, an older Indian woman, to come in and pick up the mail and do some of the bigger cleans it was hard to do while the family was home. 

We were out in the garden when I spotted her hanging out some of the cleaning cloths she’d washed on the line. 

Me: “Mummy, there’s [Neighbour]’s granny!”

Mum: “No, darling, that’s the cleaner.”

Me: “But Mummy, that’s [Neighbour]’s granny.”

Mum: “No, [Neighbour]’s gone to see his granny in India, remember?”

Me: “But Mummy, she has to be [Neighbour]’s granny!”

Mum says that, at this point, she could see the cleaner watching me out of the corner of her eye, and Mum was praying I wouldn’t say what she thought I was going to say.

Me: “She’s got grey hair like a granny!”

My mum says the cleaner completely lost it at that point and doubled over laughing. She always likes to make the point that I clearly thought nothing of their skin colour, but she obviously needed to teach me that not every lady with grey hair was someone’s granny.

I’ve submitted several stories about my friends, family, and neighbors, and I’m thankful they’ve been published, but I’m hoping y’all won’t mind one more from my paternal grandmother. It’s my favorite of the many anecdotes she shared.

Dad’s family was an Air Force family, and they once got stationed in Tokyo and Okinawa in the 1950s for about four years. (They actually returned to the States right before the very first Godzilla film was released in theaters, but I digress.)

One day while in Tokyo, my grandfather had to speak with his commanding officer before some errands, so he left Grandma with their three kids in the car to wait.  

While they waited, the car started shaking. Grandma was afraid that meant an earthquake was building up and panicked since it was the first time she’d experienced one. But just as she was wondering if it was going to get worse, how to keep the children safe and calm, and if her husband would be all right…

…about forty sumo wrestlers went jogging by as part of their training.

Of all the things Grandma had thought might happen in Japan, that certainly wasn’t one of them.

My younger sister has had glasses since she was a baby — like ten months old. She’s extremely farsighted, so her glasses make her eyes look much bigger than they really are. She can barely see without her glasses, but her glasses are always somewhat heavy and can get uncomfortable, so despite that, she sometimes takes breaks from wearing them.

When she was little, like three to six years old, she had trouble saying the word “glasses”, so she’d call them her “eyes”. It made sense to me as a seven-year-old since her eyes looked so much smaller when she took her glasses off. This would lead to a lot of funny stares when we went out in public and my sister, who was otherwise quite an eloquent toddler, would announce loudly that she was going to take her eyes off and no one in my family would bat an eye.

As my sister grew up and added the word “glasses” to her vocabulary, most people forgot about the time when she’d tell us she’d taken off her eyes — most people, except for our grandmother.

My sister just finished her freshman year of college. She still wears glasses almost all the time, but she has contacts for special occasions when she’s going out. She tried contacts for a year in high school but found them too uncomfortable to do every day.

My sister started dating for the first time this year. One day, when she was with her boyfriend, she had a massive headache. She suffers from random headaches sometimes, but this was a pretty bad one and the first one she’d had around her boyfriend. She was basically crying because of the pain, so he helped her Facetime our grandma. (She first tried our parents, but both were busy and didn’t answer the phone.)

Our grandma’s first question was:

Grandma: “Did you take your eyes off recently?”

Sister: “No, I’m not wearing my eyes now.”

That was the only part her boyfriend could hear. Her boyfriend was already pretty panicked, and he was so shocked that he started to look up their school’s emergency mental health hotline; he was convinced my sister was going insane or something.

It took my sister about ten minutes to convince him that she was totally fine, which took her mind off the headache for long enough that it went away.

When my niece was five, she asked my mum a question.

Niece: “Grandma, how old are you?”

Mum: “Thirty-nine.”

Niece: *Looks confused and concerned* “Oh… Grandma… I don’t think that’s right. That’s how old my daddy is.”

And that was the last time she was able to lie about her age!