My mom has been a teacher for all my life, and often teaches me things before my school does, especially when I was younger. I’m relatively advanced for my age, which means that I have been reading since three. This occurred when I was four, and my mom worked as a first-grade teacher in the same school I attended.

For some reason, my school thought teaching four-year-olds Spanish was absolutely necessary, so we got a new Spanish teacher in the middle of the year when the first one quit. She came into the classroom and started putting up posters while we played. Being by the teacher’s desk, I spotted a paper that seemed interesting, mainly because it had the word “snack” on it. Bored, I started to read the paper, which I did out loud.

At first, the teacher didn’t notice anything. Then, when she heard me, her eyes got huge and she rushed to the class phone. Dialing my mom’s classroom, she yelled into the phone, “Mrs. [Our Last Name], your child can read!”

My mom simply replied, “I know. I taught her how.”

That teacher avoided my mom and me for the rest of the year.

I’m an asexual woman, but back when I was in college, “asexual” wasn’t really “a thing.” I just ended up telling all my friends, “I don’t date,” as a personal rule.

One of the boys who was in theater with me had a very strong crush on me. The two of us practically built the theater department, so we were always hanging out together and were pretty good friends, but he was always trying to convince me to go out with him. He would buy me gifts even though I had told him I didn’t date and didn’t have the money to reciprocate the presents.

One day he told me his brother was trying to sell a rare draft script for the first Star Wars movie ever made. Everyone who knows me knows that I’m a huge Star Wars nerd, and I would have flipped to have that script or even just a photocopy of it. I even said as much to him. Unfortunately I didn’t have the money his brother was asking for, and the script sold online.

Fast-forward a year. I could tell our friendship was cooling because he was getting frustrated that I still wouldn’t go out with him. The last time it came up, he handed me a birthday gift: a pair of gold and ruby earrings. I don’t wear jewelry, so I had no idea what they were worth, but all I thought was that he had to have spent far more than what his brother asked for that Star Wars script! I stared at the jewels and then looked at him, finally saying, “Um, my ears aren’t pierced.”

He took the earrings back and we never really hung out again. He did finally move on, get a girlfriend, and get married. I have never broken my rule about “not dating.”

The moral of the story is: If you’re trying to get someone to go out with you especially by giving them presents, maybe take a cursory review of the three years you’ve been friends to notice that she doesn’t wear jewelry or have pierced ears, but is fanatically obsessed with Star Wars and would have felt obligated to go on a date if you had just given her that incredibly rare artifact you somehow had access to!

While as an L-Plater — meaning I am on my Learner’s Permit — I am driving with my instructor past a school. The school-zone speed limit is 40 kilometers per hour, and it is now 2:50 pm, meaning the school-zones kicked in a full 20 minutes ago. There are signs in specific areas, some of which are flashing, and huge “40” and “slow down” indicators painted on the road beneath us, impossible to miss.

I am driving past a bus bay that is separated from the main street by a grass island when a car comes up behind and beeps his horn at us. As I am driving at the correct school-zone speed limit, I don’t speed up, and he beeps his horn again. He then proceeds to drive over the curb, over the grass island, and into the bus bay, taking that road around and ending up in front of us. He then rolls down his window, gives us the middle finger, and speeds away over the hill.

My instructor is shocked, but tells me to not let drivers like that impact me and that if in the future I do decide to it is necessary to exceed a speed limit, the ones I should always stick to regardless are the school-zones, because it is not worth putting a child’s life in danger like that.

We then drive up the hill, and once we get to the top, I see flashing red and blue lights. As we drive past, the car is stopped on the side of the road with a policeman at the window. The driver sees our car, and then quickly looks away sheepishly as the policeman berates him. I look at my instructor, who continues to stare straight ahead, this time with a small smile on his lips.

Karma really is a b****.

I come from a very religious family. As such, I was never given any formal sex-ed talk.

I was 12 and I was at the mall by myself. I went into the washroom and found blood in my underwear. I completely panicked and ran into the closest store.

In this store, there was one female worker, but the rest of the store was empty. In tears, I begged her to call my family to come get me because clearly I was dying.

The woman calmed me down and gave me an adhesive pad. After explaining what it was and how to use it, she let me use the staff-only washroom in the back. She then gave me the whole sex talk my parents and my religious school had failed to tell me. She only told me because I was so freaked out and confused. I don’t think she knew I was religious; she just thought I was super innocent and my parents didn’t tell me s***.

I never told my parents what this employee said. My parents acted like my period was shameful and discouraged any discussion about it, besides saving sex for marriage, when I went home that night. Before I went to bed, my mom handed me a package of pads and a book about Virgin Mary. She didn’t explain how to use them, the difference between wings and no wings, etc., like the woman in the store had. I would’ve been so overwhelmed if it weren’t for that woman.

The following year, I was taught about how abstinence is the best birth control, but nothing like what that employee taught me. I had to be the one to teach my friends about their own bodies, and I am so grateful for what that employee did. I have friends who are in their early 20s just learning what I learned when I was 12.

This woman saved my teen years.

Once, my mom, a police officer, got a 911 call reporting an ongoing murder.

The cops went with lights and sirens to the scene and asked where the murder was taking place. The caller lead them to the bathroom where they heard shrieks of terror and somebody yelling, “DIE, DIE, DIE!”

They promptly kicked the door down… and were met with the sight of a man slapping a slipper around, trying to kill a spider, and an arachnophobic girl shrieking in terror. No charges were laid.