My mom regularly video calls with my niece, my sister’s child, who is two years old. My mother also has four cats. Every time my sister initiates a call, my niece asks to see the cats. I overhear the most recent video call.

Mom: “Hi, [Niece], sweetie!”

Niece: “Kitty?”

Sister: *Exasperated* “Can you at least say hi to Grammie first?”

Niece: *Cheerily* “No, thank you, Grammie! Kitty, please!”

My mom and I went to the aquarium. Mom was just a couple of years shy of the cut-off to qualify for the senior discount, which was sixty-five and up. When we noticed, we joked a little about it with the ticket lady.

I pointed to the single grey hair on my head that I’ve had since high school.

Me: “What, you didn’t notice I’m going grey? Clearly, I qualify!”

Neither of us got the senior discount, but we felt good anyway knowing we made the lady smile a little at our antics.

A few years ago, I worked at a wing delivery place after moving across the country for college. I accidentally left my microwave at home, but luckily, my mom had some business in the town I was living in, so she tossed it in her car and brought it with her to her hotel.

We’d discussed it beforehand, and she got a hotel in my delivery radius. She ordered some wings, and I was the driver for it. I got the wings, headed over, and started going to the elevators. I gave the front desk workers a small wave as I went by.

I got up to her room, made some small chat, and took my microwave from her. I made my way back down to the lobby, and the front desk workers called me over.

Worker: “What are you doing with that microwave?”

Me: “It was my tip from the customer!”

That hotel didn’t have microwaves in the rooms, so they let me go. I loved the confused looks on their faces.

CONTENT WARNING: Murder
 

I was about twelve years old at the time of this story. (I’m nearly forty now.) Instead of riding the school bus home, my mom had to pick me up from school on this particular day due to an appointment in a different town. In rural Ohio, there are about forty different ways to get to where you need to go between county roads, back roads, highways, etc. So, wherever we were headed from the town my school was in took us down a road we didn’t normally drive.

It was winter and snowing a decent amount, so my mom was driving at a reasonable speed for the weather conditions, and we were chatting about my day at school. All of a sudden, the car lurched forward so hard that I hit the dashboard; the seatbelt in that car was apparently not the greatest. My mom slightly lost control of the car but regained it quickly.

We looked at each other like, “What the heck just happened?” I could feel my lip bleeding a little bit from where I’d hit the dashboard, and I mentioned it to her. 

Then, it happened again; the car violently lurched forward and skidded a little bit. Mom looked in the rearview mirror, and I turned around in my seat to see behind us. There was something large and metal-looking completely blocking the back window, and at first, we both thought we’d just been hit by a snow plow. 

Mom pulled the car off the side of the road and stopped. Whatever was behind us did the same. It turned out it was just another car, but it had hit us so hard that the hood of the other car had flown up (I’m guessing after the first impact), and that’s what was blocking the rear window of my mom’s car.

Now, my mom is a small lady; she’s five-foot-nothin’ on a good day, but normally more like 4’11”. (I’m 5’2″ and have been since I was about ten years old, so I inherited that.) Mom is one of the sweetest, coolest, most supportive, and most understanding ladies on the face of the planet. But she does have a pretty mean “Mama Bear” streak if anything threatens me, as she was a single mom and I’m her only child, so we’ve always been really close.

Suffice it to say, Mom was livid that some idiot had just violently rear-ended her car (twice!) with me inside and caused my lip to bleed. She hopped out of our car and stormed back to confront the driver. I got out of the car to follow her because I was curious to see what had gone down and how this was going to play out.

The driver of the other car was a middle-aged man, and he was still sitting in his driver’s seat, but he had his window rolled down. My mom, this tiny sweet little lady, started yelling at this guy like you wouldn’t believe. I just stood there, listening and watching as the man said nothing, but his eyes kept getting wider and wider with fear, shrinking down into his seat as this little woman struck the fear of God into his soul.

He never said anything, but eventually, he scrambled across the inside of his car, threw open the passenger door, and fled from the car. We watched in shock as he ran away, up the snowy embankment into the nearby woods, without even a coat on.

Once my mom had calmed down a little, we realized we had to deal with the accident and the car situation, especially now that my mom had scared this guy so badly that he had literally fled the scene. This was long before cell phones, so we traipsed up to the nearest house we saw and asked the residents if we could use their phone to call the police. 

The police arrived quickly, and Mom explained the situation to them, admitting that maybe she shouldn’t have yelled at the man and scared him so much that he had disappeared into the woods. The police simply followed his footsteps in the snow, found him shortly after, and brought him back to the scene. They had the man handcuffed, and he had fresh injuries to his face, indicating that it had been quite the scuffle when the police had tried wrangling him.

My mom was confused, of course. Why would they handcuff the man and have to wrestle with him so badly that it would cause him injuries?

Well, it turned out that this particular man was on a fair amount of drugs and had just fled another scene where he had beaten another man to death with a crowbar. And being in such a hurry to flee and not in his right mind, he had ultimately smashed into Mom’s car during his getaway.

When the police told Mom this information, after having her identify him from the back of their cruiser, her jaw dropped. My little hopping-mad mother had managed to scare a drugged-out murderer so badly that he chose to run away through the snow in only a T-shirt and jeans rather than stay and deal with her wrath. 

We have laughed about this story many times since, but at the time, I think it was a bit of a reality check for my mom. She’s eighty-one years old now and still the sweetest and kindest lady you’ll ever meet, but still a spitfire when she needs to be (especially when it comes to me). But since then, she has always been a bit more careful about whom she unloads her Mama Bear wrath onto.

When my wife and I (both women in our thirties) had our wedding five years ago, we decided to host it at my wife’s mother’s house. We dressed up the garden, and it looked magical. We were able to have a stunning garden wedding with about 100 guests, relatively cheaply.

On the big day, while getting set up, my mother was buzzing around making a complete nuisance of herself — trying to change how tables were arranged and allocated and bothering both my wife and me while we were getting ready for the ceremony. Our friend, who was the unofficial manager of the wedding, was doing his best to keep her satiated while also keeping her from bothering the brides.

When it came time for speeches, I made mention of people who specifically helped and people who were a part of the wedding party. My sister was mentioned as she was a part of the wedding party, and my mother-in-law was mentioned for partially funding the wedding and hosting it at her house, investing a lot of time and effort.

In the end, my mother did not get mentioned because she did not help (but rather, hindered) and has honestly never done anything to support us.

When it became clear that she was not getting mentioned, her family started shouting at me from across the garden, “reminding” me to mention my mother. Out of surprise and shock, I made a quick mention, but I honestly had no idea what to even say. It made no sense to me to mention her.

Shortly after, my mother left in tears, and she took her entire extended family with her (about a quarter of the guests). Most of them didn’t even say goodbye. It was a devastating amount of drama for what should’ve been a magical day.

My dad handled it well and comforted us both. (He and my mother are divorced.) I don’t regret not mentioning her even a little bit. All it did was highlight that she can’t be trusted to participate in our lives in any important or meaningful way.

The relationship has never been the same since, especially since she outright refused to apologise to my wife, even trying to compare her behaviour with my wife being withdrawn at her family gatherings since for some reason the entire extended family tends to pretend my wife doesn’t exist.

It was totally bizarre. I am glad my wife still loves me so much despite my insane mother.