The silly side of Mother’s Day
A few years ago, while relaxing with my fiancée at my Portage home, her mother called to alert us about a deadly, out-ofcontrol fire in Valparaiso.
“Be very careful,” she told us in her distinctive British accent. “The fire made the national news.”
Naturally, we were alarmed. My fiance’s home is in Valparaiso. We made a few calls, checked our emails, and searched online for news updates. Nothing showed up. Only later, when we watched the nightly news, did we learn that the deadly, raging fire took place in Valparaiso, a port city in Chile in South America.
“Sorry about that,” my fiancée’s elderly mother told us that night in a frail voice. “I must have misheard it.”
I share this funny remembrance to celebrate Mother’s Day, a holiday that is often portrayed in this column space as
sad, poignant or tragic. Not this year, though. Instead, I asked readers to share the silliest or funniest thing their mother has done, unintentionally of course, that creates a gentle smile or a belly laugh even years or decades later.
“My mom, Janice Kuehl, once came out of the library in a pouring rain and got into the wrong car,” said RJ Kuehl, of Valparaiso. “The other driver was speechless as my mom realized her mistake and quietly exited. My dad watched the whole thing from their car, laughing hysterically, even as she got into the right car dripping wet.”
Valinda Green, of Griffith fondly recalled her mother’s hearing miscues.
“Several years ago, my parents were camping with my brother and his family,” Green said. “My dad had recently undergone a hip replacement, so he asked my mom, ‘Did you bring something for pain?’ In a slightly irritated voice, she answered, ‘How would I know if Springfield got rain?’”
Green’s mother, Lillie Nye, lovingly called “Meema,” once misheard a food offering during an in-home product demonstration.
“They were told they’d be given a choice of a ham or turkey,” Green said. “Afterwards, she leaned in to ask my dad, ‘What’s a HammerTurkey?’
“I could go on and on. She’s been gone for almost three years and still keeps us laughing,” Green said.
Jerry Smundin said the first time his mom tried legal cannabis, in Colorado, she coughed her false teeth straight across a table.
Jenna Martin’s mother once microwaved her granddaughter’s ice cream cake from Dairy Queen because she couldn’t slice through it.
“She couldn’t get the knife to move,” Martin said. “Needless to say, it was softened too much, the icing melted, and the cake collapsed. We’ll never forget it.”
On one unforgettable Thanksgiving, Laura
Toth’s mother put a turkey into her oven before leaving for the airport to pick up one of her daughters.
“When we got back home, my mom couldn’t find her house key. We were locked out,” Toth said. “We ran to the landlord’s house to get a spare key, and they handed us a coffee can full of keys, telling us it’s one of those.”
The daughters couldn’t find the right key, so one had to climb through a window. They rushed to the oven to discover that their mom had forgotten to turn it on earlier that day.
“We ate Thanksgiving dinner around 11 p.m.,” Toth said.
Tracy Lynn Frye’s mother once drove through a stop sign on the way to a Crown Point hospital to visit her husband.
“Instead of just continuing on, she stopped the car and backed up, making sure she made a complete stop,” Frye said. “I remember my sisters and me cracking up and giving her heck. Not for blowing the stop sign, but for backing up and stopping at it.
“Both our parents are gone now, but it’s still a funny memory,” she said.
Beverly Sobkowski insists that her mother is the worst photographer on the planet.
“She’ll either block the lens with a finger or you’ll be headless. Or both,” she said.
Susan Sherman’s mother once demonstrated how to parallel park by gently, yet repeatedly, bumping into the cars on both sides of her vehicle. When the kids in her car alerted her to what she was doing, Sherman’s mother replied, “That’s why they’re called bumpers. You bump them and back up, then bump them again, so they have a purpose.”
“To this day, we laugh about it,” Sherman said.
My sister, Judi Posiadlik of Portage, who has two daughters, once returned from a family vacation to Mexico with the idea to use the same laundry detergent, Suavitel, which their housekeeper there used each day.
“We loved how it smelled,” said her oldest daughter, Jill Posiadlik. “So my mom bought some when we got back home and she used it for a year or so. But our clothes became slightly smellier each month.
“She eventually realized it was fabric softener, yet she was using it like detergent. So for a full six months to a year, at least, we wore unwashed clothes,” she said.
Lastly, one more story about my fiancée’s mother, Vivienne Barloga, who we once left alone on Halloween night to pass out candy. When we returned home, we noticed she had run out of candy yet the porch light remained on.
“What have you been giving out to the kids,” my fiancée asked.
“These old plums,” her mother replied nonchalantly.
Plums?
“It’s quite all right. All the children said thank you,” she cheerily replied.