Caterwauling

I was talking to one of my favorite people today (it seems the majority of my favorite people are at work. Please allow me to pause to consider this phenomeon!) about Thanksgivings past, and I remembered a great story about my mom. (“Wobin,” for the unfamiliar.)

It was years ago, when my grandmother was still alive and Mom cooked one of her patented 40-course meals (it’s been awhile. Mmm, stuffing balls. *drool*). The thing with Mom is that you don’t know where to be while she’s cooking. If you’re sitting on the couch, you get yelled at to help her already because she can’t pull off this goddamned feast all by herself. So then you will go try to make yourself useful, only to be yelled at for getting under her fucking feet already. But when you vacate, she assumed the orders she had barked out in a frenzy had been executed and you will, surprise, get yelled at for fucking up the process.

The neuroses? Yeah, they all start there. 🙂

So anyway, it was one of those times in which I’d been exiled and was seeking safety in the living room, where my grandmother was in her hospital bed that would confine her for seven years after her stroke. (Yay for the idiot medics who came when she had the stroke, picked her up off the bathroom floor, left her on the couch, LEFT THE HOUSE and had to be summoned back when she wasn’t as OK as they thought she was. Christ on crackers.)

Ahem.

Where was I?

Oh yeah, so Gram and I were having a rip-roaring good time watching Mom drive herself insane for — oh — FOUR of us (my grandfather being the fourth — he was hiding upstairs. Smart man). We’re talking turkey and balls and eight other side dishes and 72 appetizers and maybe a pie or two cakes or something also in process. And Rosemarino salad. I don’t remember after whom it was named but it involved pasta and whipped cream and fruit. That was our family’s version of healthy.

ANYWAY.

Gah.

(We’re probably grabbing Chinese on the run again this year, so forgive the digressions!)

So my grandmother used to be the matriarch who cooked for the masses. As an Italian mother/grandmother, it was HER kitchen and HER ways of doing things — if you fucked it up, she wouldn’t eat it. So, understandably, PRESSURE.

(Ask me sometime about the year she refused to eat the turkey and demanded — and got — a frozen Swanson dinner. My mother was scarred for life!)

SO.

We were cackling at Mom. (Easy target, trust me.) My sweet-natured, mild-mannered Mom, however, had HAD IT with us. So, she calmly opened a cabinet, found two boxes of something or other, and effortlessly hurled one at her mother and the other at me.

And that bitch? Has AIM!

We were so stunned silent that she would actually DO that. And Mom, without batting an eye, turned back to her 20 projects and completed them wordlessly.

And that was the moment in which you realized you DO NOT fuck with Wobin.

I was never prouder of her!

Later she did feel bad for beaning us, but I told her to shut up and not give up that moment of victory, as she had SO earned it. Yay Wobin!

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 23rd, 2006 at 6:00 AM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.