She raised me better than this

This is my mom, who as you can see is a major cutie. With Mother's Day approaching, I've been thinking back about some of the things we've done in the past: a couple of years ago, I wrote about how she steered me through two nearly consuming post partum depressions (she had experience with one of her own), but this year, I was thinking of something different.

Over twenty years ago, before my husband and I were married, I was teaching in the north-eastern part of Indiana. My parents occasionally drove up to visit me; we'd go out to dinner together in Fort Wayne and then head off on our separate ways. It was always a very nice time.

Except for this one time when we went to Red Lobster. For some reason, Mom got it into her head that this Red Lobster was "dirty." Maybe the ladies' room looked bad? I can't remember. But for whatever the reason, when we got into the restroom after we ate, there were some other women in there, washing their hands and powdering their noses and....other things. But that did not deter my mother from having a conversation with me, oh no it didn't.

I'd barely gained access to a stall when my mother called from the stall next door, "Shelley?"

"Yes?" I answered guardedly. I was thinking she had no toilet paper and I was going to twit her with the whole "can you spare a square" routine from Seinfeld.

"Where are you?" she asked.

"Right next to you," I replied. "See?" And I stuck my foot under the wall of the stall.

"Did you remember to lay toilet paper down on the seat before you sat down?" she inquired anxiously.

"Wha-??!!....Are you SERIOUS?"

"DID YOU PUT TISSUE ON THE SEAT?" she asked in a Mother-will-spank kind of voice.

"Yes," I mumbled.

"What?"

"Yes! I put toilet paper on the seat! And I am TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OLD! You don't have to tell me to put tissue on a toilet seat in a public restroom anymore!" I heard some snickering from the other occupants of the ladies' room.

The next thing I knew, a ball of wadded-up toilet tissue (unused) was lobbed over the top of the stall, where it fell on my head. It was closely followed by more balls of tissue until I was sitting there in a veritable blizzard. I started chucking them back over as fast as I could catch them and I heard her laughing wickedly.

"Will you cut it out!!!" I hollered. There's no telling what all the other women in the restroom were thinking. Maybe they thought we were on some kind of recreational release program from a nearby facility for mentally fragile related people? Who knows.

"I did not raise you to speak to me like that," she said with dignity and threw one more extra-large wad of toilet paper onto my head, and then ran out of her stall like a monkey before I could return fire. Unfair.

And I'd like to point out that she has continued this practice up to this very day whenever we visit a ladies' room and have stalls next door to one another.

So if you think my mother looks so sweet and Nanny-like and innocent in that picture, think again. As with Zuzu, appearances aren't always what they seem.

Happy Mother's Day, Nan!!!