Mom Memories

This item collects all the replies to "Note: *Flowerr* *Flowerr* Sunday is Mo..."

I am collecting these stories, poems, and scenes because the newsfeed is so fleeting. Anyone whose story is pasted or linked in here can request to have it removed. Simply send me an email. I do have to keep everything until the end of day on May 15, 2023 so that I can read it and decide the five merit badge winners.

The game:
Reply to this post with a memory of something that involves your mother.
It must be something positive or funny.
It must fit into the Writing.Com 13+ rating.
The five best replies will get the "Time to Parent" merit badge.

Click on each badge to see who won.

Here's one of my memories:
Annette : When I was in preschool, my mom was always very involved with creative things to do for us. One day, she spent hours filling glass bottles with different levels of water. Us children were supposed to use xylophone sticks to make music with those bottles. Instead, we drank the water and were all soaked from top to bottom at the end of the day. I still remember that feeling of sticky wet clothes. So much fun.

JCosmos wrote: "No Mother's Day for My Mother" 

Angelica- 90s and 100s weather wrote: My mom makes the most delicious dessert. It's called a sweet noodle and she puts raisins in it. Though I don't care for the mouth numbing black spice she also puts in it, I eat it all up. This maybe the last year I can enjoy eating it before getting surgery to lose weight. She tries her hardest to help me out. We try everything out. But don't forget about the dessert! Yummy. To date I've lost almost 30 pounds. *Wink* I just need to keep it off and lose more.

Spring in my Sox wrote: We lived in a mobile home when I was little. I remember my mom sitting on the bathroom counter with her feet in the sink to shave her legs. The fake wood paneling and 70s orange shag are vivid in my mind.

Happy Father's Day from Sharma wrote: "My Unique Family" 

Soldier_🎶_Mike wrote: Mom was a great cook. We enjoyed everything she fixed, except... She made a cheese-and-spinach-based dish one time when I was in junior high. A couple of my younger brother's friends left before it was ready, but were interested to know how it tasted since the spinach-y aroma filled the house.
I don't remember what the replacement dish was, but nobody ate the original meal - including Mom.

Scifiwizard Retired wrote: I am still making memories with my mother. One of my fondest memories is her saving every drawing, every story and every card my siblings and I ever made so she could look back at them and live those memories with us again and again.

buddhangela's Brave & Crazy wrote: My mom had her moments. For birthdays every year she baked angelfood cake with lemon-drizzle icing. (For the girls, the icing was colored pink.) But one year, I think when I turned eleven, she got it in her head to make me a special cake. And she did! It was amazing – it looked like a hamburger. You've probably seen cakes like it over the past few years on Bake-Off and other competitive baking shows. But this was around 1980. I have no idea how she did it, but I remember that it really looked like a cake-sized hamburger.

Looking back on it now, the really great thing about that cake is that she probably made it because she saw it in a magazine and thought it would be fun to do. But she wasn't (and still isn't) the kind of person who does something out of their comfort zones. She's stays in her normal space – grew up in large Catholic family in the Fifties. The fact that she challenged herself and allowed herself to do something fun, and buy the tools and ingredients she'd need to do it? That had to have been a big deal for her. Looking at it from her perspective makes the memory all the sweeter.

Sunny wrote: My favorite memory I have of my Momma is singing with her. She was a very good singer.

Choconut ~ Busy Writing! wrote: Mum was a quiet but super intelligent woman. She was also the bravest person to have lived. Like, ever. She had severe rheumatoid arthritis and was in constant pain, but I never once heard her complain. But, my memory ... Every Easter, she would make the most wonderful treasure hunt for me to find my egg. She wrote amazing, rhyming clues to take me to the next clue, and eventually to the egg. It was my favourite part of the holiday. Even better than the chocolate egg — and we all know how much I love chocolate!

QPdoll wrote: When I was thirteen, my family and I lived in Texas. My mother and I went to a furniture store, and next to that furniture store was a game room. (For those of you who don't really know what that is, it's a place where lots and lots of video games were available to play.) So, I asked my mom for money to go play some games while she looked for furniture.

Well, I finished playing games, having spent all my money, and went out to walk next door to the furniture store. The problem was, when I walked out, I didn't see our car anywhere. So I went back to the game room and made a collect call to my mother on a payphone. (Those were public telephones where you had to pay money to use them. But you could make a "collect" call and whoever you were calling would pay the fee.)

So my mother answered when I called home. I asked my mom, "Did you forget something?"

"What?" she said.

I told her, "Me!"

"Oh, my goodness! I'm so sorry. I'll be right back."

It didn't take her long to get back to pick me up. She's never lived that down all these years. I still tease her about it and we have a good laugh.

Maddie Spring in my Step Stone wrote: Every other Sunday morning, my mom and I would go to the grocery, just us. We were up before the sun and drove the 45 minutes to the bigger store, so we could get the best prices and she would set our family up with groceries for another 2 weeks. We didn't have a lot of money, so it was important to use it wisely. She still managed to get us some special things, too. Those mornings were special to me because it was just mom and me.

It always seemed like we talked more easily and laughed together on those mornings. It was like a little island of time among the everyday stresses. She taught me about how to calculate pricing, so you get the most for your money. Also, how to pick the best produce. We talked about recipes... and life. By the time we were leaving to come home, the sun was up and we always went through a drive-thru to grab a snack for the ride home. That was special, too because we didn't eat out often at all.

I miss those mornings with mom, but I've held on to the feeling that I had and it makes going to the store a special time for me with my family now.

Purple Princess wrote:
I'm struggling between 2, but here's one.

I was 12 or 13. We were supposed to leave for a funeral in Ohio by 10 am. My mom was a nurse and had to work a double in order to get that Saturday off. Arriving home at 6am, she crashed on the couch and I was in charge of packing the things we would need for an over night trip.

I couldn't figure out where I was supposed to put something in the suitcase. I tried waking her, pulling her arem, kept asking her where she wanted this item to go when finally she muttered "put it in a peripheral IV."

🤦‍♀️😄😄😄😄😄

I wish I could remember what that all important item was.

Sumojo wrote: We three kids were all wartime babies. My dad was away for six years fighting in France and Germany. He obviously came home on leave at least three times! I was eighteen months old when he saw me for the first time when the war was over. Being a sole parent during those war years made my mum very resilient. She was afraid of nothing, or so I thought. I have a vivid memory of being lifted up on to a sideboard while my mother stood on the kitchen table. The reason? A mouse! She’d seen a mouse run through the house! I have no idea who coaxed her down and saved us from the dangerous creature.
My husband and I emigrated from England and after dad retired they joined us in Australia. Now Australia is full of deadly creatures, but nothing scared my mother until once she had a rat in the house. She made dad agree to move into a motel until the offender was caught and disposed of.
She died in 1985 in England where she returned after my dad died here in Australia. She said she wanted to die back in her home country.
I miss her still, very much. She was the best.

Prosperous Snow wrote "Remembering Mama" 

IceSkatingSugarCube wrote: My mom had a dream one time that she was making cat-shaped cookies. She needed a lot of them quickly, so when she ran out of dough much sooner than expected, she panicked. Finally, she thought up a plan. She headed out the back door and caught as many of our cats as possible, then tossed them in the oven. This is where she awoke, disturbed and amused.

Tinker wrote: "A Gift From Mama" 

Blueyez ৎ୭ wrote "Cream of the Crop" 

Olivia wrote: Actually, this is my first conscious memory. *Delight*

My mom had just divorced from my biological father, and she and I lived in a maisonette in Deckstein in Cologne. It was a wonderful summer early afternoon.

Sunny, balmy air, a light breeze coming in through the terrace doors, birds chirping, bumble/-bees humming and buzzing in the flower pots outside. The radio was playing in the background, too.

It would've smelled like flowers as well, but that day it was rather Frittenfett cause mom was making fries, one of our favorite junk food.*Hungry* And, decent Rheinländer that we were, we ate them with an obscene load of Mayo.*StarStruck*

Mom was huffing and puffing because she was pressing the stubborn, bretthart potatoes through an old-fashioned fries-cutter. I sat on the counter next to her, hungrily watching (little poop me*Rolling*).

Suddenly, she dropped the fries-cutter, with the potato sticking half in it yet – one end round, the other raw fries already*Laugh* – lunged at the radio and yanked up the volume. Before I knew it, she'd scooped me up and danced with me through the open kitchen / dining / living area, loudly singing along to Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA.

Mom meant I looked quite... consternated*Shock2* (yeah, wouldn't have occurred to me, either, that a three-year-old can look consternated*Rolling*) when she told me about that day when I was older.

It's weird: still today when I'm making fries (without the work-out replacing fries-cutter), I hum Born in the USA. When I'm in a good mood, I even sing it. But I should be careful with that word... it's more acoustic torture. *Shock*

Let's say that any possible "victims" can consider themselves lucky that I live alone. *Rolling*

On April 12, Mom was deceased six years. Our relationship was World War III. most of my/our life, but those few good times over the decades stand out like lighthouses in that darkness.*Heart*

I think "up there" Mom's happy that I finally break the cycle she was unable to break in her lifetime. Love ya, Old Woman.*Heart*

💙 Carly wrote: "A Mother's Sacrifice " 

Weirdone-Back in the games wrote: I barely remember this, but when I was a toddler, I was eating a pear. I said that it was a "peach". My mother corrected me and said that it was a "pear". I doubled down and said that it was a "peach". Well, we argued back and forth like that for however many minutes, until finally my mother gave up and said, "If you want, you can call it 'broccoli'."

The story might not have been worth writing down except that the sentence became an important institution in our family. For years afterwards, whenever two members of the Lella family got into an argument about the proper name for something --a common occurence incidentally--it was customary to end the argument by saying, "If you want, you can call it 'broccoli'."

Go figure.

Jeff wrote: When I was younger, I went through a phase where I had a number of warts on my hands and forearms that I was really self-conscious about. My mom helped me try a bunch of remedies, from ointments to medications to freezing them. Nothing worked.

One night, we were vacationing at my grandparents' lake house in Montana and she woke me up around 11pm and told me to come with her. There was a full moon out and a completely clear night as we climbed into my grandfather's boat and motored out to the middle of the lake.

She told me that she read about an old folk remedy/superstition for warts where, under the light of a full moon at midnight, you rub raw potatoes on them and then bury them. She had brought a potato and a paring knife and we did the ritual exactly as she read about and tossed the potatoes overboard before going back to my grandparents' house and tucking me into bed. For a long time, it was a secret just between us.

The remedy didn't work (surprise) and my warts ended up just going away in due course a couple years later, but she always claimed that the ritual was what did it, even if it took a while. She claimed it's because pseudoscience isn't 100% accurate. *Laugh*

This has always been one of my favorite memories of my mom because it highlights the two things I loved most about her... that she would do absolutely anything to help her kids (no matter how outlandish), and that she was always full of fun and crazy ideas that she wasn't shy about acting on. My childhood is full of these kinds of moments, which are the ones I find myself revisiting the most as an adult, and the ones I most want to emulate with my own kids. I hope one day they have a "midnight potato" story about something crazy they did with their dad.