Moms are always right.
It's frustrating.
About ten years ago my mom said something to me that I thought I would never listen to or agree with.
She said,
"You have to learn to make decisions because they are the responsible thing to do, not because they are the fun thing to do."
Sounds like a normal mom thing to say, but the context is actually hilarious.
It was sixth grade and I had been begging my mom for weeks to let me start shaving my legs.
I don't think I really had any hair on them to speak of, but I had already blown my chances at hanging out with the cool girls by telling Cassidy Jorgensen about the time I got stuck in my cousin's plastic stroller and had to use butter to get my legs out of the holes, and I was really looking for a good topic of conversation to help move past that.
My mom was (and still is) a very logical woman, and her reason for saying no was simply this:
shaving your legs is annoying, and the longer you can wait to start the better.
We obviously didn't see eye to eye on the subject as my plastic stroller nightmares were getting worse and the fact that I was still wearing overalls to school when everyone else had graduated to capris wasn't really helping,
but eventually I let the subject go and resigned myself to hairy-butter-legs.
In the mean time, my best friend, Sara Ferguson, came to school one day with a surprise.
She had reversed her shoelaces so they tied at the bottom instead of at the top.
This was a real hit amongst the 6th grade,
and me, being the attention-monger that I was, decided to jump on board and spent all of lunch re-lacing my shoes so they looked the same.
It was a disaster.
I tripped three times over the long loops hanging off of the bottom of my shoes during cone-dodgeball alone.
But the way those bunny ears flapped around my toes was so eye-catching that a few scraped knees were worth all the stares and questions I was getting.
I arrived home that evening walking tall and feeling good,
until my mother found me in the entryway where I had just spent the last twenty minutes trying to untie shoes that were laced the wrong way.
She saw the scrapes on my knees.
She saw the hole in my overalls. (Not actually from this. I think I just tore that hole so she'd finally let me stop wearing them.)
She disappeared into her room and came back a few minutes later with a shiny new razor and a lecture about how dangerous it is to run around with shoelaces under your feet to trip on.
"But it's fun!" I said. "It's fun to run around with shoelaces under my feet!"
Then came the line:
"You have to learn to make decisions because they are the responsible thing to do, not because they are the fun thing to do."
And so, so I would stop doing silly things like tie my shoes backwards, I...got to start shaving my legs.
I'll never understand the correlation.
All I know is that today in the shower as I was shaving my legs I thought:
"Shaving my legs is annoying. I never should have started."
And then I said "Noooooooooo!!!"
Because sooner or later everything your mom says comes true.
Which makes me really nervous about the time she said,
"You'll be the death of me."
Love,
Katie
