Sunday, May 13, 2012

Happy Mother's Day!!





Happy Mothers Day to all of you who are mothers or who have a mother or who act like a mother.

Mothers Day is always problematic for us at Lee Lee's.  We get a bunch of mothers and daughters who come in together to shop. And since the commercials started to air we are getting a nice little bounce of people coming in to check us out.

Sometimes it is the yuppie girl who moved here from Kansas or Texas or some shit and they want to their Mom a cute shop where she can find something that will fit her. And they are going to be on TV! Imagine that Mabel?

But the absolute worst is the Mom and daughter who hate each other and are enduring another painful holiday where they are ripping strips of skin off of each other. The Mom will go"You would a lot better if you lost twenty pounds" or "I wish you were more like your sister." Then I have to grab Lisa before she bops the Mom in the snoot or something. We take the girl aside and tell her to come back on her own to shop and some of them have turned out to be our best customers.

We have two sets come in so far and they were both nice. Let's see how it goes.

Happy Mother's Day you Mothers!

28 comments:

blake said...

We're all mothers and mother-effers, eh?

ndspinelli said...

Are you saying all moms aren't June Cleaver? I'm shocked. My bride is having a total knee replacement on 5/24. Her narcissistic, petty, loathsome mother has a couple walkers. my bride asked if she could use one for just a week or so knowing the extra one just sits there. Now, understand my bride has done EVERYTHING..EVERYTHING for this woman. But mom said, "when your brother visits he uses it to hang his sleep apnea gear." And, that lazy aasshole doesn't do shit.

My apologies for an angry downer comment but I'm just keeping w/ the theme of the post. My bride is taking her mom to brunch as we speak. Bozo brother is home scratching his nuts. Happy Mother's Day to all you Trooper women. Obviously you're all good mothers since you tolerate all us bad boys.

Trooper York said...

Mother-in-laws can be a pain in the balls. I am blessed with a great one.

Not that I would ever tell her that. I bust her chops unmercifully. I mean I treat her like a queen. When she is in my house she doesn't lift a finger and I go to her house and do all the cooking and cleaning during the holidays. But I still have to bust her chops.

Once she had moved to a new apartment after she sold her old house and before she moved to her new one. They had this bakery on the corner that specialized in sugar free cakes and since she was diabetic she was all excited. So the wife stayed in the car while we went inside to check it out. There was this 90year old lady behind the counter who walked in mincing little steps like the Tim Conway character in the old Carol Burnett show. So as the mother-in-law is walking around I go up to the lady and go "Hey how you doing? This is my card, see that lady over there? That's my mother-in-law. She steals. So if she steals something don't call the cops. Just call me and I will pay for it."

The lady says ok. And then she starts following her around the store shuffling her feet at minus 10 miles an hour.

My mother-in-law couldn't understand why she was being followed. Until we went outside and I told her. She was pissed.

But it was damn funny!

blake said...

Ha!

No MILs allowed here.

ndspinelli said...

Great ball bust. maybe I can put super balls on my in-laws walker instead of tennis balls. Seeing the woman bounce around her apartment would be good for me.

windbag said...

It's been fifteen years since my mom passed away. Her birthday is May 9, mine is May 8. We shared birthdays and Mother's Days over the years, all jumbled together. I never really thought about how few birthday cakes she had, just the leftovers from mine. I remember one May Day I hung a basket of flowers on her bedroom doorknob. She wasn't well, suffered depression and stayed in bed most of the time. I recall watching the basket off and on all day, hoping that she would find it. It eventually disappeared behind the door.

Despite her illness, she was a talented lady. She could kick the ever living shit out of a piano and did so all the time. We always had music going in the house. I used to stand down by the bass notes of the piano, waiting to hit the lowest note that fit whatever she was playing. Somewhere we have a recording of a wedding she played, where she played a pump organ, feet pumping the bellows and fingers flying over the keyboard.

About a week before my little girl was born, my mom suffered a stroke. I traveled up to Watkins Glen to be there, but she suffered a second, massive stroke and died before I got there. When I got there, they had a machine pumping her heart and pushing air in and out of her lungs, but she was gone.

Just before she passed, she motioned for my dad to hand her a tissue box and pencil. The initial stroke a couple of days earlier had left her almost speechless. On the back, she wrote the words to the chorus of an old hymn:

Jesus paid it all,
All to Him I owe,
Sin had left a crimson stain,
He washed it white as snow.


She handed it to my dad and slipped away.

Fifteen years. She would have been 83 this year. I whispered "Happy Mother's Day" on my way to work this morning.

windbag said...

Mother-in-laws can be a pain in the balls. I am blessed with a great one.

Me, too.

blake said...

OK, windy, I'm tearing up, you bastard.

Dust Bunny Queen said...

I always had to go clothes shopping with my mother. She was color blind and couldn't tell what things went together. It was my job to help her pick the colors that would look nice and not clash. After I moved out and went to college, she had to ask the sales ladies when I wasn't available to go shopping. Very frustrating for her.

Our shopping trips were always a lot of fun. I can't ever remember arguing or fighting. Buying clothes for me and for my mother and my brother (also color blind so he didn't care what we got him). We would go to lunch and later buy some See's Candy to take home to the guys.

I loved shopping with my mother and wish that she was still alive so we could go again.

ricpic said...

About once a year my Mom would put her hands on her head and flex first her left biceps and then her right biceps while smiling slyly. Always brought down the house.


That's correct, biceps is singular. What the plural is I sure don't know.

blake said...

bi = two
cep = head

The anterior muscle acting on the humerus has two heads joining the shoulder to the elbow.

It's like pants. So, two pairs of pants are "pantses", these would be bicepses.

Anonymous said...

Happy Mother's Day to all the Moms here and as for all you MFers, well, I'm scandalized!

Just got home from a terrific brunch and visit to Boerner Botanical Gardens, with a couple of my kids and grandkids and the conservative son in law, that actually does like me and vice versa.

Brunch was at the Golden Mast on Okauchee Lake, I don't know why we don't say Lake Okauchee, I think it's all the Germans around here, we always say things backwards.

I got a phone call from my Navy daughter from Afghanistan! My best Mothers Day gift!

Anonymous said...

Haz knows the Golden Mast I bet, and he grew up not far from Boerner Botanical Gardens.

Darcy said...

Thank you all, and Happy Mother's Day to all the TY mommies from me, too.

Windbag's post got me choked up as well.

And gosh, I miss my mom.

The Dude said...

DBQ - a colorblind woman is a very rare thing indeed. I am colorblind. One of my brothers was. Clothes shopping is a nightmare. Selecting paint is, too.

Mine is the usual red/green colorblindness - what colors did your mother have problems with?

The Dude said...

The plural of biceps is "latissimus dorsi".

chickelit said...

I'm going back to Madison next month for my mom's birthday--she'll be 75. I haven't figured out what if anything I should give her. She doesn't even want or need anything material.

Any suggestions?

Anonymous said...

How about a beautiful picture album, with pictures of grandkids, family memories, have each grandchild write a little essay on why they love Grandma with some pressed flower that they picked and themselves. Or even a memory of her children, from their childhood?

Flowers are always great , or a basket with living plants, of course good chocolate, but that's just me.

Trooper York said...

I would give her a leather bound printed edition of your posts of your father's letters home.

Or you could print them and put them in a scrapbook type thingy with the photo's printed and illustrating them.

I think she might like that.

Anonymous said...

Oh YES, Trooper, great idea!!

ndspinelli said...

Bruce, What Trooper said and a bottle of Korbel brandy.

Trooper York said...

And the DVD collection of Sea Hunt. That might make her smile.

Dust Bunny Queen said...

Mine is the usual red/green colorblindness - what colors did your mother have problems with?

Almost all colors and hues were affected. Pastels were something she was totally unable to see. All my little pastel girly socks as a child were always mixed up. Pink, yellow, pale greens. She finally gave up trying to sort them and just put them in a big pile and let me sort them out for all of us.

My brother [natch] is color blind and his wife has to pick out his clothing for him too when they are going out in public.

Blue green. Red green. Brown blue. Brown red. None of those were able to be seen distinctly.

When we moved from Texas back to California, before they standardized the stop lights, we got into a very bad accident because no one thought to tell her that the Red light was not on the bottom as in Texas. All she could see was that the light was on or off and ran right through the intersection. T-boned!!

She seemed to have a fondness for orange. God know what it color it looked like to her. Or what any colors looked like.

My father and I would go Oooh Aaaah over the scenery and sunsets. My mother and brother were all like...whatever...can we go now?

The Dude said...

I had written about the frequency of light used in traffic lights in Texas, but deleted it. Green looked red to me, and that, combined with traffic signals being mounted horizontally nearly caused me some grief in Austin 20 years ago. It's not clear to me that those lights met any standard that I am familiar with.

chickelit said...

Thanks for the idea about the book but I think not. You see my mom has kind of a funny recollection of that time period. She always heard everything filtered through my dad from that period of his life before he met her (the letters were in the possession of my grandmother until after she passed away). After my aunt who doled out my grandma's possesion gave them to me (bless her for not doing the the usual every goes to the eldest, i.e., my brother), I read them and then later typed them up. I made a booklet and gave it to a bunch of family members. Many liked it (especially my brother) but I never heard anything from my mother. This was a strange period for her because she was in the midst of falling in love with a widower after living alone for several years. I think that she appreciated it, but may have felt conflicted and didn't say much. She remarried. She was so funny at the time because she reached out to my brother and me and "asked" for our OK. I was like "of course, mom!"

She and my FIL are a great couple. He's full of life at 82. I wrote up a great story he told me about Frank Lloyd Wright here. But they each already had their grave plots next to their original passed-away spouses and so far as I know that hasn't changed. The circumstances are interesting to contemplate: "to death do us part" means that each outlived their spouse and kept their vows, yet each will be buried next to their original spouse. One thing I'm going to do when I get back is drive her around to all her old haunts in Richland Center (the town where she lived and met my dad) and let her free associate.

Anyways, the letters, for some reason, mean much more to me and my brother than they do to her. Go figure.

chickelit said...

Has anyone ever paid someone to do a quicky geneology?

I mean the sort which could cobble together existing records? My aunt did my dad's side already back to the 1600's in Germany but my mother's side is undone.

She would like that.

ndspinelli said...

Bruce, I've worked many cases in Richland Center. It's a nice town but shit for restaurants. I spent many nights @ a motel on the edge of town..I think it was the Starlight? At least no bed bugs.

chickelit said...

It's a nice town but shit for restaurants.

That's OK, there's a Culvers outside of town off the 14 IIRC. I won't be looking for fine cuisine in Wisconsin--just bismarks and fish frys.

When I was kid there was an A&W root beer stand over by Krouskop Park--it's long gone now though.