Stories of my mother
comicbook_greek asked people to post stories about their mom today if they wanted to, so here are a couple that illustrate my mother's character.
Story the first, a short one:
The summer I turned 10, my mom and I went to England and Scotland for a few weeks. We had BritRail passes, and my mom had always wanted to do that thing where you show up and take the next bus/train/plane, whatever it is. So we went to the train station, ready to go, and Mom asked the nearest employee where the next train was leaving from. He said, "Um, that would be Edinburgh, track 10, five minutes." Mom replied, "Great! We'll take it!". She still talks about the look on his face.
Story the second:
For grades 6 - 9 I went to a private school that separated each grade into three classrooms, two "regular" ones and one "smart" class. I was, naturally, in the "smart" class. ;-) One year, at the start of our biology rotation in science, our new teacher was explaining the grading system and said, "And if you don't hand in a lab before it gets handed back, you get a zero. Of course, that won't happen in this class."
This pronouncement incensed me for reasons that I can probably articulate better now than I could in Grade 8, and I promptly decided to get a zero on one and exactly one lab (they weren't worth very much to our overall grade, so I wasn't making a huge statement with that action ;-). And I did.
This was so alarming to the school that they called my mother about it. She came to me to ask what had happened, more confused than anything else. I explained about the infuriating pigeon-holing and my little protest, and her reaction was, "Oh, okay. That makes sense. Well done!".
I think this is why my mother has dealt so well with all my various comings-out (vegetarian, bisexual, poly); she values iconoclasm above all else. She may not understand why I live the way I do, but she admires how far outside the proscribed norm it is. ;-)
Story the first, a short one:
The summer I turned 10, my mom and I went to England and Scotland for a few weeks. We had BritRail passes, and my mom had always wanted to do that thing where you show up and take the next bus/train/plane, whatever it is. So we went to the train station, ready to go, and Mom asked the nearest employee where the next train was leaving from. He said, "Um, that would be Edinburgh, track 10, five minutes." Mom replied, "Great! We'll take it!". She still talks about the look on his face.
Story the second:
For grades 6 - 9 I went to a private school that separated each grade into three classrooms, two "regular" ones and one "smart" class. I was, naturally, in the "smart" class. ;-) One year, at the start of our biology rotation in science, our new teacher was explaining the grading system and said, "And if you don't hand in a lab before it gets handed back, you get a zero. Of course, that won't happen in this class."
This pronouncement incensed me for reasons that I can probably articulate better now than I could in Grade 8, and I promptly decided to get a zero on one and exactly one lab (they weren't worth very much to our overall grade, so I wasn't making a huge statement with that action ;-). And I did.
This was so alarming to the school that they called my mother about it. She came to me to ask what had happened, more confused than anything else. I explained about the infuriating pigeon-holing and my little protest, and her reaction was, "Oh, okay. That makes sense. Well done!".
I think this is why my mother has dealt so well with all my various comings-out (vegetarian, bisexual, poly); she values iconoclasm above all else. She may not understand why I live the way I do, but she admires how far outside the proscribed norm it is. ;-)