For several years my sister and I referred to my mom as A.H. It used to drive her crazy, especially the first few months when she didn’t know what it meant. A.H. stood for Adolf Hitler.
You never realize how great your own upbringing is until you are faced with something different. It’s really interesting how I’ve never thought of my mom as a really great mom (in the Hallmark sense of the word — you know baking cookies after school etc) . She will be the first to admit she never really wanted kids (my dad really really wanted kids) and definitely enjoyed us more when we became rational human beings as opposed to younger kids. She isn’t really the motherly type and she wouldn’t be offended by that comment.
Despite all that she is a good mother. Absolutely everything she did while we were growing up, even the things that I thought were crazy (like making me hand wash dishes even though we had a dishwasher — when you are ten hand washing dishes that could go in the dishwasher is like medieval torture designed to make your life as miserable as possible; or making us sit through a formal dinner using the correct silverware, even though we would have rather been playing Nintendo) has made me a capable responsible person who knows how to act in almost any social situation. Same for my sister.
You don’t realize how important that stuff is until you are confronted by people who don’t know how to do simple things. I think I met my first person like that in college. Interestingly, that person has not changed and still does very little for themselves.
I’m planning on calling my mom and apologizing for every time I even thought about calling her Hitler. She also deserves a spa package.
