Tales From a Female Traveller

MY MOTHER THE BLONDE

I was just over at my good friend Zeph's site (Chronicles of an Exhausted Mom) reading about how her son is mad on closing anything that may be open, and I was reminded of a story my Mum likes to relate every now and then (although I'm not sure why).
The story goes something like this...

When I was about 17 months old my Mum became pregnant with my brother. Every day she used to hang the freshly washed laundry on the clothes line in the back yard, which she accessed from the back door of our house and every day I would sit in the kitchen and watch her stride out the door with the clothes basket. Now, my mother used to leave the keys to the house INSIDE... because, why would she need them? So out she'd be, pegging the sheets to the line when all of a sudden she would hear the slam of a door. Out would pop her head from under the sheet and low and behold, the back door would be shut and she would be locked out.

Obviously, thinking she couldn't reply on a 17 month old baby to open the door back up for her she would head around to the kitchen window, jimmy it open and slip her 5'2" frame back inside with no problem. But as my brother grew.... so did her tiny frame. This wasn't a problem for quite a while however and eventually she realised that every time she would hang the washing the door would mysteriously slam shut locking her out of the house. Innocent wind blowing incident? No such luck, apparently my deviant baby mind found it the most amusing thing to watch my mother try and clamber back in the tiny kitchen window as her belly grew to an enormous bulge. She tells me I used to wait until she was actually pegging the washing out until I would close the door and roll on the floor laughing as she struggled with the window.

"But Mum" I say to her now "If I did this everytime you went out there... WHY wouldn't you learn to take the keys with you??"
"I didn't think you would keep DOING it to me!!" she'd say pathetically, at which point everyone would laugh and she would sulkingly say "shut up...."

In the end... she became WAY too big to fit through the window and she would have to go and bother the strapping young man next door to do it... which, as it turns out... made the whole thing that much more amusing to me.

posted by Lucyspeak @ 1:47 pm