I enjoy a terrific relationship with my mom as an adult, in large part because she wouldn’t tolerate any of my bullshit when I was a child.
The last time she and I fought, I was a teenager. We were in a screaming match (over what I can’t remember) and I must have said something that crossed the line, because Mom decided she’d had enough, and I deserved to be hit. Being big, bad and all of fourteen years old, I wasn’t too afraid of my hundred pound, five-foot nothing mother.
Realizing I was too big to be spanked, she did the next best thing in her mind: she grabbed a broom and tried to hit me with it. I snatched it out of her hands, snapped it in two over my knee, and threw it down at her feet defiantly. ‘NOW’ I bellowed, ‘what are you gonna do?’
Infuriated, she reached for the first thing she saw: a metal folding chair, and came at me WWF style. Emboldened by my success with the broom, I snatched the chair from her and threw it across the room. ‘NOW’, I taunted, ‘WHAT are you gonna do…?’
Something in my dear, sweet Mom snapped as she responded to my challenge. She was standing in the doorway of the kitchen, and there was a frying pan on top of the stove. Without ever breaking eye contact, she reached back, and in one single, fluid motion, grabbed and hurled a cast iron skillet at me. I remember watching this frying-pan-turned-instrument-of-death pass by my face in slow motion, Matrix-style. I saw it make a hole in the wall, two feet to the left but level with my head.
This was a warning shot; if I persisted, she was prepared to take me out, and I knew I would have deserved anything that followed, as I was being a total dick.
We had a crazy contest, and Mom won, hands down. I took a LONG walk, and didn’t have the nerve to speak in her presence for two whole days. Finally on the third day I meekly asked if she could pass the salt at the dinner table.
I never risked incurring her ire again, and I never loved or respected her more.
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