How We Made Mom Crazy

My brother and I were solely responsible for driving our mother to the edge. I don’t know if that happens to all mothers that have two boys or if we were just special, though I suspect the latter. I do not believe we were tying to drive her insane on purpose it was just that our idea of fun was her idea of a really, really bad nightmare.

When on our own, bad things happened. Odd how harmless fun can turn into so much destruction My parents would go out from time to time and leave my brother and I to our own devices - the fools. We’d have a contest to see who could get their circus peanuts, an orange peanut shaped marshmallow kind of candy, to stick to the ceiling. If they were a little stale and a bit on the firm side, you might have to chew ‘em a bit before you threw them. Either way there contest ended in orange peanut shaped marks on the ceiling.

Usually my brother and I got along pretty well, though once he really pissed me off and I tossed a hard plastic hand brush at him. Fortunately, for him, he slammed the bathroom door just before the brush impacted his rather soft skull. Unfortunately, it was a hollow core door and the brush easily penetrated the panel, leaving a rather conspicuous hole in the flimsy wood. Covering this with a picture we made on the vacu-form machine we had didn’t fool my mother for long. Then there were the pillow fights.

I hit my brother so hard with my pillow that the pillow blew out the sewn end of the pillow case . I knew mom would have a fit about that, but being a resourceful young lad, I figured I could sew it up good as new on her sewing machine and no one would be the wiser. I didn’t have a clue as to how the machine worked and sometimes “winging it” isn’t a good idea. This was one of those times. With a regular needle, you put the tread through the eye that much I knew. I saw a hole in the end of the needle so I figured that would do - it didn’t. What it did do was wrap every cog and gear located under the plate on the foot of the sewing machine in neat little bundles of thread. Now I had a ripped pillowcase and a broken sewing machine. I got a sharp knife and managed to liberate all the gears I could see. I don’t know if that fixed the machine, but the process of de-threading the guts of the machine had the side benefit of keeping me occupied and therefore unable to cause anymore damage. I wound up stitching the case by hand – as if she’d never notice that, but sometimes you got to go with what you have.

We had a lot of fun, cranking dad’s stereo and playing the dynamite blast on the sound effects record he had so we could watch the front picture window move in and out, almost as if it was breathing. I don’t think the stereo was quite the same after that stunt. Then there was riling the dog up ‘til she started biting and pretending she was shark – the carpet was the sea and the furniture served as islands. You had to leap from one island to the next – if you fell in the sea the shark would get you (and she would).

When mom would get home any damage would be assessed, we’d have to listen to it and then she and dad would seem to forget by the next time they decided to go out. It was always “What do you guys have a happy fizzy party while we are gone? Do you shake up a bottle of soda and spray the walls” (we actually hadn’t tried that one yet)? In the need those little Fizzy parties along with a few other stunts came pretty close to punching mom’s ticket to Whackyville, Wisconsin. She survived, but I think we both left home just in time. If you don’t know what fizzies are you may be too young to be reading all this…