Driving With My Mom – How My Mom Drove Me Crazy

We were kids on our way down the street with our mother. Our car was a fossil. We could see the road beneath our feet and had to be careful not to fall through the hole and forever be crushed beneath the wheels of this – um, car.

So it was bad enough that we were driven everywhere in this killing machine, but the day that stands out most is the day a spider fell in front of my mother as she was driving.

None of us knew about the spider. If we had, we would have remembered how Mom reacted to spiders and, without any thought, we would have evacuated the car.

Just to give you an inkling of how my mom reacts to spiders, I would like to relate to you the day we weren’t allowed outside – because a spider was crawling on the water spigot. The spider was the size of the entire side of the house. My mother will deny this exaggeration, but my sisters will back me up.

Every day after that, when I walked outside, I would look above the back door to make sure Giganto Arachnid wasn’t going to leap on me, spin a fast and furious web around me, and devour me for lunch.

I used to have nightmares about being sucked down the back stairs into the basement where Giganto had snuck into the house and leered at me from the bottom of the steps as he pulled me toward him while I grabbed each rail by each step before I plummeted to my death. I don’t know how I made it through my childhood with my sanity intact (hmm, on second thought…).

What we saw on that near-death-experience day when my mom was driving with a spider dangling in front of her face, was a curb closing in, grass under the wheels, quickly changing to sidewalks, and then to front steps while we all screamed from the back seat, “MOM! YOU’RE GOING UP THE CURB!”

Followed by, “MOM! YOU’RE ON THE GRASS!”

Followed immediately by, “MOM! YOU’RE GOING UP THE FRONT STEPS!”

Something snapped Mom out of her stupor, because just before we actually hit the steps, we all came out of our comas two blocks away from our home on some neighbor’s front lawn.

But thanks to my Mom, I have been able to write blogs like the one you are now reading.

And, thanks to Mom, I was able to write Want to Be a Driver’s Ed Teacher? – NO THANK YOU! where I obviously took mental notes on how to drive while watching my mother.

And this one: The Day I Almost Killed An Entire Family.

And finally this one: Road Trips in the Flintstonefossilmobile.

To my Mom, thank you! And to my mom and moms everywhere, HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY!