Mothers

My mother has been officially informed that she is no longer permitted to cut The Son's hair. This is after she gave him a haircut that makes even little people in the street stare and laugh. Yesterday we were sitting at a cab stand when a little girl, who couldn't have been more than 1 year older than him, pointed at him and said "get a haircut", and then she laughed and laughed whilst her mom shooshed her and also tried not to laugh. I kid you not - the haircut has reduced The Son's apparant IQ by at least 100 basis points. He looks like a fool. Picture a little kid with long hair everywhere else except for his fringe, which starts about 4 inches above his eyebrows and slants upwards as you move to the right (parallax error). It doesn't help that he has a big forehead - now he just looks mentally challenged.

So of course my mother laughs and says, yeah I won't cut his hair anymore, but what she really means is "... until I next feel like it". The same woman who I gave my precious plants to (pre-Son) for babysitting when The Husband and I went on holiday - when I got back, every single plant had been, uh, replaced. WTF. These are not the same plants I passed to you 3 days ago! I said. Yeah, she replies. They were not nice. I pulled them out and put in some nice ones.

The Husband suggested to me after that episode that we should think hard before we leave our children with her for daycare. We could come back at the end of the day and find they have all been replaced with new children. Those were not nice, she will say. These ones are nicer.

Somehow I find all this micromanagement easier to bear than my Husband who has already had a number of arguments with her. I think one of them got started when she went through our closet one day whilst we were out, threw out all his house shorts and replaced them with these gorgeous purple ones. I explained to him that she's been doing this to me since I was a baby (my Pokemon house tee-shirts went missing at the same time) and because we are now married, she regards him as an extension of me, and therefore also falling within her jurisdiction. So he should just grin and bear it.

I should remind him of our Chinese wedding dinner, when she ordered all of our guests to adjourn to her house after dinner for a flu jab, and then proceeded to innoculate every single one of them.