Poop Mints

My family would go to Pizza Hut a lot. Mainly, because it was one of the top three "fancy" restaurants in town, the other two being steak houses. (Which we saved for really special occasions.) I loved a lot of things about "The Hut" (as I affectionately called it after their commercials told me to)- the "Book-It" program, the "Land Before Time" hand puppets, and their short-lived mascot "Pizza Face". But most of all, I loved the basket of free mints by the cash register. It was nice to feel like someone trusted me to take just one. (Or maybe two if you were a good customer. And I was always a REALLY good customer.) Sometimes I would take a couple on my way back from the bathroom, just because I could. Free! And never an empty basket! The stuff dreams about mints are made of.

But after my mom watched a 20/20 special, she knew that those mints came with a hidden price. (Curse you, John Stossel!) Apparently, I wasn't the only one grabbing mints after using the bathroom. Turns out that A LOT of people get mints after a trip to the loo and a lot of those people don't wash their hands. And a lot of the time, those people have POOPED. Then somehow, through the black magic of John Stossel, the poop that didn't get washed off of the pooper bounces off of their hands and onto the mints, creating the E-Coli-inducing POOP MINTS.

After mom told us what John Stossel had burned into her brain, we continued to get the poop mints anyway. But now we pop them off the wrapper right into our mouths, not risking contact with the hand that touched the poop wrapper. Because we CALL them poop mints, but it's really just the wrapper you have to watch out for. Poop-safety first.

Lady Killers

My sister told me a disturbing "Love, Mom" yesterday. Let me preface this tale by saying that our mother does not approve of flip-flops or "thongs" (which is what she used to call them before we laughed at her until she stopped). I think her disapproval comes from the time I wore flip-flops in the Nebraska winter in order to be "cool" even though she told me not to have "practically bare feet in the snow". Or maybe it was because we laughed at her about the thong thing. Anyway, since then she's been looking for reasons to make us fear the flop.

According to the most recent cautionary tale, it's better to drive barefoot than while wearing flip-flops.Why? "Because one 56 year old lady was wearing them while driving and they got caught in the gas pedal, and before she knew it, she'd run 3 old ladies down in the church parking lot and killed them."
Maybe she'll start calling flip-flops "lady killers" now. Either way, it's better than "thongs".

Gel de Douche.

When I was ten, my grandmother and I took a rare trip to the Grand Island Mall. (There were other people along on this trip, but for the purposes of this story there were not.) Around that time in my life, I was really "into" bath gels. I believed that the cooler the bottle, the prettier the gel would make me. (Even though after using said gel I still had a mushroom hair-cut and glasses. But I FELT really pretty.) So when I spied an elaborate display of brightly colored bath gels, I pointed them out to my grandma like the pro I was. "Look, Grandma! These are BATH GELS. It's like, soap, but really cool soap." 

Apparently, Grandma had seen gels like these before. "This stuff [the gels] will give you VAGINITIS. If it's cheap like this and you sit in it, you can get VAGINITIS. And that stuff [the vaginitis] won't go away." 

Fortunately, I had read a Baby-Sitter's Club book where Kristy had appendicitis, and I knew "itis" meant "the swelling of". I also knew enough about vaginas to know that the swelling of one was most likely not a good thing.

After that conversation with Grandma, I probably should have gone back to plain old soap. But hey- I live my life on the edge. And on the other side of that edge is a nasty case of vaginitis. So I better be really careful.

Worse Than TSS.

Surprisingly, my mother never warned me about TSS, or "Toxic Shock Syndrome" (the thing ladies can get if Mr. Tampon stays in for too long).

Instead, she told me this story about a smelly girl nobody liked:

Once upon a time, in a small Nebraska town, a girl's volleyball team was plagued by a TERRIBLE stench. This stench inflitrated the locker room, the gym, the cafeteria- everywhere the team went. Parents complained, so lockers we cleaned out with bleach and uniforms were washed in hot water. But to no avail. The stench persisted. Then one day, a girl on the team ended up with terrible cramps and had to go to the hospital. The doctor opened her up and found a rotten and decaying tampon inside of her which was the cause of the offending stench.

TSS? Whatever. Being the cause of a PTA meeting about a stench? Now there's a reason to double check if Mr. Tampon has successfully left the building.

Don't Sit Down in a Pool.

If you are a fan of swimming, don't read this story. Because this is not something you want to be reminded of when you are trying to have fun doing hand-stands and somersaults in a pool.

After I mentioned the super fun time I planned to have in a hotel pool, my mother told me this little gem of a tale: Whilst playing in the shallow end of a swimming pool, a little girl decided to sit directly on top of the pool filter.  After a while, her mother heard her crying (it's always the mother) and it turns out that pool filters work by powerful suction. Suction powerful enough to suck a rectum out of a tiny person. AGH! DO NOT PICTURE THIS. Instead, enjoy this menacing drawing of the offending pool filter.

Wash Your Bananas

My mom tells me to wash my bananas, because "you never know where someone has put a banana".

I hope that this is not true. But I still wash my bananas because I'd rather spend that extra minute washing it than worrying that I ate traces of poop.*

*  "Traces of poop" is a common "Love, Mom" theme.

I'm Sorry in Advance.

Sometimes I want to un-know some of the things that my mother tells me. It's hard to relax and enjoy things when you are worried about someone gizzing in your soup.

So here's my attempt to purge my mind of all the uniquely upsetting things my mother (and sometimes my grandmother) told me over the years.

Love,
Me (Mom's daughter.)