Fight me.

Logic suggests the easiest way to get them to go away is for you to answer while pretending to be me.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

You know when youre watching a tiktok and youre like, ok, good premise, nice jokes, dumb humor, kinda original, but then it just picks all that up, rolls it like a thick news paper, and then squashes you like a fly with it all?

I didn’t want to get arrested so I just never asked my mom for spaghettis after that. Lesson, learned. Don’t ask mom for spaghettis or she’ll call the damn police on you. 

So I have this memory in my head, and it goes unquestioned until I say it outload for the first time a few months back and as soon as I say the words “When I was six, my mom called the cops on me for asking for spaghettis” My adult logic slams into place and is like “Hang on. Your mother definatly did not call the police on a 6 year old for asking for spaghetti.” 

So obviously that’s not what really went down. I call up my mom to tell her how I remember it and on top of her figuring out why her kid has always been really cagey around spaghettis for the last 3 decades she tells me what really happened. 

So on that night, a man tried to break into our house through the front window. It was just my mom, and her kids so she did what she felt she had too and shot him in the head. He’d been wearing a helmet, which landed on the floor under the window.

Now I just want ya’ll to put yourselves in my moms shoes for a minute here. This woman has just taken a human life. The trauma of that- the instant agony, the panic, the guilt, the fear- all of it hitting her at once, her only solace the knowledge that her children are safe. She protected her daughters. No matter the cost to her soul- her children are safe.

Growing up, I spent most days with my grandmother while my parents were at work. My grandmother was a spry old Estonian woman from Saaremaa who had herself grown up on a farm, but her favorite hobbies in her retirement were reading, being a card shark, and gardening. She had a lovely backyard with a lot of flowers: both those native to Maryland and some that reminded her of her homeland. She spent a lot of time out in the garden, and my very earliest memories are of sitting in the grass watching her putter around in the dirt on her hands and knees.

So one weekend afternoon when I’m perhaps barely a year old, I’m at my parents’ house on their day off, just sort of noodling around on the grass behind our townhouse. My mom thinks she hears me babbling to myself and so she quietly sneaks up behind me, hoping to maybe catch some of my first words.

As she gets closer, she notices that I’m pulling up clumps of grass in my fat little baby hands while I mutter something. Just fistful after fistful of grass and tossing it in every direction. She gets up right behind me and finally she can make out what it is I’m saying as I rip up the lawn: