Mother’s Day, Schmother’s Day



It got pretty cold here the last couple of days, and I wasn’t prepared for it at all. In fact, I had to work the night shift this week and had to spend a little time outside- on the north side of the building.

As much as I tried to avoid it, as bad as I didn’t want to call my wife, I finally broke down and did it.

“Will you bring me a sweater with a hood on it?” I asked her, holding the phone a foot away from my ear so the high-pitched cussing wouldn’t damage my ear drums. After all, it’s a twenty minute drive each way and I knew she hardly ever has that kind of time to kill in the evenings.

“Of course I will. Do you need anything else?” she said.

I looked at the phone, made sure I was actually on the line with my wife, then listened closely to make sure she didn’t have me on speakerphone. That could be the only explanation to her being so nice- other people had to be listening. Any other time I’d ask her to do something nice for me she would get hotter than one of those plates at a Mexican restaurant.

Come to think of it, she’d been nice to me for the past couple of weeks. She hadn’t fussed when I needed a part for my new truck, she let me sleep late Sunday and -holy cow- she even cooked for me one evening before work.

Ahhh, then it hit me. Mother’s Day is this week. Hence the being nice all of a sudden, the jewelry magazines lying around everywhere, etc.

“Well now I’m stuck”, I thought. If she took almost an hour out of her busy evening at home to bring me a sweatshirt when I should have grabbed one myself, then I have to go get her something for Mother’s Day.

And the kicker is that whatever I get her will be twice as expensive than what I get for Father’s Day, you can bet on that. But I can’t go too cheap, because then I won’t get hardly anything at all when it’s my turn. Instead of the usual pack of underwear and some socks, I’m liable to just get a card. Unsigned.

I’ll say this- whoever thought up Mother’s Day knew what they were doing. And whoever came up with Father’s Day didn’t. I haven’t done the research on it (surprise, surprise), but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that Father’s Day was dreamed up years after Mother’s Day was. What they should have done is put Father’s Day first on the calendar.

Think about it, the women already get the best of every other holiday. They get better presents on their birthdays than we do, better presents on Christmas, and they make us take them out on New Year’s every year. And Valentine’s Day? Please.

All we get is Thanksgiving. Would it kill them to let us get the upper hand on this Mother’s/Father’s Day thing? How can they argue with that?

Well, now that I think about it I guess you could call the day of the Super Bowl a guy holiday. And yes, the 4th of July is more of a barbecuing, beer drinking kind of day. And of course, there’s the opening day of deer season…

Tell you what. What do you say we at least switch years every now and then?



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