After reading my last post about the “Cradle Crap” my friend Irene (Smith) wrote to me about the time her ultra clean German mom found a stray M & M in the living room. I thought her tale was so funny I wanted her to have the guest post spotlight, so enjoy a bit of Madness, German style! Here you go:

I remember my Mom and her ladyfriends talking about cradle cap when I was little. I was so grossed out. My brother is eight years younger than I and I quickly learned babies are precious, beautiful, funny and sometimes very gross. One day my mother and I were watching TV on the leather couch in our living room with my one and a half year old brother in Mom’s lap. Watching TV with my Mom was so much fun. It was the sixties. So TV, 500 Rummy, Barbie and Etch a Sketch were huge for me.

After Mom had fed, changed and put baby brother to sleep, she was straightening up the living room. Mom was born in Germany. She was so much fun and the cleanest person I have ever known. A speck of dust had no chance of surviving her daily cleaning routine, which was top to bottom, every single day. Her motto was you don’t wait for the house to be dirty to clean it, you clean it every day so it will never be dirty.

So baby brother is asleep, Mom is straightening up the living room; a stray piece of popcorn here, an M&M there, and she picks up the M&M and casually pops it in her mouth. She immediately spits it in her hand and with a grossed out look on her face says “Mein Gott (OMG with the accent), its a sh!tball!” Diapers back then left a lot to be desired as far as gaps go, and it seems my baby brother occasionally produced an abundance of small balls of what he would later call “dookie.” (Well he still calls it dookie and he’ll be 48 this April!) I guess one of us sat on a stray M&M flattening it on the leather couch, but it really did look exactly like a brown M&M!

How my father loved hearing that story upon his return from work. He was fun too, and seized any opportunity to tease her. Forevermore, when my Mom’s continuous cleaning got on his nerves (this included his precious Sunday NY Times being completely folded, put back together, with pen put back in its place by my Mom, in the time it took Dad to pour a cup of coffee or run to the bathroom), whenever she complained about him being messy (again, messy could mean you were having a snack and did not sweep the crumbs off the table every 10 seconds), he would say “Oh calm down, you ate a sh!tball!!”

Irene & her family

Thanks for the laugh Irene – I can practically hear your mother’s accent!
~ Me