Slept On It Wrong?

Today’s blog was inspired by the comment my mom left on yesterday’s blog. Scared yet, Mom?
My mom is one of those people who is cool, calm and collected under pressure and I’ve actually never seen her freak out over miniscule things before. She’s the person you go to when you need advice or a solution to a problem. I, on the other hand, misplace my favorite stretchy pants and I’m yelling “why hath thou forsaken me?” at the heavens. My mother always knew how to ­­­­take you down a notch when you were being absurd. When we were kids it didn’t matter what hurt, the cause was always “you slept on it wrong” and the cure was always “put some Bag Balm on it”. For those of you city kids, Bag Balm is used on cow udders. Yah, real handy. I used to wonder if I had come in with a severed appendage if her antidote would still have been “rub some bag balm on it”. The funny thing was, my Grandma had a similar cure-all only hers was this stuff she called “salve” and it was black and sticky and smelled horrendous. She lived to 98 years old so maybe that “salve” was some top-secret fountain of youth.
Though I soon caught on that this was my mom’s way of ignoring it. Which, if you think about it, is brilliant. Do you feed into your kid’s paranoia and create a hypochondriac or do you find a loving way to tell them to shut up because they’re talking nonsense? And subconsciously, I knew that when she said “you just slept on it wrong” that nothing must be wrong because if it was, my mom would know and would fix it! So it was comforting….in a highly annoying sort of way. But now that I’m a mom I totally get it! And, to my horror, I realized I do the same thing to my kids! When they’re moaning about something insignificant I don’t coddle them…I tell them to “walk it off”. They know that random movement of the legs isn’t going to cure their paper cut, but it forces them to put the situation in check. “Is my paper cut bad enough to demand more attention? Or can I solve this myself and move on with life?” The only difference is that when my kids have some body anomaly I tell them to “walk it off” and then secretly I run to WebMD and double-check to make sure something isn’t horribly wrong. My mom is more knowledgeable about medical stuff than anyone I know…so it makes me wonder if she was covertly running to a Dr. Spock manual checking to make sure we weren’t seriously ill.
My mom successfully raised two kids on a very limited income and somehow my brother and I turned out just fine (insert nervous tick here) so she knew what she was doing. I tease my mom and tell her my tombstone is going to say “Gee Mom, I guess I must have slept on it wrong”. That way I can make people go “huh?” even from the afterlife. But thank you, Mom, for teaching me (or at least trying to teach me) not to sweat the small stuff. Now…I have a headache…where’s my Bag Balm?