The Secrets of Our Parents.

I'm visiting my mom.

I love my mom a lot. But I've said that before.

I think it's a universal thing -  kids don't see their parents as human beings, individuals with their own hopes, dreams, disappointments, failings, etc., until they are adults themselves.

 Parents are - ideally - food, affection and car key giving automatons, whose sole purpose is to provide their offspring with the necessities of life, plus a bunch of other crap that the other kids at school get because their parents have a great gig at Manitoba Hydro.

And then little by little you find out details of your parents' lives that you can relate to:

 first loves, 

addiction to online shopping








inexplicable urges to binge drink

lack of athletic prowess, 

or what have you.

And sometimes you find out things about your parents that take you completely by surprise. We find out things about our parents, dark secrets we wish we could bleach out of our consciousness, and go back to seeing them as the man in the La-Z-Boy watching Monty Python re-runs, and the woman eating orange peels while she reads improving literature.

This has happened to me.

I have discovered that my mom is money-crazed.

Now, we're good Scottish folk, and being a bit tight with my pursestrings, I should not have been surprised, but still, some things don't need to be screamed out for all to see.

Or at least not written down clearly in a day-book on the kitchen counter.

My mom is super organized. Every aspect of her day is planned and each errand or activity is written out and then gets crossed off as they are completed.

So, I guess she was just being thorough when she wrote down the following entry. This is what my mom has planned for April 14, 2013.

And it's all she has planned for that day, apparently.

Does she have some hideaway where she secrets off to, to roll around in wads of cash, gold coins  and pearls spilling out of ancient chests? 

 litlnemo/Flickr

Or does she go somewhere where someone else counts her cash for her, while she stand behind him holding a gun? 

Do we ever really know our parents?

So if my mom has to set aside an entire day to count her money, that means she must have a crapload of dough, right? She's a pretty good counter, so I imagine she could count pretty high in, say, an 8 hour period.

This brings to mind that for Christmas, I got pot scrubbers.

In spite of her secret, I continue to adore my mommy. And not because I expect that she'll ever share her wealth with me. No. I know she's going to donate it all to the church because she's so damned churchy. No. I love her because she's excellent.

Except at skiing.

She kinda sucks at that.