Happy Mothers Day to all the moms out there!

In honor of the holiday, I would like to share with all of you one of my favorite stories about me and my mom. 

When I was in eighth grade at Becker Middle School, I had Mr. Lynch as my English teacher (he is one of my favorite teachers to this day). I don’t remember what lesson we were learning that day in class, but Mr. Lynch really wanted us to remember it forever (oops…). So he told us to write the lesson down on a piece of paper five times. The whole class wrote the lesson down five times. Then he told us to turn to each of their neighbors and tell it to them. So we each turned to our neighbors and told it to them. Then, just to be funny, Mr. Lynch told us to whip out our flip phones (you know, this being 2011) and text the lesson to our mothers. 

All the kids laughed. “For real?” one of them asked. I don’t know what the rules are today, but when I was in eighth grade our phones were NOT to be seen during class. 

But to our surprise, Mr. Lynch nodded and said, “Yep, text it to your moms. But there are conditions. If you get a text back, you must read it out loud to the class, and you may not text them back again.”

Well, all us kids thought this was great fun. Who ever heard of using a cell phone during school? So we took out our phones and texted the lesson to our moms. After a few minutes, the replies started coming in. 

“What?” said one mom.

“Ok, that’s kind of a weird text,” said another mom.

Each time a text came in, the student would read it out loud, we would all laugh, and continue with the lesson. 

Then my mom texted back. 

I opened my phone and I can still remember the feeling of the blood draining from my face as I read what she wrote. Mr. Lynch saw that I had a text and asked me to read it out loud to the class. With a shaky voice, I read: “I don’t know who you thought you were sending this to, but we are going to have a LONG talk after school about using your phone to help your friends cheat.”

My teacher burst out laughing, and I looked up at him with pleading eyes and said, “Can I please PLEASE text her back?”

To which he replied, “NOPE!”

What was a terrifying moment back then has turned into a story that always makes me laugh now. I love you, mom. Happy Mothers Day to you, and every other mom out there who doesn’t put up with her kids’ BS.