Catching Up with Mom About Thanksgiving, Her Next Visit, and Impalings

I try to be a good daughter and call my mom fairly often, but since she almost never calls me, the ball’s in my court to keep in touch on a regular basis. A couple days after I chatted with my mom, my brother John called and we talked about random stuff for a while before he said, “Hey, did Mom tell you she got impaled?”

Naturally, my reaction was “WHAAA?!” as I pictured an entire montage of horror movie impaling deaths, each more gruesome than the last. He clarified. “Yeah, she was at the farm tending to her peppers when she fell and impaled her leg on a piece of metal. She had to go to the hospital and get it dealt with.”

First of all, of course this injury was pepper-related. That woman would probably take a bullet for those damn peppers. Secondly, I tried to picture this accident with my chicken legged mother having one of her stumpy Korean legs impaled by a piece of rebar or something but couldn’t envision it. How did this piece of metal merely impale her and not take the whole damn leg off? The woman has no thigh girth or muscle whatsoever. It’d be like trying to jam a stick through a dry noodle.

I guess Mom ended up going to the hospital and enduring a painful cleanup, a Tetanus shot, and some nice stitches + bruising that both impressed and grossed out my nieces. After my brother filled me in on Mom’s accident, I waited for her to bring it up to me in our next phone call…and waited…and waited. She never mentioned it. Not once.

Finally, fed up with playing the George Costanza “we’re taking it up a notch!” game, I called her on Thanksgiving and we had a nice chat about various odds and ends:

Mom: “Hi bay-bee! Happy Thanksgiving!”

Me: “Thanks, you too!”

Mom: “You get enough to eat?”

Me: “Oh, God yes. I’m so full that it hurts. I ate so much. I feel awful.”

Mom: “Oh good. I happy to hear that.”

Side note: Only my mother would be thrilled to hear that I ate so much to the point of self-loathing and physical pain.

The conversation turned to when she was planning on coming out for a visit before I finally dropped the bomb on her:
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Me: “Oh, by the way, how come you never told me you got your LEG IMPALED on some rusty metal while you were gardening?”

Silence.

Then…

Mom, matter-of-factly: “Never had chance.”

I was dumbfounded. Really, after all the phone calls we had, she never had a chance to say, “Oh, by the way, I tripped and impaled my leg on some metal and had to go to the hospital, but I’m okay now.”

Me: “Are you serious?!”

Mom, indignantly: “Well, you always flying here and there and traveling so much, I never had time to tell you!”

Me: “John told me two days after I talked to you on the phone!”

Mom: “…oh. Well, it hurt.”

She then gave me details of the accident as if it happened yesterday and conveniently overlooked the fact that I had called her out for not telling me sooner. I’m assuming that the expectation was on me to say at the beginning of each phone call, “Hey Mom, it’s me. How are you? Feeling okay, weather’s good, haven’t been impaled by any rusty pieces of metal?”, just to cover all my bases and so my mom could one day say, “As a matter of fact, I did get impaled the other day!” Because, you know, otherwise she’d forget.

Oh, by the way, this is the same woman who both sold my childhood home and re-married without telling me. I’m serious. I had to find out about both from various siblings 2-3 months after they happened. She’s weirdly sneaky like that. If she were to take out Kim Jong Il and reunite North and South Korea, I’d read about it in the news before getting it out of her.