A Well Deserved Whuppin

A couple weeks back, Og posted a little throwaway "#7 of my top ten worst beatings":

Og’s Mom: “Don’t you get smart with me!”
Og:”How would you know?”

--sound of furniture being destroyed and repeated impact with blunt instruments

As it happened, when Og posted this, I had just returned from Massachusetts, where I had gone to memorialize my mother with my family. That put me in mind of my past, and I decided to post a little anecdote of one of my "formative experiences":

The worst beating I ever received from my mother, was due to similar smartass stupidity.

Now, my mother was 5′3 and 105lbs. By the time I was 9 I was bigger than her. When I stopped growing at 13, I was 6′2″ and 265lbs of mostly muscle and smartass.

Around 10 or 11 she pretty much stopped trying to hit me, just because it would have been a waste of time and effort.

So, one day in the summer of my 14th year, my mother (who would have been 34 or 35 at the time) and I were having a fight in the kitchen. The fight turned kinda nasty, and I said, with a great big shiteatin grin on my face “what are you going to do, hit me?”

So she did.

An open handed slap across the face, about as hard as she could hit… which, for a 5′3″ tall 105lb woman was pretty hard… but I had 11″ and 160lbs on her, and by then 8 years of Jiu Jitsu, and football, and wrestling.

Me, being composed as I said, mostly of muscle and smartass; did exactly the thing you would expect… I laughed at her.

So she tried to hit me again, and I caught her wrist; and she jerked it away so hard she sprained it… me, all the while, laughing at her.

At this point my mother got as angry as I’ve ever seen another human being get… I mean bright PURPLE with throbbing forehead veins and all and I was just falling all over myself laughing at her because I KNEW she couldn’t hurt me…

Oh boy, was I wrong.

See, the open handed slap of a 105lb woman may not hurt all that much… but my mother understood things like leverage, and mechanical advantage, and using the tools to hand…

While I was busy congratulating myself at how clever I was, my mother held her wrist in her other hand, turned slightly, and then spun back around the damn quick…

With a 12 inch frying pan, across the side of my head, with the entire force of her hopping mad body behind it (it turned out to have been hard enough to fracture her wrist)

I staggered back and fell flat on my ass, too stunned to swear.

My mother… all 5′3″ of her stood over me with the frying pan in her hand and said…

“Well… that wiped the smile off your face didn’t it. Don’t you EVER forget, I brought you into this world… I can take you out of it”.