Another Mother

I have two mothers. It’s not what you’re thinking, though. I adopted one. Or she adopted me… or both.
When I was eight I began taking horseback riding lessons at the Robarts’ Farm. Sally Robarts was to be my instructor, my friend, and eventually another mom. She gave me two additional sisters and a brother I sometimes acknowledge and sometimes don’t. Growing up, Katie and I spent hours with other kids hanging out at the farm on weekends and during the summers cleaning stalls, cleaning tack, riding, feeding, grooming, and bathing horses… anything just to be there! I have dozens of stories of our antics and adventures. You’ll hear about most of them eventually, not to worry.
Let me be clear: Sally is crazy. But so is my real mother, so this didn’t faze me. Sally isn’t crazy in the fairytale since of the word, though. Sally is crazy in the most basic interpretation of the word. As in, she is completely un-understandable. You will never figure her out because she says one thing, does another, says something completely new the next week and then does something out of the blue five minutes later. She’s totally random, you can never predict the next thing she’ll chose to do.
For example, she is adamant that I remain a “good, Christian girl.” And when I say adamant, I mean that she’s been morbidly embarrassing me for years now touting my pureness. Then one day when I was about fourteen, we were driving down the road when a man driving a huge dump truck full of red clay pulled up next to us. She noticed him leering at me and instructed me to look up at him, luck my lips, and crook my finger at him asking us to follow him. She wanted a free load of clay for the stalls. What she would have done when he got to our house, I’m really not sure- because I refused. She pouted for the rest of the day. See? Walking contradiction, that woman.

Most of the things she does are completely inappropriate. Like the day she tore a hole in the butt of her shorts and drove to the Goodwill store, blew through the front door and yelled at the top of her lungs, “I’ve had a SPLOSION (as in explosion) in my pants!! I need new ones NOW!” My friend Theresa was with her, poor girl, and I thought of this exact moment the other day when Sally was trying to figure out why in the world Theresa hadn’t introduced her new fiancée to her. Hmm… I wonder.
She also regularly wears spandex pants. The shiny kind- usually a size eight or so. She’s a size sixteen. She regularly explains to small children that they need to sit on horseback as if they are holding a quarter in the crack of their butt. Parents love this. After Hurricane Ivan took the entire roof off of her house, she let the Mexican doing the repairs move into the FEMA trailer. It was still raining into the house at this point. Every day at ten minutes until six she yells, “Ten minutes to Wapner!!” to remind everyone (herself and I and the digs) that jeopardy starts in ten minutes.
How long do you have to imitate Rain Man before you simply become him?