My mother just left after spending the weekend with us, and I’m sitting here with a half-empty bottle of André’s peach Bellini—because nothing pairs quite like fruit-flavored cheap champagne and residual frustration.
She swears her hearing is perfect. She just “can’t understand what we’re saying.”
Apparently, somewhere along the line, the rest of us devolved into a pack of mumbling feral creatures, communicating exclusively in consonants and sighs. It’s like living inside a David Attenborough documentary about the world’s most exasperated matriarch.
She’ll tilt her head, squint, and say, “You need to speak more clearly.”
So I slow everything down—one word at a time, like I’m narrating a hostage video for preschoolers—and she still can’t understand me.
Then she sighs and says, “Never mind. I’ll just read your lips.” Which she can’t. At all. It’s adorable, really. Like watching a toddler try to lip-read in hieroglyphics.
When she comes over for dinner, my husband inevitably has football on—college on Saturdays, NFL on Sundays—and she’ll sit there politely, like she’s attending a very loud sermon in a language she doesn’t speak.
The referees are screaming, the crowd is roaring, the commentators are shouting in surround sound—and she’ll turn to me and say, “You need to speak more clearly, Elizabeth. I can’t understand a word you’re saying.”
Her misunderstandings have become family legend. Once, she thought a 401K was a floral bouquet. She also believed Best Buy’s Rewards Zone was the War Zone and even ducked like she was under enemy fire.
And for years, she was convinced that in the song Louie Louie, they were singing about a “wigaphone.”
When we finally asked what that was, she said, “You know, a wigaphone.”
We do not, in fact, know what that is—but we are patiently waiting for Merriam-Webster to weigh in.
It’s really become less “conversation” over the years and more “closed-captioning gone rogue.”
She had her hearing tested four years ago and proudly reported that it was “perfect.”
She’s 82 now, and hearing can change—especially after four years of listening to nothing but the screeching EMV tires echoing through the halls of her retirement community. So, um… no.
I’ve stopped correcting her. There’s no point.
Every clarification leads to another misunderstanding, like conversational whack-a-mole. Now we just let her roll with it.
Because she’s not wrong about everything.
We probably are mumbling—mostly under our breath, wondering if the wigaphone’s covered by Medicare.
Absurdities and Fires 