My Mom Can Still Annoy Me

My mother can annoy. A lot of people’s moms can annoy them. What’s weird about that in my case is that I’m 62 years old and my mother has been dead for about five years. The most recent occurrence of annoyance has to do with Epsom salts. My mother was a big fan of Epsom salts. Whenever I would get a mild sprain or twist a joint, my mother would haul out the Epsom salts and I would end up soaking the injured area in warm, Epsom salts-laced water for a half hour or so. This would be perfectly okay except for the fact that Epsom salts had no medicinal properties, at least none that I could detect. When I was done soaking some sprained foot or hyperextended elbow in Epsom salts, my injury always seemed worse than before. It was as though the Epsom salts brought the sub dermal pain to the surface.

My mother was equally supportive of calamine lotion. Epsom salts did not do much, medically speaking, but calamine lotion did absolutely nothing. Every now and then back in my youth I would come to my mother with a nasty poison ivy rash or a bunch of mosquito bites. My mother would go to the medicine cabinet and out would come the calamine lotion. All calamine lotion did was dry to a pink, flaky crust. My mother swore it would reduce the itching. All I remember is scraping off the crumbling pink coating so I could scratch the rash.

The one good thing about a poison ivy rash was that if it were sufficiently severe, my mother would hold me out of school. She did not keep me at home for my sake. She kept me at home so the rash would not spread the poison ivy scourge to other kids. Little did my mom know that a poison ivy rash is not contagious.

This brings me up to contemporary times. A few weeks ago I slipped on some steps and mildly sprained my wrist. It wasn’t too serious but I decided that I might as well initiate some limited therapeutic care. Naturally I remembered my mother and her Epsom salts. How could I not? I swear I could actually hear her voice telling me to get the Epsom salts out of the cupboard.

It was as though I was possessed. Despite the fact that every fiber of my being was telling me to forgo the “salts” and instead simply rest the maligned joint, I couldn’t do it, I just couldn’t do it. I stopped at the CVS down on the corner and bought the economy-size box of Epsom salts. I came home and poured a cup of the salts into a bowl of warm water, and while watching a 30Rock rerun, soaked my aching wrist.

I awoke the next morning to a sore, stiff, slightly swollen wrist. It was as though the Epsom salts had seeped into the joint and expanded all the veins and capillaries to the rupturing point, and perhaps even broke a small bone or two just for good measure. I thought about going to an Urgent Care and getting my wrist X-rayed, but I knew deep down that the only thing wrong with it was that I had followed my mother’s advice. And sure enough, a few days later the swelling subsided and the wrist regained its full function.

Today the outside temperature reached almost 80 degrees. In fact, I think I saw a mosquito fly by my head as I was venturing to the mailbox. This summer I will undoubtedly suffer a mosquito bite or two, but no matter how much they itch, they will not encounter a single drop of calamine lotion. Sorry Mom, I’d rather just scratch.