I pilfer from my Ma

Be patient. Wait for the sound of the shower to die off. If you feel motivated, heave your bony ass out of bed and try to drop for 10. You will get to 7 before your arms give out but that’s OK. Last time it only took 6. If it's piety moving you today, dust of your old King James and read a psalm. Before you, the bible was your sister's and before her, your dad's. Now it looks like it survived a civil war. Last Christmas Ma gave you money for a new one but that morning, Mike and Kathy invited you over for breakfast at the IHOP and you didn't want to look like a chump for not ponying up your share. Ma thinks you bought the bible.

But if things are as they usually are these days, you're feeling neither motivated nor spiritual and you haven't felt either way since that long sleep between high school and college freshman year so stay in bed. If necessary, pull the pillow over your head and try to mellow your matricidal thoughts into something less violent and more non specific. You do not want a fight with her over her morning routines. You did that once, went off on her because she kept flushing the toilet – once, twice, three times, four times – It’s 5AM goddamit. How about you drain the Pacific too.

That day, you discovered Ma had skills, a backhand – a swift back-swing pausing delicately over her left shoulder, and then a reckless decent landing and exploding on your stupefied face. To think you believed backhands were only myth, the kinds of theatric rhetoric people added to threats more as garnish than actual bite. Remember years ago when she told you she played tennis in her high school days? You'd laughed and for good reason - the woman, who took a full minute to ease her considerable mass out of her one-storey SUV, scampering after a rubber ball on a tennis court, was enough to short circuit your imaginative faculties. She made you a believer.

If she’s been in there 20 minutes, she’s probably washing her hair today and will be at it for another 20. Go to the kitchen, to the cupboard where she leaves the garri and her Nigerian spices. Look behind the jumbo plastic bucket of "I Can't Believe it's not Butter" she now uses to store dried pepper. You’ll find that pot you discovered last night on your way to the cereal box. The one with the warped lid charred so badly the metal was flaking. The one she always says she’s thrown out but which just happens to find its way buried under the living room sofa or wedged behind the refrigerator or the oven or haunting every last crook you'd never think of looking in, bearing a tight roll of $20 bills.

As you wet your lips and grin, remember:
one bill and she blames her carelessness
two, she blames the cashier's
three and you're a thief.

Choose wisely