Mom said so

When one is born in a family such is mine, where every member is a skilled storyteller, one has innumerous stories to tell. I reckon there are almost no occurrences that cannot be related to one of our stories.

Today, I am going to narrate the one about ‘Mom said so!’. This reply is used, within our family, as argument from authority (besides ‘Na!’, of course). Any small whinge is annulled by ‘Mom said so!’.

Its story goes like this. In the apartment building where my parents live, in Tulcea, there once lived a family with a lot of kids. The parents, working in shifts, did not have the time to cook their meals. So they would leave them money in order to buy some snacks. The eldest brother had the task of buying and distributing the snacks. On the night in question (when it happened that this expression entered our family vocabulary), the eldest was distributing a biscuit pack to each of his brothers.

One, a whimsy-whamsy, refused to take it. The eldest tried to give him again the pack, and since he was refused once more, he uttered:

‘Mom said so!’

And so the little brother immediately took the pack, and started eating. While us, have been honoring this saying ever since.

If you’re good, next time I’ll tell you about 'Ma friend, go la noi la unitate' (a mixture of Romanian and English meaning to express ‘My friend, go to our unit’). Though it’s very clear to me that I will not be able to live up to the way my cousin tells it. Maybe that it is why I can’t get enough of him telling this story.