Wednesday Writing Prompt - Cliches, Good Ways!

 

Some years back. Need to take a new photo as the banana trees are putting out six bunches of bananas. Yes, we have bananas! Starting with a mangled cliche!

There was a Jimmy Buffett song titled "Cliches" with the chorus lyric "Cliches, good ways to say what you mean, mean what you say." I hope some I have listed below are largely devoid of meaning. 

Yes, I am back doing D list actor who is not very deep's writing prompt. It's a good one today, cliches uttered by parental units. He was wittering on about his favorite Southern writers, O'Connor and McCullers, while admitting a) he's really not read them, but ha has seen the movies and b) kept confusing the two. C'est la vie! 

I prefer the works of people like Zora Neale Hurston, Truman Capote and Faulkner for my navel-gazing Southerners. At least Capote was amusing.

There are so many things, deeply fucked up things uttered by my parents that I am at loath to repeat them here. A sampling of a few: 

Dad - "Life's a bitch, you marry a bitch and then you die."

"Where do you think you're going dressed like that?"

...and my personal favorite... 

"The honeymoon's over when someone farts in the bed"

Well alrighty then. 

 Mom said any number of things but here are the two most common:

"You must suffer to be beautiful"

"Trashy women smoke!" 

 It's this last one I remember hearing the most. Later I learned it was something my grandmother told her, and her grandmother told her mother. Some awful shaming and blaming type language going back many years. 

I don't smoke, but it was not this phrase uttered by my mother that stopped the possibility of smoking. It was my own body, even if the few times I tried it I heard her voice in my head. It was because of my severe allergic asthma. The coughing and feeling like death warmed over, the furious pounding down of enough drugs to make the Rolling Stones drug consumption in the 1970s seem quaint and restrained. Yes, even counting Keith Richards. Sick, sick, sick!

Years later when I caught her saying this within hearing of my three children I told her to knock it off. Reverse glamorizing a thing by forbidding it is a thing. Talking about other humans in demeaning dehumanizing terms was never something I wanted around them. I wasn't perfect with that myself, and said enough judgmental things in our church years without adding that one in. I regret those years for so many things that I haven't still fully unpacked all the judgmental-ism. What's that old cliche? When you know better you do better? Yeah. That.