20 questions younger me should have asked my mother

1.    If Santa is magic, why does he need a budget?

2.    If human babies come from storks, where do stork babies come from?

3.    When you say, ‘all vegetables,’ qualify exactly what you mean? Follow up queries:

a.    Are vegetables weighted equally? (Two brussels sprouts must be worth at least thirty peas. That’s just rudimental cruciferous equational-modelling mathematics.)

b.    What is your stance on potatoes? Do they count as a vegetable? (Ha, pre-

carbohydrate vilification, a nineties’ loophole!)

4.    Specifically, what are the consequences if I don’t eat all my vegetables? (Beyond not having to eat the gloopy, out of a packet, custard-based pudding that you reminded me every time is fewer than two hundred calories, which I think made it taste worse. Either way, it certainly didn’t help. Yuck, I can’t look at a packet soup now without a small sick burp of associated disgust, it’s a whole aisle in the supermarket that’s dead to me.)

5.    Why did you protest me leaving the house at fifteen in a PVC bodice but did nothing to intervene when I spent three years between eight and eleven wearing nothing but highly flammable shell suits (you literally pushed me toward bonfires and placed lit sparklers in my hand every 5^th November)?

6.    Does the reason you got divorced have anything (at all, even remotely) to do with the much younger man with the ponytail, greasy face and funny sounding accent who kept coming to the house when dad was at work and repeatedly tried stroking my dog even when I hissed in his face?

7.    Can you provide me with case evidence (including photographs) of where children who twisted their bellybuttons actually experienced their bottoms falling off?

8.    Can you provide me with case evidence (including photographs) of where children who watched too much TV got actual square eyes?

9.    Given I have irrefutable proof you cannot ‘go blind,’ will you stop pleasure-shaming me?

10. Instead of letting me spend hours crayoning stuff, hitting marbles with other marbles, collecting packs of stickers that frequently include stickers I already own, sketching then etching it away in an endless self-defeating cycle, can you teach me something useful like how to complete mortgage forms, how to do nothing long enough to not smudge my drying nail varnish, how to achieve pay equality, the correct way to answer the question ‘why don’t you have children (and by correct, I mean the way that makes the arsehole who asked it, whose facial features have clenched together like a fist around a gavel, shut the hell up,’ or, what about, how not to go into my overdraft?

11. You said that I had to kiss grandma’s hairy cheek, even though she always smelled like gravy and eucalyptus, because ‘I’d regret it someday when she’s gone’. I don’t. Not even the tiniest little bit. What I do regret is every gross coerced embrace. So, how likely is it, if I say ‘no’, that you’ll smack me, ground me, or send me to bed? (Please answer in a percentage to two decimal places.)

12. Is Jack really my half-brother? Follow-up questions:

a.    Are you sure?

b.    Have you had him tested?

c.    If not, how can you be certain of 12a?

d.    But what if the hospital made a mistake? (I have since watched many, many hours of informative, made for TV, true event inspired programming where this has happened.)

e.    Did you consider adoption?

f.     Not ever? Not even when he was ten and tried lighting my hair on fire because he thought it was funny?

g.    Have you considered the possibility that he is a psychopath?

13. Please refer to 12a, 12b, 12c, and 12f, and then answer 12g again.

14. When did you realise that you’d peaked with me and shouldn’t have had Jack? Follow-up:

a.    Not ever? Not even when he was ten and tried lighting my hair on fire because he thought it was funny?

15. When we moved house with that much older man with the droopy face and creepy eyes, you said my dog (and best friend in the whole wide world) had ‘gone to live on a farm,’ exactly where is this farm and who runs it? (I need specific geographic coordinates and proof of identity, plus evidence of fitness to own the most amazing dog ever from the farmer. And three character references. And, a photograph of Bart, holding a newspaper with today’s date, looking happier than he has ever looked before.)

16. Imagine a psychic proves they’re not fake (e.g. they know you emptied my savings account when I was 13, hid it from me for a year and then told me it was a ‘bank error not in my favour’) and they’re not asking you for money. The psychic says when Jack is twenty-five, he will be convicted for scamming money from six elderly women, do you agree he’s a psychopath? (Also, I am beginning to suspect I was swapped at birth. FYI.)

17. Every time you said you’d been ‘resting’ your eyes, you were one hundred percent asleep, right? (Especially that one time when you drove Aunt Lindy’s car onto her lawn, desecrating her nativity scene, including gnome baby Jesus.)

18. You told me lots of stuff over the years that seemed to be about what men do or don’t like and how to make them happy. Why?

Follow up questions:

a.    Have you done the same with Jack for women? (Strike that, it’s probably what he used to prey on the pensioners.)

b.    Who told you it’s your responsibility?

c.    Can you tell me how to make myself happy instead please? (This seems much more relevant, but maybe you never did learn that for yourself?)

19. There was that day in the summer holidays when I was eight and I tried running away. I hid in the park for four hours, that man I recognised on the local news three months later ran past my swing in just a brown trench coat, then it got dark, a loud rustling noise from the bushes that sounded like a wolf or a bear readying for attack made me panic and I ran home (plus it was teatime and I only had one gobstopper and a pack of chewing gum). You didn’t have a police search for a blonde girl in a bright purple shell suit to call off. You weren’t rejoicing at my safe return, crying ‘never, ever worry me like that again, sweetheart.’ Did you even wonder, ‘where’s my daughter,’ once in two-hundred and forty minutes?

20. That night when you left with the sweaty man who smelled of onions and had a timeshare in Florida, did you know you weren't coming back?