The Stages of Going Grocery Shopping With Your Mom
Disclaimer: for legal and other reasons (read: my mom may one day see this), this article is meant to be satirical and is in no way based on any real-life events, people, or people. All similarities are purely coincidental. If you’re a mother reading this, don’t come for me.
Stage 1: Lying and Denial
Your mother assures you that ‘this will only take a few minutes.’ You’re ‘only going for the essentials.’ She even made a list to prove it! Less than ten items? This will be a breeze you tell yourself! Surely you’ll only be getting the items on the list itself. Right?
…..Right?
Stage 2: Entering the grocery store and immediately going to the produce section, specifically the fruit section
I don’t know what it is about brown mothers and parents in general. But they LOVE buying fruit. Now at first, you may be wondering why I’m complaining about this. Surely, buying fresh produce to eat is a good thing right? And you’re right. But here’s the thing about brown mothers and produce: they always buy in bulk.
You can tell your mom a thousand times that the fruit drawer in the fridge is stuffed to the brim with clementines and apples, but you might as well be yelling at a wall (not comparing my mom to a wall, of course, definitely not doing that). For a second you think your efforts have not been in vain when your mother says “okay.” But then you look away for a literal second, and when you look back you see a bag of 47 apples, 39 oranges, and a 6-pack of mangoes in the shopping cart. And when you try to tell her that she’s picked up way too much fruit for your humble family of four, she assures you that it’ll all get eaten. And if you foolishly ask ‘by who,’ she will look you dead in the eye and go
“You.”
Stage 3: Completely Ignoring the List
By this stage, you’ve probably been in the grocery store for about twenty to thirty minutes and have given up all hope that this was going to be a ‘quick grocery run.’ If you haven’t, that’s your own damn fault. It’s also at this point in the shopping trip that your mother cuts the act, drops the charade, and starts picking up anything she feels like. At some points, it feels like she’s going out of her way to pick up everything that wasn’t on the list in the first place. A little bit of salad here, a little bit of red onion right there, a sack of potatoes because ‘they’re never this cheap’ even though they’re literally on for full price, and a twenty-pound cheese wheel because it’s a whopping six cents off from regular price.
Stage 4: Scrolling through Flipp (or whatever price-matching app your mom has on her phone)
You’re one hour into the grocery run. The shopping cart looks like a mini grocery store itself. It’s around this time that your mother hands you her phone and tells you to start comparing prices to other supermarkets. This is the one time she will allow you to be on a phone during this trip. So you do as she says and start comparing the prices to every single one of the 101 items she has in this shopping cart, your eyes slowly glazing over and crossing by the time you finish. All this just to tell your mother that the oranges she has in the cart are on sale for 3 cents cheaper at an Asian supermarket whose name you will not even attempt to pronounce for fear of being called racist. You’re also pretty sure that this supermarket only price-matches the other big supermarket chains in the area, but your mother assures you that ‘you never know.’
Stage 5: Your second trip to the produce section
Oh, you thought you were only going to be visiting the produce section once on this trip? Do you also believe the Earth is flat? Grow up.
Honestly, I don’t hate fruit and vegetables. I like them! But ethnic mothers buy fruit and vegetables the same way rappers buy jewelry and gaudy clothes. They buy them to flex. Now I don’t know who they’re trying to flex on, but what other reason is there for them to be buying dragon fruits and mangosteens like they’re about to disappear off the face of the planet???
Stage 6: Questioning if you’re ever going to get out of here and slowly losing your sanity
It’s been anywhere from two to fourteen hours. You don’t remember what the outside world looks like. You’ve grown a beard that would make Merlin jealous. You wonder if your friends remember you. Have they moved on? Have they had any kids? Do they even know you’re missing? Or did they know that your mother was taking you out today and let her do it? Are the accomplices to this??? AND WHAT THE HELL IS A BOK CHOY???
As you mentally unravel, your mother grabs three more cases of strawberries.
Stage 7: One more look at the produce
At this point, you’ve just accepted that this is your life now. All the fight in you is gone. You don’t even bat an eye when you see your mom grab a pair of watermelons. Hell, at this point you tell her to grab one more. Why not? All good things come in threes, don’t they? Your mom then has the NERVE to look at you and go
“Don’t be silly. That would be excessive.”
Stage 8: Emancipation
It’s over. It’s finally over. You drag the shopping cart to the checkout line. Your mom does all her price matching. You bag all the groceries. You somehow manage to carry them all to the trunk in one go because dammit, you may have lost your dignity, your voice, your youth, and your sanity, but you still have that male pride of yours. You load up the trunk, your mom looks over the bill, nods and then looks at your with a warm smile.
“That was fun. I love shopping with you. Want to stop for a treat on the way home?”
And in that moment you smile too. Because even though this shopping trip took years off your life, you got to spend some quality time with your mother. And you can see how much these things mean to her.
“No, I’m okay. Let’s just go home,” you say tiredly.
“Okay,” she says, smiling as you drive home…..
Only for your mother to remember that you forgot the bananas and pop a U-turn to head back to the grocery store as you groan in agony.
