I was randomly thinking about my past the other day and teenage mutant ninja turtles popped into my head while driving. Out loud I said (quite loudly out loud) I can believe my mom is so freaking stupid. My wife turns to me and asks what the hell I’m talking about. She won’t argue that my mother sometimes lacks common sense and because of this, her intelligence is somehow in question. I told her a story of something that happened 18-20 years ago.

My whole family was driving back from my Grandparents in Greenville, OH. I enjoyed the TMNT cartoon, but my brother was an action figure collector of them. (BTW shout out to my favorite turtle Donatello). I being a normal pre-teen was trying to argue the possibilities of mutant ninja turtles existing (the way lots of pre-teens argue and defend things even when they don’t know the whole facts). My father explained that it wouldn’t work at couldn’t happen. My mother trying to talk about sex gracefully in front of her 4 children (the oldest myself) asked my father what if “a lonely guy and a turtle..” My father cut her off right there and gave her the “If you are truly that stupid how do you manage to breathe look”.

He then went into a basic biology 101 talk about how species had to be compatible to reproduce. This unfortunately I think shut me down and my mutant turtle theories. That is until mutagen is truly dumped into the sewers, then we’ll see who is right on the ninja turtle argument.

But, needless to say, a woman who was in her 30s or just about, thought the humans and turtles could not only be sexually compatible (wouldn’t the guy actually have to get busy over the turtle eggs?), but they would also have viable offspring similar to ninja turtles. I must receive all my intelligence from my father, or my Mother must have got a skip year on her side’s intelligence gene.

This was the same woman who at one time was talking about getting money from her parents (they deny it) to pay off the house when she was going through marital troubles. She had a grand plan to live off of child support and possibly alimony. Now for those that don’t know child support was nontaxable and she had lived that way for a couple of years when I was a teenager. Her theory was if she got the money she would put it in the bank so she could deduct her mortgage payments and get a tax refund back. I think that even after an hour of my explaining to her that she had to have taxable income and pay taxes to qualify for a refund at all, and if you haven’t paid any you weren’t going to get money back from the government just because you have a deduction.

If only my father was an idiot, I could say I was the milkman’s kid. When it’s my mother, I have to hope I’m my father’s illegitimate child with a nuclear researcher that died in a radioactive experiment after I was born, and he met my mother and they adopted me.

Nuclear researcher….hmmm…I brought it full circle, I wonder if I have any turtle DNA in me.