Yesterday, I was griping to Brad about my adult onset acne. It's very frustrating to me because I get worse break-outs now in my 40s than I got as a teenager.

In my frustration, I called myself a pie face rather than a pizza face.

As I was getting ready for work, it suddenly occurred to me what I'd said. As I chuckled to myself about my dumbness, I was reminded me of something my mother had said one time when I was a kid.

My mother is one of these kinds of people who just does not swear. Like, ever. I think in all of my childhood, I heard her use the word "damn" maybe three times and you knew when she used actual, real swear words, it was serious business!

Normally, her swear words were things like "h-e-double-toothpicks", "pickled pig's feet", or "puddle jumpers". Once in a while, she'd even go so far as to use "bunnies".



One day, my family was on the town, going out to eat. My brother, who is the oldest and was about 18 at the time, was driving. My mother was sitting by him in the passenger seat with me and my sisters in the back seat.

Seeing the place we were going on the other side of the road, my brother made a sudden u-turn in the car, throwing us all to one side and narrowly missing on-coming traffic. He pulled over to the curb, where we all tried to right ourselves and catch our breath.

My mother was so angry with him that she wanted to tell him off but was just not going to swear at him. She started to say, "You.....", but struggled to find the right thing to say to him without swearing at him or calling him a bad name.

You could see her mouth working and hear little mumbley sorts of noises as she struggled to come up with just the right thing to say.

Suddenly, she burst out with, "You pie face!"

There was about 5 seconds of stunned silence, then we all burst out laughing.

My poor mother was instantly deflated. She was not about to laugh because she was still so angry at him but there was just no way we were going to stop laughing long enough to allow her her very justified self-righteous anger.

To this day, that is absolutely my most favorite story of my childhood and I love to tell it to my kids. Once in a while, I will call them pie faces just for the utterly ridiculous nature of it.

And my mother? While she never used that insult again, it didn't do much to change the way she would swear. But I guess she learned her lesson to not make stuff up under a particularly stressful situation to avoid swearing because what you make up might just be more amusing than you intended it to be.