nurse candy

At the very least I can say with almost full confidence that I have never forgotten to put pants on.

My mother has never been the Joan Cleaver type of mom I've always longed for. She never made cookies or even dinner that didn’t come in the form a combo meal straight from a drive-thru window. By the age of eight I was doing my own laundry and making my best attempts at peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. On occasion I wrote myself love notes to put into my lunches to make the other girls seep with jealousy that was barely containable within their plaid jumpers and knee socks. By then my penmanship was already at a 5th grade level and could certainly pass any handwriting analysis my classmates might employ.

Rather than ironing my socks with light starch or meticulously organizing my vast collection of nude and sometimes headless Barbie dolls, my mother was much more likely to wake us up at 6am for a game of Find the Bra. It was a regular occurrence for us to search the house and surrounding areas for the bra she was about to put on that morning and had somehow managed to misplace at some point in the time it took her to have her morning coffee and put on her makeup. On two separate occasions I found her bra in the freezer.

To describe my mother as unpredictable would be a gross understatement. In fact her eccentricities are so common it would be delusional to hope for any indication of the mundane. The problem is you just never know exactly what new adventure she has in store that day.

My mother has worked as a nurse in an assortment of pregnancy clinics, gyno offices, and breast treatment facilities and always carries with her an ample supply of inappropriate stories. But more importantly, her occupation in combination with her name has resulted in a witty yet descriptive nickname that my sister and I regularly exhaust: Nurse Candy.

Several weeks ago – against my better judgment – I invited a gentleman friend back home to experience all that is Buffalo, New York in February. Aside from the obvious excitement he had in venturing to a great cultural metropolis, he had little idea what to expect from Nurse Candy.

I gave her a solid four hour head start to primp herself and hide any of her penis and/or vagina diagrams she unapologetically leaves around the house before arriving. When we got there I’m not sure what was more embarrassing, the fact that she welcomed us into the house garbed in a bathrobe at 3pm or the fact that the bathrobe was untied exposing her bottomless nether region.

Unfazed by her appearance, Nurse Candy welcomed us into the house mid-robe fumble and with a hug.