by Joe Azar
There is no doubt I am a “momma’s boy.” That woman moved to a different country, only to get robbed on multiple occasions, then moved back to the U.S. and raised two kids by herself for years. I’m not exaggerating, she is a superhero to me.
She’s also one of the nicest people you can meet. Working in a church for over a decade, she has helped people in need and is a sucker for a classic sob story. However, that does not mean that in any second she’s not able to turn into the equivalent of Ronda Rousey. If you asked me to bet on a fight between Rousey and a pissed off Adrienne Green, my money is on the former UFC Bantamweight champion being taken off on a stretcher.
I try with every fiber of my being to avoid making my mom mad because I have seen her anger so many times first hand, starting back as a child in the wacky jungle of Ciudad Ojeda.
Okay, we’ve already established that despite my pale white skin and my blonde hair that I was born in Venezuela. I’m forever grateful for those first eight years, not only because of the stories that I have to tell, but also because it totally gives you a different experience of life.
It pushed me to live outside of a bubble mentality where one thinks there is only one way to do certain things or a specific way to live life. People see an empty Pepsi bottle as waste, but as a kid, that is what my friends and I played soccer with as we often didn’t have a ball.
It is a different setting to live in too. Every night near sunset, bats would fly over our backyard. And in our front yard, was my personal favorite: the mango tree. That tree attracted iguanas, so essentially I had a handful of small iguanas that lived in my yard as “pets.” The mangos did attract other unwelcome creatures, though, including a massive bird-eating spider.
My mom absolutely hates spiders. When she saw this massive animal in our yard that day, I couldn’t imagine what she must’ve been thinking (I mean, I could guess, but we can’t print those words in the paper). Rather than standing there mortified, my mom told me to stay away from the spider as she headed back into the house.
She came back with aerosol spray in one hand and a lighter in the other. As a child, I had no idea what was coming next. Standing there confused, I saw my mom start the lighter, aim the flame towards the arachnid, push down on the aerosol can and torch that spider like it was our barbecue dinner. I was amazed at what I had just seen. This woman, who was deathly afraid of an animal that happened to be in our yard, just toasted the biggest spider we had ever seen.
From that day on, I swore my mom could do anything. This story doesn’t involve that much bad luck outside of the spider happening to be in our yard, but it is one of those memories I’ll never forget; it was the day my mom became my favorite hero.
