clean the bathroom after you took a bath / the cleaning lady mustn't see all the filth
A Sheltering Suburban Mom post.
"Screens rot your brain," says your mum, who is on level 4,000 of a game about sweets and plays it at red lights. You didn't text back by ten at night. She has rung your friends' parents, the friends' parents' neighbours and a hospital, in that order. "Don't talk to strangers," she told you for eighteen years. Today she told the man behind her in the post office queue all about her gallbladder. "We don't use that word in this house." Then she stubs her toe on the coffee table and uses that word, and three others you didn't know she knew. **Why it caught on:** it's the author photo of romance novelist Carly Phillips, who has said she was upset at first and later took it in good fun; the character has nothing to do with her. Almost everyone grew up with a version of the mum the internet built on her photo, and only noticed later.