If you want to catch Dad in a good mood, you’d better act fast, because some unfortunate if not unexpected news is about to make the old man pitch a fit: Mom is caught in a rip tide.
Goddammit, Mom. She should know by now that imperiling herself in hazardous ocean currents really pushes Dad’s buttons!
In the five minutes since Dad wandered off to hit up the beach’s public restrooms, Mom has somehow managed to go from quietly reading her latest Donna Leon mystery novel on the sand to frantically struggling for dear life as a powerful rip tide sweeps her out to sea. This isn’t just some half-assed baby rip tide, either—we pretty much blinked and Mom was already a flailing little dot on the horizon, way out of earshot for us to tell her she should swim horizontally out of the water’s flow so Dad won’t flip his shit that she’s exhausting herself trying to fight current directly. It was also nominally Mom’s job to watch our valuables while Dad went to drain the dragon, so now he’s gonna be doubly steamed to find that she left the bag with our phones and wallets just sitting there unprotected so coastal water phenomena could yeet her halfway to Portugal instead.
While we’re not half as ticked as Dad’s about to be, we’re still pretty disappointed that Mom would pull her typical “Mom requires emergency services” drama on our nice day at the beach. All she had to do was not get caught in a rip tide for another hour or so and we probably could have talked Dad into getting lobster rolls and raspberry lime rickeys at the great clam shack just up the road. Mom’s always talking about how she could go for a nice pint of fried clams in the summer, and then when that’s finally within reach she goes and enters a current so forceful that her best front crawl ends up looking like the aquatic version of moonwalking. Even if the lifeguards manage to bring her back alive, Dad’s going to insist on heading straight home while making all sorts of passive-aggressive cracks about Mom needing to check the bathroom for rip tides before she takes a shower. And God help us if the love of Dad’s life drowns, because the geezer’s liable to blow a gasket so bad that his freakout when we dented his Mazda back in high school will look like a Mister Rogers episode in comparison.
Might as well hop in the rip tide ourselves to dodge the Category 5 shitstorm that’s coming.
Look, we recognize that Dad’s not blameless here. He was the one who decided to set up our towels directly in front of the rip tide because “the water looks less choppy here,” (pretty much the first red flag they teach you in Rip Tide 101) and he also rushed Mom past the rip tide safety sign she was trying to read at the parking lot because he wanted to get at the sandwiches in the cooler she was carrying. We personally regret taking our eyes off Mom long enough for this to go down too, though in our defense, we were busy trying to keep seagulls away from the kettle chips Dad left unattended when he went to piss. But still, would it really have killed Mom to just walk the beach a bit if she was getting restless? She knows how disaster-prone she is!
Welp, here comes Dad wearing the last smile we’ll see on him for the rest of the day. Here’s hoping Mom lives and learns some real lessons about not causing the kind of emergencies that get under Dad’s skin!
