Last weekend I was out on a date when my Mum messaged me.
“Hey you’ll turn into a pumpkin soon,” she said.
It wasn’t long until midnight and she was reminding me that I had to come home eventually.
It’s not the only creative line she’s used to remind me that sometimes my social life gets in the way of coming home at a reasonable hour. Her other favourite is, “I run a house, not a hotel.” Which is a surefire way to guilt me into the realisation that I’ve been spending a little too much time with friends and not enough with my family.
But it turns out that I’m not the only one who’s had that experience. Over the weekend, Twitter user, rana, asked her followers, “can we start a thread on ways immigrant parents have expressed they want us to come home?” The answers ranged from cute and endearing to downright hilarious.
She began the thread with a message she’d received from her Baba that read, “I believe it is enough.”
Other users quickly jumped at the chance to share their own experiences. One user shared their Mama’s text telling them that if they didn’t come home, they shouldn’t be coming home ever again.
One tweeted the ultimate parental guilt trip, when their parent messaged them, “You want us to die...you have the rest of your life to party and hang out”.
Some parents attempted to pull at the heartstrings of their kids. One user shared that their parent asked them, “what’s the reason u hate us so badly?”
One parent even took my mum’s favourite line to a whole new level by simply closing the hotel, telling his child, “Don’t come. Door closed.” Another threatened to kick their hotel guests out entirely, “I will put all your stuff in garage...Don’t come back here”.
But some parents simply couldn’t resist the urge to be utterly dramatic. One mum simply messaged, “Please reply my blood pressure up.” But this papa really takes the cake - when his child doesn’t reply to his text asking for help with an app, he commits the ultimate act of parental guilt-tripping with this downright Shakespearean monologue.
I have to admit that after reading some of the responses, I’m kind of relieved that the worst I get is a Cinderella reference or two. But here’s hoping that my Mum doesn’t get any ideas from this or else I’ll be answering to lone question marks pretty soon.
