Good news: Your mother was wrong. If you cross your eyes and hold them, they won’t get stuck that way, according to a recent article by Discovery Health. You might experience some eye strain or discomfort, but they will bounce back. So there.
This makes me wonder what else Mom was wrong about. Or not.
When I was expecting, my brother gave me two paperback books to help me prepare for motherhood, Momilies and More Momilies.
What’s a momily, you ask? The official Momilies website defines it as 1. a sermon made by a mother or 2. an admonitory or moralizing discourse from mother to child.
I can guarantee if you go to the website you will get lost for at least half an hour. But it will be time well spent. In fact, I am laughing out loud as I write this—mostly because, 22 years after I received those two books as a gift, I now know how well I have absorbed the content.
“Always check the chute again after you’ve put something in the mailbox.”
Some momilies I may have picked up from the books, while others may have been handed down from my own mother. Or is it possible that these are gifts with which Mother Nature endows us?
I do wonder what it is about amassing wisdom over the years that compels us to impart it to our children in pithy yet trite ways. My son just snorts when I tell him to “always dress up for an airplane ride” (there’ll be a whole separate post on that topic one day), “clean up the kitchen as you go along” or, my own, “use your finger as a shoehorn.”
I can’t say my mother ever told me that if I crossed my eyes they’d stay that way, but she did have a few classics of her own, the most memorable (and valuable) of which was, “The tip of the iron is your best friend.”
I am betting you have a few of your own.
Word Nymph 
