2024, Family, Kids, Uncategorized, work

Tease

42 Comments

My children love to characterize me as being really rigid and fussy. I’m really not that fussy and particular, but they exaggerate as a way of gentle teasing. My post last week about Saying “No” gave us some some fun discussion about my parenting. I didn’t realize that they both read the blog on a regular basis. Son sent me the following You Tube video, which I find hilarious. He likes to refer to me as “Meine lieblings Mutti”.

I like their teasing, as it is gentle and done in good humor. My father was a terrible tease but he wasn’t malicious. There is a fine line between good teasing and bullying, though. We don’t have bullies in our family.

I have been teased at work by my coworkers the past few weeks for my smudging of our building and the sheer amount of smoke that I filled the building with. That has been fun teasing, too. I imagine it got tiresome for a former coworker to have it brought up on a regular basis that she had been caught speeding in a State vehicle by the governor. She always accepted it with grace and humor.

What do people tease you about? Know any mothers like the one in the video?

42 thoughts on “Tease”

  2. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    Renee, the first thing I thought with this, before I viewed it, was “Dutchitude,” the thorough cleaning and grooming of the Dutch in NW Iowa, SW Minnesota. But it was not cleaning, it was just clucking and worry. It made me laugh.

    My good friend and co-worker who I worked with in three different places gave me a refrigerator magnet as a tease. It says, “As long as everything is exactly the way I want it, I’m totally flexible.” It is a tease and it is true of my character. I interpreted it as a gentle tease and that someone in the world “gets me.” So I love it.

    OT: Lou’s back pain is slowly responding to treatment and time, but he is still in some pain. Yesterday he started PT and returns today. Last night he slept! Every night since last Friday he has been up wandering around in pain, but not last night. That is a major victory. MY DIL ordered a pain salve that just arrived so now we will try that too. 

    Nurse Phoebe, the corgi, misses playing with him. Yesterday during the day he was napping, sound asleep. I found her sitting on top of his stomach yipping her little “Pay attention to me” yips, having placed her favorite pink pig toy in his hand. He slept through the episode.

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply

      1. I just noticed that one of the Gravatars displayed as having “liked” the above blog is yours, Jacque. I wonder what transpired between the time that you “liked” the blog and you posted your comment that reverted you to “Anonymous.” Was it a matter of how much time lapsed, or did you use two different devices? It’s a mystery to me how WP works, or doesn’t.

        Liked by 2 people

        Reply

        1. A mystery to be sure. I liked the post around 7:30am, then wrote the response about an hour later. Same device. WP will not let me access the log in either.

          Liked by 2 people

        2. I can always “like” the blog and my avatar shows up. However, I remain anonymized until I log in. I usually have to log in at least daily, sometimes every time I want to comment. Once I have logged in, I go through and add “likes” to everything. If I get logged out, I know it immediately because I can’t “like” anything. WP keeps us on our toes.

          Liked by 1 person

  3. My Bird, Port, has become a terrible tease. He throws the toys off the top of the aviary. The empty toilet paper rolls get filled with little wooden balls that bounce under the furniture. The rolls are last to go. They are soft and cause no damage to my skull.

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

  4. One of my coworkers has a paternal grandmother who immigrated from Germany after the Second World War. My coworker tells the story of how her grandmother cornered my coworker’s mother in the kitchen in the early days of her parents’ marriage and shook a big spoon at her daughter in law saying, in a very think German accent “I will make the pancakes!”

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply

  5. Me and pancreatic cancer are a constant drama. For 5 weeks they tried to find cancer. Could not prove it was there. Could not prove it was not. Anyway, the surgery for it is so massive it would be very risky and would make a misery of the rest of my life at my age. But I should watch for signs of pancreatitis. In the last three days three major ones have appeared, two of which are certain pains. So now what? I suppose I have to go back up to Abbott Northwestern again. But there are other explanations, one of which is another kind of cancer.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    2. No likes. For what it’s worth, you are not a single tree standing alone in a wilderness. You have an entire forest of people who will try to help as able. A calm heart and mind are important so as to get the best medical treatment possible.

      Liked by 4 people

      Reply

  7. I will claim only one childhood trauma—teasing. My parents and my older brother were relentless harsh teasers. My mother was harshly teased by her mother and siblings for being fat. They were sure they were going to get her to lose weight. My father was harshly abused. Odd how we do the behavior we hated. If I did anything embarrassing, the story was repeated for years. I warned Sandy to expect those stories, but they died with our marriage.
    But my sister’s husband picked up the ball. He invented stories to tease me about. My sister threatened him with divorce if he did not stop with her, me, and their kids. It was pathological. His children when they got old enough would leave the house the minute he started. Eventually he did stop.

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply

  8. My dad and his coffee group were all Second World War veterans. They met for coffee every day for years and were always gently ribbing eachother about the branches of the military they served in. They were such wonderful supports for one another.

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply

  9. I’m ambivalent about teasing. I know some teasing is good-natured and funny, but I think a lot of comments made in jest are mean-spirited barbs that are intended to hurt. I agree with Renee, there’s a fine line between bullying and a good tease. I’m very careful about teasing, and I do it only when I’m certain the person on the receiving end knows I mean no harm, especially if it is a child.

    My dad and his two youngest brothers were teasers. They teased me a lot when I was little about my freckles, the black beauty mark I had on my right jaw, and my strawberry blonde hair, all of which I saw as flaws. I didn’t think it was funny, at all, and would often get upset, and then they’d try to comfort me. By the time I started school when I was seven, I was hyper sensitive to comments about my appearance which, of course, the other kids were quick to pick up on. Back then it was pretty much standard procedure for kids to be teased for physical attributes like being fat or skinny, or have freckles, or red hair.

    Liked by 5 people

    Reply

  10. I don’t recall ever being teased. I probably have been but I don’t remember.

    I don’t believe there is entirely good-natured teasing, especially when the teasing is ad hominem, an observation regarding one’s physicality or personality. Embedded in the teasing is, I believe, a genuine opinion on the part of the teaser—otherwise where does it come from—and made from an attitude of superiority or at least objectivity and couched as humor. For it to be “good natured”, it falls on the teasee not to be sensitive to that observation about their person. The teaser takes no responsibility for the effect of the tease.

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply

    1. I consider my comments about you in that bunny suit as teasing. I feel confident that you’ll not take offense because you posted the story yourself. I simply love that image, and it tickles my funny bone to think of you in that suit.

      Likewise, Edith took a lot of ribbing on this page for her “life in crime,” a joke she played along with and contributed to by giving herself the Little Jail Bird handle. I’ll admit, there were times when I felt uncomfortable about the extent of it.

      Liked by 3 people

      Reply

      1. When the teasee is participating in the fiction, it’s not what I would consider teasing. I invited it, after all, thereby indicating it was not a sensitive subject. I suppose it could get tiresome if it were carried to an extreme but still not really a tease. There’s no embarrassment.

        Liked by 2 people

        Reply

      2. I, Clyde, am responsible for that, not meaning it as a tease. Her name reminded me of an old small notebook a woman had kept for many years and left in an old house in St. Paul. I won’t explain how I got it. Long story. It was such a delight to read. The woman, whose name did not appear anywhere, recorded all sorts of things in detail. Somewhere in the 30’s was the entry for a date “Edith went to jail.” No explanation. I think it was the only unexplained entry. I told that story on here and away it went.

        I was tormented in junior high for my very thick glasses. Tormented is the word. I am not going to talk about it. But I seldom tease, and only lightly. Me and two colleagues whose classrooms were bunched together had a running tease, more of a game, for a dozen years. I won’t explain it all, but we had a great deal of fun with it.
        My sister and I, who were very close up into our 20’s, had light teases we did with each other. Our children once told us long afterwards that they knew when we had planned to have sex that night by the way we teased each other. So they would make a point of staying up later. They were completely wrong but we never told them.

        Liked by 4 people

        Reply

  11. I’ve been accused, and lately I’ve come to believe that it’s true, that I am too serious. Teasing was always hard for me as a younger person. I’ve always felt hurt by it. I agree with Bill that it frequently comes from a place where someone is pointing out what they see as a shortcoming. I don’t do it. I wouldn’t do it well if I tried.

    There are really good-natured people who use teasing as a way to show love. This usually goes above my head unless I know the person well. My grandpa used to tease me. He called me Tootie. I understood he was trying to make me laugh because I could see the twinkle in his eyes. He had a weird-looking, large, lumpy lipoma in the crease of his right elbow. I asked him what it was. He said, “Well, that’s where I keep my worms, Tootie.”

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply

  12. I’m sure there has been teasing in my life. There may even be teasing currently, but nothing that I can think of off the top of my head. It’s been a long day.

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply

  14. Myabe OT, maybe not, I was amused while wathcing PBS Newshour this evening. Lisa Desjardins is rather well known for having her cat, Rocky, in the frame when she does interviews from her home. On tonight’s broadcast, about 11 minutes in, there’s a segment where she’s talking with Amna Nawaz about a spending bill and its chances of passing, and near the beginning of the segment, you can see a hand just past Lisa’s shoulder, apparently giving Rocky a treat. A few minutes later you can definitely see a person reach out and put some treats on the ottoman with Rocky. They may have been catnip treats, because Rocky gets a little frisky and bats something around a little, before settling into a classic catloaf pose.

    An online source says that Lisa and her husband have a child…possibly the person with the treats. I love watchng Rocky.

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply

Leave a reply to Barbara in Rivertown Cancel reply