COM A AVÓ ATRÁS DO TOCO

Hello, dear foreign, how are you?

Over here I’m back at my home town to visit my mum, and she’s the inspiration for our expression of the day.

My mother would be the sweetest, calmest and most patient woman of the entire world, if we lived in the inverted world, with everything upside down and backwards. The woman is the angrier mom I’ve ever met, but then all Latino kids are going to say the same.

So my very impatient mother has her good days, when she’ll only yell at me if stand in her way, but there are days when I’m in the other room and still being blamed for a stain in her favourite table cloth that happened two months ago – when I wasn’t even here. Those cloudy gloomy days, are days when my mom wakes up with the grandma behind the stump. Yup. No animals this time, but no sense either, right?

“Com a avó atrás do toco”, or with the grandma behind the stump in the nonsense literal translation, actually means to be pissed off for no apparent reason other than being in a cranky mood, and it’s mostly used to describe the way someone woke up in a certain day. One would wake up with the grandma behind the stump when they have a bad day from the start and feel a little bitter, so it’s a warning to avoid getting closer for the rest of the day.

I’ve been hiding from my mom’s fury for two days now, with her is more like a week thing, she never settle for just a day.

The sentiment that takes over us in the morning as if the annoyance bug had bit us over night is represented, in English, by the expression “to get out of the bed on the wrong side”, both expressions agreeing the waking up moment is decisive on the outcome of the day.

There were not many explanations as to why would grandma be behind the stump, or what does that has to be with anyone’s rage attacks, and the only thing I found about the origin of this one was a definitely not trusted source: a guy with a video on Facebook telling a tale about the irritation from when people had to bite a piece of wood to get amputations because there were no anaesthesia, and the original expression would be “with the voice behind the stump” (voice in Portuguese is voz, very similar to avó, which means grandma). That doesn’t make any sense to me, but neither does an old lady behind a stump, so I guess it’s up to you if you believe our Facebook stranger or not.

In any case, I’ll keep hiding from my mom and her grandma behind the stump, and you too, dear foreign, run away from everyone waking up in the wrong side of the bed, cause we’re too young to stop this blog. Hope to see you soon.

Till then,

expressionada