My mom is a true work of art. She is one of these people that can never quite get a saying right, or uses a completely wrong (or in some cases, completely made up) word. It makes for some of the better conversations I’ve ever had in my life.

My wife and I are having some friends down from Chatanooga, TN and Anderson, SC, so we’ve had to make arrangements to house about seven extra people in our home. I remembered that my mom had two air mattresses and I quickly made the trip to Gulfport to accommodate our guests.

Friday night, we plugged in the air mattresses to end the night, everything worked fine. In the middle of the night, the mattress that my wife and I were sleeping on deflated and made for a pretty rough night of sleep. I called my mom the following day to tell her about the mattress and this is the conversation that followed. Enjoy.

Me: Hey, what’s up?

Mom: Nothing, cleaning. What are you doing?

Me: Trying to recover from a night of trying to keep my body on a sinking ship.

Mom: What?

Me: Your mattress deflated in the middle of the night, we ended up sleeping on the floor.

Mom: Which one?

Me: The super-tall one.

Mom: Oh, that’s the one we keep in the guest room. It’ll flate back up.

Me: What?

Mom: It will flate back up.

Me: Am I to understand that you think the opposite of deflate is “flate back up”?

My mom does a thing where if she thinks you’re making fun of her, she curses or hangs up. I got the latter.