So a story as old as time, my mother-in-law says some pretty unhinged things, and they’re always pretty harmless, but she fully lives in a reality separate from the one that everyone else lives in. So she’ll say something with such conviction, and you’ll know that it sounds really wrong, but the way she says it and the confidence she has, you start to question everything.
So there was a time we were visiting, we were at their house, and they had just semi-adopted a cat that was hanging around their house, and it was a long haired — it was really slight, like very small, but it looked like a Maine Coon, like really, really long fur, um, kinda that same coloring. And we’re talking, and she’s talking about this cat, and then she said, “Oh, yes, this cat is part raccoon, like half raccoon.” And I was kind of laughing, like, “Yeah, it kind of looks like a raccoon”. Um, you know, maybe because it’s feral, she was saying that.
And then it occurred to me, based on what she kept saying, that she like truly believed it was a cat-raccoon hybrid. So I said, “Oh, that’s not a thing, like they don’t mate.” And she’s like, “Oh, no, they definitely do.” And I was like. “Well, if they do mate,” which you know, maybe you hear about seals having sex with penguins or whatever, “like the action might take place, but they can’t produce offspring.” And I was trying to describe that to her, and she was just “Oh,” like, “oh, okay. No, well it is.”
Um, so just like super dismissive. And like, you know, it’s low enough stakes. It’s like, I don’t care, if you want to believe that that cat is half raccoon, go for it, it definitely isn’t. But like, you’ll bring it up later. Like something else that she said, you know, along those same lines, and it’s just a very kind of condescending like, “Oh, okay.” Like, you know, you say the thing that is actually the truth, and she just kind of smiles like you’re out of it or out of your mind. So, um, yeah. That’s, uh, that’s a specific instance I can think of, but like I said, she really pulls a lot of those out of her hat.