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I have noticed a lot of these high profile criminal trials on cable news always lead up to the inevitable moment where the defendant’s mom addresses the cameras and tells everyone that her sweet little baby couldn’t have done the terrible things the prosecutor says he did, even though the rest of us totally know he did it. The crime could be videotaped with the defendant holding up a sign that says “I did it” and some of these moms would still swear he didn’t do it. Not my mom. She would rat me out in a heartbeat if she thought I did it.

A lot of mothers, particularly Southern mothers, will only defend their children if their children really didn’t do anything wrong. In the case of my Mom, she always told her kids that we were her second priority next to God. So if it come down to us or him, she would side with him and do the right thing- which translates into “I will tattle on you little brats in a heartbeat!” If I told my mom I killed someone, she would call the cops. The most I could expect from her was that maybe, just maybe, she would argue the judge down from a death penalty to just life in prison without parole. She would possibly be harder on me than my victim’s mother. Which brings me to a story about my old roommate, Mike.

I haven’t seen Mike in ten years, and I don’t particularly care if I ever do. (He stole my stuff and sold it to a pawn shop. But that’s a whole ‘nother story.) However, I will always remember this hilarious story he told me.

One time when Mike was about 18 years old and still living with his mother, he woke up with a couple of police officers standing over his bed. His mother was standing behind them with her arms crossed. “OK, son. Where’s the body?,” said an officer.

“What body?,” said a suddenly awoken Mike.

His mother chimed in, “Look, I know you hit someone with your car. And I know they’re probably dead. So I called the police to come take you in.”

Mike tried to explain that he hadn’t hit anyone, but they weren’t buying it.

He just couldn’t explain why there was blood all over the hood of the car and a dent in the shape of a human body right in the middle of it.

Finally Mike confessed.

“All right. All right. I’ll show you what really happened.”

So Mike, his mom and a police officer rode up the street to a stop sign that had been knocked over. Mike explained to them that he was driving drunk the night before and plowed into the sign. With a stroke of terribly bad, but totally deserved, luck — the stop sign had fallen over on the hood of Mike’s car. Much of the red paint from the sign smeared into the hood of the car on collision. And it just happened to make a dent that was shaped much like a human body. At the time, Mike thought it was a good idea to just drive home and go to bed.

He thought wrong. Luckily for Mike, the paint and the dent marks lined up with the damage to the stop sign; and the police  didn’t charge Mike with murder of an unknown person; but he did get charged with DUI and a few other things.

So what’s the moral of the story? Hopefully, you already knew not to drink and drive. You didn’t need me to tell you that. The other moral of the story is, “If you get in trouble, don’t tell it to your mama. She might tell on you.”