Tiffany was six years old when she first heard the word incompetent. It happened on a warm summer morning. It happened on a Thursday. It had to, because Tiffany remembered her mother didn't have to work that day, and her mother only didn’t have to work on Thursdays, the only day her mother would up early on purpose solemnly to yell at Tiffany and her siblings. To avoid hearing the constant yelling and screaming of her mother and older siblings, she would hide in the bathroom right beside the toilet. Close enough to hear the argument yet far away enough that she wasn’t in sight for it.  Tiffany’s mother, Anne, was always yelling about irrational things because she was always so drunk. & on that summer morning, the irrational act that Anne was bickering about happened to be cup Tiffany left sitting on the counter from her late snack. She could hear Anne screaming from the bathroom so she decided to just face it and accept her consequence. Tiffany ran to the center of the living as her mother stared her down from the rocking chair. She took a gander to her left to see all her siblings sitting upon one couch, and from the looks on their faces, she knew her mother was well hungover.
“Is that your disgusting cup sitting on MY counter?” Anne said, words slurred. Whenever things went wrong, Anne always claimed everything in her possession. It was a habit their mother had and Tiffany couldn’t stand it, even at her young age.
“Yes, mama it is. It will not happen again. Really, I promise. I didn’t mean to. I’m so sor-”
Anne absolutely hated when people apologized, she said that people were never sincere with apologies and that they only did it once they got caught. So when she knew Tiffany was about to let those words come out of her mouth, Anne signaled her with the hand, suggesting that she wanted Tiffany to stop right there. When Anne heard those words about to leave from Tiffany’s mouth, her upper lip shivered and left leg began to tap rapidly against the floor and as quickly rocked back and forth in the rocking chair and neither of her eyes, neither the good one or the lazy one, blinked once. Her mother looked so mad that Tiffany began to sway back and forth while fiddling with her fingers, both things she did when she was extremely nervous. All of her siblings could all tell how this scenario was about to go, and they were all in very much fear of what would happen next. They thought for sure that Anne was about to go on one of her rampages where she simply throws any and everything in her reach. But instead, Anne stumbled upon her drunken feet until she was stable, closed her eyes, swung her left hand back and proceeded to slap Tiffany across the face with all of her might.
“Shut up! I am so tired of hearing you apologize. You’re worthless..all of you! All you had to do was simply put away a damn cup, how hard is that?” Tiffany wept as she held her face in her hands and her siblings just simply sat in complete disbelief. “You’re incompetent and the fact that you always will be disgusts me!  I promise that you will never amount to anything..any of you.  Giving birth to you all has to be the biggest of all of my many regretted mistakes.”
At the moment, Tiffany didn’t get it. She had no clue the meaning of the word incompetent. Tiffany wasn’t old enough to know that her mother was implying that nothing she ever did was right, and all her actions and her decisions in her life had been mistakes. But what Tiffany could tell, was that being incompetent was something that was ugly. Something nasty.
Later on into Tiffany’s adolescence, she gained the understanding of that word. She learned in her ninth grade english class during her vocab review that the meaning of being incompetent was “not having or showing the necessary skills to do something  or anything successfully.” From that moment on, she realized the words of her  mother, who was severely injured during that time due to a  fatal accident from her disgusting  habit of drunk driving. She understood then what her mother meant, that being incompetent was lacking the ability to be successful at anything; that she, Tiffany, lacked the ability to become successful in her life or in her future endeavors.
Her grandmother, Teresa, never called Tiffany this name. Teresa always told Tiffany that she was grandma’s little baby. An angel sent from heaven just for her. She enjoyed spending all her time Tiffany doings things like teaching her how to cook family- tradition meals or simply telling her stories of her life back in her younger days. Like the story of how Teresa met Tiffany’s late grandfather back in the 1950s.