Season 3 Episode 12: My Mom, the Mom

February 26, 1989

Published 02/26/89

Kelly picks her mother to appear at the school’s Mother-Daughter Career Day, which obliges Peggy to perform motherhood in public, and Peggy’s solution is to bring her own equipment. Her couch, her side table and her remote control all turn up in the classroom, which the episode never explains and does not need to. Al, meanwhile, has decided to teach Bud the value of a dollar by putting him to work at the shoe store.

The classroom scene is one of the best jokes the series ever constructed about Peggy, because it is not a lie. She demonstrates her actual working life accurately and in detail, and it is the career she has chosen. The episode is careful not to shame her for it; the comedy is in the gap between what the school expected and what it got.

Al’s half supplies the series’ only hard figures on his pay. He works on commission, and he spells out the arithmetic: on a twenty-dollar sale his commission is $1.97, and after taxes, social security and Peggy, he keeps a nickel. It is the most precise accounting of Al Bundy’s finances the show ever offered.

It is also the third of Jade’s four appearances, played by Teri Weigel. Peggy and Kelly both reveal, separately, that neither of them knows her natural hair colour. And this is the last episode in which Bud’s skateboard is visible on the staircase: the prop went on to be used in an episode of the ABC sitcom Free Spirit, produced by some of the same people, and starring Edan Gross, who had already appeared on this series twice.