Mom, the unnamed mother of Dexter and Dee Dee in Genndy Tartakovsky’s Dexter’s Laboratory, first appears in the short “Changes,” produced for Cartoon Network’s World Premiere Toons and aired April 28, 1996, with the series proper running through 2003 and a return in the 1999 television film Ego Trip. She is voiced for the whole run by Kath Soucie. The show never gives her a first name; production simply called her Dexter and Dee Dee’s Mom, and Dad addresses her only as honey or dear. Her maiden surname is inferred as O’Reilly from her brother Fergle O’Reilly. She is drawn as a tall fair-skinned woman of Irish descent with bright red hair in a slightly curled bob, large doe eyes, long lashes, and red lipstick, and the design leans into a pear-shaped figure—a large bust, a narrow waist, wide hips, and a prominently large seat—that the series treats as a visual gag. Her house uniform is a pale mint-green short-sleeved blouse with a wide collar, a white apron, dark green tight pants, matching green pumps, pearl earrings, and the yellow rubber gloves she almost never removes.

She is the authority in a spotless suburban house and a committed germophobe. Cleaning is her constant occupation, and the gloves are both tool and armor; in “Pslightly Psycho,” their disappearance from the nightstand sends her into a spiral. A ferocious temper surfaces when she is disobeyed, up to threatening Dexter with a spanking over garbage left out, yet flashbacks show a softer origin. She was a high-school cheerleader, revealed in “Chess Mom,” and a Valley Girl type in college in the 1980s, which feeds the accent she carries. She met Dad at university; he helped her through campus life and her fear of germs, and he is the one who gave her the yellow gloves. Episodes imply that Dexter’s perfectionism, intelligence, and taste for dramatics come from her side of the family more than from his bumbling father. She can out-think Dad in the kitchen, as in “The Muffin King,” where she orders him away from her muffins.

Later stories push her past the sitcom apron. “Mom and Jerry” and “Maternal Combat” show her as a surprisingly able fighter when the house or the family is threatened, and she appears across the series, in Cartoon Network bumpers, and in Ego Trip. The image lock below keeps that spirit—Irish-descended fair skin, red curled bob, doe eyes, red lipstick, pearls, mint blouse, white apron, dark green pants, green pumps, yellow gloves, tall pear-shaped build—and presents her as an adult woman in her early twenties, above legal age, regardless of cartoon proportion.