When I signed on for marriage, and then about a year later for motherhood, I didn’t really anticipate the hostile situation I would encounter in the kitchen. I mean, you see women on television cooking and putting dishes on the dinner table. They’re smiling. You grow up with your own mother supplying sustenance in some fashion. She survived. And perhaps because of these positive images, I couldn’t have predicted the mob rebellion and mental anguish that awaited me in that cold, stainless steel dungeon.
In the beginning.
When Hank and I first got married, I thought of supper like an 80-year-old cafeteria worker would think of supper. I made foods to fill all of the compartments on our trays; A meat, a potato, a veggie, a bread and a dessert. Sounds like a lot of work, right? Luckily, this was also a time in my life when I fully embraced convenience foods. I snatched up 10 for $10 just-add-water muffin mixes and sauced vegetables steamer packs like our livelihood depended on it.
There was no planning or hectic schedules to factor in. I just pulled various pouches of processed shit from the pantry, whipped ‘em up and went about our night, watching whatever the F we wanted to on television and talking about whatever the F we wanted to at the table.
My day job was interesting juxtaposition with my domestic demeanor. I worked for a gourmet food and wine magazine from 9 to 5, where I would stand in meat coolers with classically trained chefs as they ran their hands over aged fillets and explained the cheese-making process. Then I came home, threw together my Pillsbury endorsed family meal and all was well. It was a naive time. A blissful time. A time of empty carbs and subtle weight gain. We were just a couple of kids fighting over how soupy the mac and cheese should be and it was glorious.
The family table.
The moment I started bringing other human beings into the world, an unintentional shift took place within my culinary conscious. I made baby food … from scratch. Baby food that looked like the morning after my worst decisions. I set aside steamed sweet potatoes and ripened pears as if they were the Hope Diamond so I could puree perfect jars of goo for my little princesses. I felt so maternal and connected to the earth.
I’d keep spooning it in and they’d keep spitting it out, like sludge from a sewer. Back and forth we’d go for 30 minutes. In the end, I’d have the stuff in my hair and under my fingernails and they looked like they got in a fight with a barrel of bad apples. I should have known then. I mean, my future self could have told my new mother self, but she wouldn’t have listened. I should have seen that they would never appreciate anything I put in their stomachs ever for their whole childhood until the end of time.
The thing about feeding kids is, their dining hopes and desires can be drilled down to five categories: goldfish, highly processed meats such as bologna or hot dogs, mushy foods like applesauce, yogurt and mac and cheese, anything that comes with a toy and cake. I have spent hours at the table fighting over how many bites they have to take and timeouts and bargaining and threatening and tricking and, in the end, unless you have something shaped like a dinosaur or princess on their plate, it just doesn’t matter. Their willpower is too strong.
They will starve.
They will scream.
They will throw shit.
I have friends who gave birth to unicorns. Their children “love salmon” and “try one new vegetable a week,” but my kids didn’t come out with magical cones on their foreheads and they think asparagus is the Devil’s work. There’s no convincing them otherwise.
The infuriating part is the hustle. You spend all day at work, bust ass to get home, start dinner right away, slap it on the table (sweat on your brow) before anyone has the chance to realize they’re hungry and immediately you’re met with the uprising. “I hate this!” “Why’d you put pepper on this?” “That touched something else in the pan.” “This isn’t as good as last time.”
My favorite is the total disdain they have for new things.
“I hate these.”
“Sandwiches?”
“Yes, I hate these sandwiches.”
“Have you ever had them before?”
“No.”
“So how do you know you don’t like them?”
“Because of how they look.”
“How do they look?”
“Like gross sandwiches.”
And on my life goes, with some version of this rewarding dialogue night after night after night. I keep cooking and they keep praying the oven breaks.
Paralyzed by pesticides.
Somewhere in my early 30s, I became obsessed with food documentaries. Food Inc., Cowspiracy, Sugar Coated, Supersize Me, Forks Over Knives, Fed Up, What the Health, you name it, I’ve lost sleep over it. I love spending roughly 120 minutes feeling simultaneously enlightened and terrified, which stresses me out, which then makes me want to turn around and consume all of the offensive, disgusting food items featured in the film I just watched.
Ask me on any given day and I’ll be eliminating something from our diets. I’m an expert Whole30’er. I took you all on a 14-day vegan adventure earlier this year. I’ve called it quits with sugar, my abusive-yet-beautiful boyfriend, more times than I can count. I see something, read something or hear a podcast and I go all in. I clean out my cabinets and pledge my allegiance to a different “ism” on a regular rotation.
The kids notice, sure. They add their commentary to veggie-heavy or new meals to the point where I’ve gotten in the habit of whipping up alternatives for them to place in their judgmental pieholes. But the joke is on me because, remember, they don’t eat anything I make anyway.
I just expect some switch to flip at some point and everyone gets on board with being the family who implements true change and comes out on the other side with amazing results. I secretly yearn to be the woman who cures her foot fungus and starts running ultra marathons by eating only kale and giant mushrooms from the jungle. But I’m more the mom who eats an egg sandwich and fried potatoes before spin class and belches up garlic during sprints.
It’s not for a lack of trying. You guys, I made almond flour scones from scratch the other week. Scones. I expected my patrons to pass out from both the effort and the flavor. The reception was lukewarm at best. So then I start to wonder what the point of putting much thought into any of this really is.
I’ll end it here, with a glimpse into my internal dialogue while meal planning for the week …
I know what I’ll do. I’ll go get my cookbooks out and plan a week of clean meals. If it’s good enough for Gwenyth, it’s good enough for my family, right? These pictures are all so pretty. I bet these people never gets colds.
Hmm, these look really hard. And I’m not really sure where I’d buy yaca. Maybe I’ll do Pinterest instead, but I’m only going to pin from the Vegan board. And the Whole30 board. And maybe one thing from the Yum board.
OK, I’m going to try at least one new recipe this week. It’s good to push these people. The girls can just pick out the parts they don’t like. I have to stop catering to everyone’s different tastes. I’m enabling. Oh gosh, that’s why they throw fits. Enabling and too much tablet time.
Man, this week is really busy. I definitely can’t make anything new on Thursday, that’s for sure. And it’s the girls’ last day of school on Wednesday, and they’ll want one of their favorites.
Ah, screw it … we’ll go with pancakes, tacos and burgers again.
