If I ever want to know where my son is, all I have to do is follow the trail of opened, half-eaten food containers.
This trail starts in the kitchen near the refrigerator and wends its way through the house and yard, eventually ending up in his bedroom.
I recently asked him why there was a half-eaten jar of peanut butter lying without its lid on his bedroom floor, a spoon still stuck in it.
He just shrugged. Apparently, he’s waiting for a magical fairy to come and remove it.
This morning, we had a ferocious argument over a loaf of sliced white bread that he’d left open, shortly after I’d reminded him – yet again – that he needed to seal up the bread so it won’t get stale.
“You don’t even eat white bread, so why do you care?” he griped at me, making it clear that the entire disagreement was all my fault.
“Because it was my money that bought that bread, and it will get dried out and have to be thrown away,” I retorted.
Apparently, this was also my fault. I don’t eat white bread, but I know he loves it so I bought him some last week, in a moment of extreme grocery store weakness that I now regret.
I need to stop having those random moments of touching motherly love when I’m walking through the supermarket. They are never a good idea.
Plus, seriously, white bread isn’t even good for ducks, let alone people, so I’m not doing him any favors by buying it for him, right?
I know some of you are thinking, “Wait – white bread isn’t good for ducks?”
No, it’s not, and the way I know that is because a crabby old lady yelled at us one day when we were feeding the ducks at a local pond. Thanks, crabby lady.
Anyway, I went home and looked it up and it’s true. Ducks need bird food like corn and such, not bread. I went to the pet store and bought a big bag of bird food, so of course we never fed the ducks again. I think the bag is still in my trunk somewhere.
I wish they’d put up signs to that effect at duck ponds, so people could be educated without someone yelling at them. And maybe have those little feeder stations where you put in a quarter and get some healthy food for the ducks. Right?
Speaking of bird food, I was shopping online for sunflower seeds because I like to sprinkle them in my salads, and I saw big bags of bird food consisting mostly of seeds. Gee, they were pretty cheap. I guess I shouldn’t put those in my salads, right? It’s tempting, though. Did I mention they were cheap?
I’ve said this in my column before, but I remember the day when my little kids came running home and shouted “Mommy! Mommy! We had the most delicious thing ever over at Ashley’s house! Can we get some? Please? Please?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “What was it?”
“It’s this stuff called white bread,” they shouted eagerly. “It was sooo good!”
“No, sorry,” I told the children who’d never eaten anything but whole wheat. “We’re not buying that stuff. It’s not good for you.”
But that encounter did cause an acid flashback to my childhood. I’d never heard of any milled wheat product except Wonder Bread, which was white and fluffy and you could mush it into a glutinous ball if you needed an emergency baseball.
In those days, I suppose our moms were just so thrilled at all the miracle new products, they never learned that the process of making white bread essentially removed everything worth eating.
Just to make our Wonder Bread diet more healthy, our mom would occasionally make butter-and-sugar sandwiches with it for our lunches. This tended to happen right before our dad’s payday when she was out of everything else.
My dad was a sergeant in the Air Force when I was a kid, and his pay period always started out with meat for dinner but then went slowly downhill until the end of the month, when we were eating potato pancakes.
To this day, I get infuriated when I go to a fancy restaurant and they’ve got potato pancakes on the menu for $19.95. Are you kidding me? That’s poverty food. Trust me. (Unless we’re talking Jewish latkes with applesauce. Those are yummy.)
In our neighborhood in those days, our mother was known as a soft touch, so any other mom who couldn’t feed her kids would hit her up for a few bucks. She always helped them out.
Have you ever noticed that poor people are always the first ones to help other poor people? Because they know what it’s like. It’s a fact that poor folks give a much higher percentage of their income to help others than rich people.
Anyway, my dad used to always be infuriated to come home and find potato pancakes – again – because Mom had given our last $5 to feed someone else’s kids. But looking back on it, I’m proud of her.
She would have bought Wonder Bread for my son. But she also would have nagged him about closing the wrapper until he wept in despair in a much more professional way than I ever could. And she’d give him 20 lashes for leaving food around and open. I’m too much of a wimp.
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August 23, 2023 at 09:00PM
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Frumpy Mom: Singing the white bread blues - OCRegister
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