“Christopher,” my mother used to say when I was ten or eleven, “don’t say you hate something. Say you strongly dislike it.” She was studying early childhood then, working as a preschool teacher, and was constantly practicing her new mediation skills on me. She also started saying, “I always love you, but I don’t always like you.”
“Fine,” I said, “I strongly dislike you right now.” That got me a little smack on the butt. Big deal.
The fact that I was a smart ass wasn’t her fault; I blame it on my older siblings, and the way we all clamored for attention in a big family. The way we wanted to stand out. Mama only put up with so much griping and tattling though. She taught us not to be so self-focused.
One place she gave up the fight though, was cooking. There were five of us kids, so trying to please us and keep us well fed was a struggle. We ate a lot of meat: ground beef in our lasagna, meat balls in our spaghetti, pork ribs. She rarely cooked fish, since most of us didn’t like it, and I can’t remember her ever cooking rice either. Bread, pasta, meat, vegetables. Mostly frozen vegetables. “Frozen is second best to fresh!” she used to say, unloading the white plastic bags of Bird’s Eye from paper grocery bags and arranging them on the white wire freezer shelves. Frozen vegetables were a revelation for her: crinkly fried potatoes, sliced green beans, and my favorite: broccoli with cheddar cheese sauce.
Looking back, I realize what a picky eater I was as a kid. I didn’t like anything green at all (I just could not wrap my mind around the concept of eating spinach until I was about thirteen), so the frequency with which she got me to consume that broccoli with cheese sauce may have been solely responsible for any vitamins and minerals I ingested from the ages of five to thirteen. I also loved sweet potatoes (with brown sugar, of course) and carrots, though they had to be overcooked and drowned in butter (actually, it was most likely margarine back then). Other than that it was white bread, peanut butter and jelly, bologna sandwiches, cheese pizza, and macaroni and cheese from a box.
Years later, when Mama got sick and Pop became the family cook, I came to realize how poorly we had eaten most of our lives. I mean, there was always plenty of food, and fast food was not a big part of our family meals—though Mama loved Burger King, and what she always referred to as their “burger whopper with special sauce”—but we ate a lot of nutritionally poor convenience foods at home: hot dogs and processed lunch meat, potato chips, pasta, cornbread from a mix, and white bread. Initially, I had to beg Mama to buy Wonder bread, that doughy, wet, processed sandwich bread, but she eventually gave in. It was the same with the sugary breakfast cereal, like Captain Crunch Peanut Butter and the overly sweet Lucky Charms, with those artificially colored pastel moons and stars that dissolved in your mouth like cotton candy.
We obviously didn’t have the healthiest diet, but these memories are still so sweet.