An extra-early drop-off for my eldest and a week so packed with classes and other activities that I’d not been able to squeeze in a visit to the grocery store meant that today my Diet Coke supply was tragically depleted and without a trip to the drive-through, someone — or possibly two someones — would have faced my uncaffeinated wrath. It felt very much, I thought while pulling away, like five years ago when each day I deposited a second-grader at school before heading home for a long hours alone with nine-month and two-year-old babies, hours which I could survive only after fortification from the kind of caffeination available in a big plasticky cup.

In those days their favorite thing was discovered quite by accident: I seated straw into cup in preparation for the day’s first healing gulp and it made an amusing noise. They were enchanted. “Again,” demanded the older baby, while the younger baby chortled. Of course I did it again (and again and again and again). Anything that kept them amused and marginally out of trouble for five minutes was worth the trouble, and so it became our routine to drive home to the sounds of rhythmic soda straw squeaks and little people’s laughter.

Do you remember when you used to love this sound, I asked today, demonstrating on my cup as we waited for the light to change. Neither the just-turned-seven-year-old nor her almost-six brother claimed to, although they both politely chuckled when I pointed out that it used to send them into gales of hysterics.

“I don’t remember being a baby,” said the girl.

“I don’t either,” said the boy.

I do, I said. You both pooped a lot. Poop is pretty much the ne plus ultra of humor topics these days.

“I did not!” said the boy, aghast.

“You still do,” said the girl.

“I wish I could be a baby again,” said the boy, and I’d have to agree with him. Even for a day — even for an hour! — I’d like to be mother to their baby-selves, in no small part because I’d like to believe I’d do it better a second time. I’d be more patient with carrot-colored walls and elbows that smell like bacon. I’d appreciate more that I could fight by proxy, that the sun brought on laughter, that the beloved wank-couch still lived. If I could do it again I would endeavor to yearn less.

And I’m certain I could succeed.

A couple three times a year the meal I set before my eldest is returned with words surly enough that an outside observer would come to the conclusion that it was excrement and not, for example, pizza upon the plate. A couple three times a year I respond with great vengeance and furious anger, a reaction which serves to curtail such displays of ingratitude. Until she forgets and the cycle begins anew.

You’d think she’d have learned by now. You’d think she’d have figured it out the first time her father and I scooped her from the booster seat and deposited her without a word in her gated bedroom to stew in the juices of her self-made discontent while we devoured the more than satisfactory meal she’d so precipitously rejected. Once released, mostly softened by her period of starvation¹ the child was told that she could fix her own damn meal, a task she carried out with the most plaintive wails. Small enough was she that all she could manage was a slice of cinnamon-raisin bread and a banana; this arranged on her plate for inspection we informed her that as she’d found the original meal unpalatable she could use her own money to purchase its replacement.

That took the starch out of her for quite some time.

But not enough, and it amazes me that this child’s siblings pretty much never complain about what I fix. No doubt this is all my fault as the first child was coddled with store-bought miniature jars of creamy, flavorless delicacies well into her second year while the little ones were given full family dinners (tacos, chili, pork chops) at four months old. And they loved it.²

This time the issue began, if you can believe it, with potato chips. Potato chips! I’ve been hearing for ages now how this preteen adores one variety and hatesHatesHATES another. The problem is that I can’t keep track of which is which. One week she’s cool with ranch. The next ranch sucks but sour cream and onion is wonderful. Then there was the time I bought a different brand of sour cream and onion. That went over well.

Honestly I hardly even pay attention. With at least four disparate palates to please I’m doing good if I can nourish all and not offend most. So when on a busy Saturday the time for lunch was squeezed almost out of existence by a too-long morning activity and a too-soon afternoon one, they should have been happy to have been given — on plates no less! — sandwiches, fresh fruit, cut up carrots, and a pile of barbecue-flavor chips. But that wasn’t good enough for Miss Thang who, upon arriving minutes after the meals were distributed and espying the offending items, shoved her plate across the counter at me. “I hate these,” she said with the haughtiness of a rock star whose tour rider has been ignored. “You know I don’t eat barbecue chips!”

Reader, I was offended not by the rejection of the item but instead by the sense of entitlement. As the plate whizzed past my stomach I slammed my hand on the counter then delivered a scathing lecture in which was pointed out that not a two-minute walk from her house lived people who likely spend some days each month with nothing, absolutely nothing, in their cupboards. She rides to school with them, I told her, all while she is lucky enough by the accident of her birth to live in a house where veritable piles of shiny produce live on the counter every single day, replenished by the all but unseen hands of hardworking (and equally lucky) parents. How do you think it would feel, I asked her, to wake up in the morning and have no idea how you were going to get food for the day? I’d built up enough of a head of steam that no doubt the entire neighborhood was treated to my rant. You look into the eyes of the kids on your bus, I said, and remember that some of them will eat one decent meal that day, at school, and then maybe next time you can be a little more polite in saying ‘No thank you’ to food you don’t want.

I sent her to her room tasked to write two-hundred words on the topics of food security, privilege and gratitude. An hour later she emerged, paper in hand. By then I’d calmed down enough to craft the rest of her consequence: I’d intended to make her buy a replacement lunch from me but instead she was to go online and search for a local food pantry to which her payment would go. As she addressed the envelope I wrote out a check doubling her donation and then she, abashed, trudged it out to the mail.

My friend suggested another possible life lesson: Into her lunch for a full week I should put nothing but barbecue-flavor chips. Arranged in layers in a shallow container like a sandwich. Broken into pieces in a tiny box like raisins. Stacked in a baggie like…well…chips. Ground into dust in a thermos like a drink.

Gawd I love that idea. Should I do it? Can I do it? Please say yes?

1. All of twenty minutes by the clock but YEARS to her four year old mind [↩]
2. I am joking about this. Mostly. [↩]

It’s good in the sense that finally I will be able to concentrate on my work for more than three minutes at a stretch without being interrupted with piteous requests from small children who, in the half-hour since breakfast ended, suddenly discover that they are near starvation and will expire if not immediately provided with a bottomless supply of clementines and goldfish crackers.

It’s also good in the sense that the hope I cultivated twelve years ago — to be home full-time with my children until they began school — has now come to fruition. My youngest, who was born really just yesterday, is now enrolled in Kindergarten, a placement I sincerely hope does not bore him to tears considering the fact that during the hour-long open house today, while all the other little children fiddled with their backpacks and cubbies, my child marched up to the board upon which was posted the entire year’s required sight words. And he read them all. Without a single mistake. Not that I’m bragging or anything.

It’s not so good because the end of summer means no more pool, which after a rocky start turned into the most soothing way ever to provide fun, exercise and mental stimulation to my offspring while at the same time not driving me around the bend. I have come to the conclusion that ten-plus hours a week up to my neck in water while sunlight penetrates right into my brain are absolutely crucial to my continued mental health. I don’t know how I’m going to make it without. Would anyone care to support my continued mental health by sending me on a mid-winter (or mid-autumn, or late-summer, or super-early-spring) jaunt to a someplace where I could indulge this new-found penchant for hanging out in pools in direct sunlight?  Email me. We’ll talk.

It’s also not so good because if last year I cried, this year — the year when the final wee chick leaves the comfort of the nest — I will no doubt sob, and I’m going to have to come up with something and fast to keep it in check enough that the other parents won’t be scandalized.

A baseball cap, perhaps? Dark glasses? Would it be out of place to arrive in a full-face veil?

At the start of the summer the eldest resolved to attend a local Red Cross babysitter training. Her father and I privately conferred; it was decided that mommy, daddy and child would each shoulder one-third the cost of this venture. “Twenty-eight dollars!” she screeched when told of this decision. “I have to pay that much! I’ll never make that back by babysitting!”

We assured her she would, and on the day of the class she appeared at the breakfast table with somewhat less than her usual degree of surly. She went into and came out of the facility with a smile on her face, which is the admittedly very low qualification by which I judge if a child’s activity has been successful. Tell me what you learned I asked, once safely ensconced at home. She thrust her notes into my hands while demonstrating on a stuffed animal proper baby wranglin’.

“And,” she babbled, “we learned how to change diapers, and how to feed a baby, and how to milk a baby…”

You learned how to milk a baby? I said, trying not to laugh.

“Mom, you know what I mean!” she said, and I said that I certainly did! Since then it’s been my family’s go-to phrase. Kids dawdling about room cleaning or getting out the door? Let’s go! We’ve got to milk the baby! Bored on a hot afternoon? Why don’t you spend some time milking the baby? Vying for attention while I’m in the middle of something? Can’t you see I’m trying to milk the baby?

And on the rare instances when they’re doing exactly what they’re supposed to be doing? You just keep on milking that baby.