I didn’t take care of my children the way I should have – the way, in retrospect, I could have, if I had been whole and strong and had a better relationship with kale and thought about how chickens spent their days.
If one of the four pillars of motherhood is made of broccoli and breast milk, mine limped on three cheese sticks right from the start. Neither of my kids were breastfed. To be fair, I seriously tried with both kids, and both breasts – but after about 2 weeks I stopped due to dire injury and a low tolerance for snapping turtles. And honestly? Twenty-odd years ago my executive function seemed more critical than my breast milk function. I was a woman running a company and the formula for success seemed better from a bottle than a boob.
And as for broccoli – well, let’s just say tater tots got a lot more plate time at my house. It’s not that nutrition didn’t matter at all, it just seemed “less of a thing” than it does now. It lurked in the back of my mind as “probably a good idea” but not “sit there and eat your organic peas or your brain won’t develop right” essential. So as they grew I apparently continued to live life in a blur, in a fog, in a constant mad dash toward processed food, only aware from the corner of my eye that while my kids were cracking open tiny cans of fruit cocktail and sipping sugar-juice from a foil bag, their preschool counterparts had little sushi containers full of seaweed and soy milk.
Clearly, I was holding on to the 70’s and the box of Devil Dogs a little too tightly, because I actually remember feeling a bit suspicious of those healthy families. I grouped them together with the swear-jar crowd. Life is hard enough on kids – why take away their right to eat a bag of marshmallows and suck yogurt from a plastic tube? And are you seriously telling me little Riley thinks rice cakes are cookies? Put down the fucking rice cake, Riley. Eat a fucking Oreo. And here’s 50 cents for the fucking swear jar. Ok, 75.
As I smoked my cigarettes and served white bread and Lunchables and laughed in a wheezy voice, I know I wasn’t the mom that smelled of sea air and roses. Nor was my kitchen big enough to house entire islands and filled with jars of lemons and copper colanders of just-rinsed arugula. But I could be fun to be around and quite educational; I can name several New Castle kids that came to the house and left with a whole new appreciation of the underground snack world.
I liked the creativity of food, more than the content, and I enjoyed setting a table using the color-wheel, rather than the food pyramid. I’d make “all orange” dinners complete with Kraft mac n cheese, Cheetos, carrots, canned mandarin oranges and Sunny D. (And before you mention a list of healthier orange food options, let me just butternut-squash your good intentions right here – this isn’t the time).
My safety-cone-orange dinners are a fine example of good parenting gone bad. I made them giggle and use their imaginations while pumping them full of life-sucking toxins. (ps. since ranch dressing isn’t orange, no one ate the carrots). And while there are worse mistakes than processed foods (and some of those I’ve made as well), I wonder about the damage done beneath the surface. Like many mothers, my mistakes haunt me as my children transition toward adulthood, carrying the weight of misinformation, mistake and misdirected love.
The hard truth is that there are some parts of parenting where the torch we passed needs to be extinguished completely – leaving our kids standing in the dark trying to find their way. Maybe mine will follow the sound of laughter, and end up at farmers market in front of a color-wheel full of health! I hope so. In the meantime, I hope they’ll relax a little about being perfect, and have a fucking cookie.
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