I am back in Florida for a few weeks and then I am moving back up north to live with my daughter. My parents are doing well - my mom actually looks good and my father is doing well, however he looks like Howard Hughes. He refuses to cut his hair or his beard until he absolutely has to and wears a baseball cap on his head, I suppose to feel young again. I don't know. I hope he doesn't scare Ashanti when she comes in a couple weeks. This is the same man who made my brothers wear crew cuts when they were young, and wore his hair like that as well, all the years I was comin' up. It was definitely not the style at the time and I'm sure my brothers hated their hair like that. He was exactly like that sgt. in the Marines on the TV show "Gomer Pyle," way back in the 60's. In fact, when I watched the show, it was scary how much that actor and my dad looked and acted alike.
When I first walked in the house, I noticed that my mom looks much better. She actually had more skin on her face and looked healthy. She told me that she gained 5 pounds and I told her that that was awesome. She still weighs herself at Publix on the giant scale in the front of the store. I'm positive that she still announces to whoever is around at the time how much she weighs. She delights in this as much as I delight in a hot fudge sundae. As much as I love my mom, we are so not alike. She and I have much different ideas about beauty, self and raising children.
My mother is, in the truest sense of the word, a food "nazi." No matter which room in the house she is in, if I go into the kitchen at any time of day or night, she will be in there in the matter of seconds. She is quickly alerted by the sound of the refrigerator door being opened, no matter how quiet I try to be. Sometimes I think she flies in there with a swoosh of her wings. She feels she must sit or stand, guarding the refrigerator and watching every single morsel I put in my mouth. She will recite endearing phrases such as "Don't forget dinner is in twenty minutes," or "Why don't you go and take a nap now," or "Is that all the cookies that are left?" She has, and always had, a vehement desire to see that my brothers and I adhere to her strict serving sizes and demand for complete food submission. And because she was such a food "nazi" when we were coming up, as soon as her foot stepped out of the house, we would steal as much food as we could from the refrigerator and the freezer in the basement. And so, you see, because she wanted us so much to be thin and trim, she actually caused us to all be overweight. It's such a reverse-psychology kind of thing that I learned in grade school. She has yet to learn this and I'm sure it puzzles her why she never got us the way she wanted us.
The freezer in the basement was awesome. It held little pound cakes and treats that we would gleefully eat and then stuff the wrappers at the bottom of the garbage can. We did this for a long time before she actually began to wonder why the treats in the freezer seemed to disappear so fast. Those treats were not for us - they were for my father, who also got to eat ice cream from the container, eat off bricks of chocolate my Nana would bring for him and drink pop - all of which were off limits to us. Instead, we would have Jello for dessert, or fruit, or something equally not as exciting as what my dad would get. We would drool watching him down a 1/2 carton of ice cream with a spoon and imagined what it would be like to be able to do that. It became too much torture, so we actually snuck and ate several times out of the container, attempting to make the spoon carvings just like my dad's, and we got away with it for awhile. That is until she made my dad put the ice cream in a bowl.
In comparison, my kids pretty much ate whatever they wanted to, when they wanted to. I mean, I made dinners most of the time, but they were usually simple meals and I didn't worry about how many carbs there were, etc. I was always tired coming home from work, so I bought a lot of frozen pizzas and made tons of macaroni and cheese, because we received "free" cheese when my kids were young. The cheese was so processed that it hardly melted - it would just sit there and you really had to mix it up good or it was one big blob. But it was food (I think) and it filled our bellies. They also ate a lot of Ramen noodles. Whatever was cheap and still filled the belly. I never hounded my kids on what they ate or didn't eat. I never told them that people were starving in China so they had to finish all the food on their plate. I was determined that I wouldn't raise my kids the same way I was raised, but I probably should have made them healthier meals. When you're on welfare or making minimal money at your job and still have to pay for day care, the cheapest food is what you could afford. I'm not proud of that fact - but it's just the reality of it. It was what it was. It is what it is. I like that phrase a lot. It is what it is. Simple but absolutely true, without going into a plethora of explanations.
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