At moments in this life one may pause long enough to be consumed by the thoughts of how life got away or so out of control. Such a moment occurred for me this morning as I found myself starting to pull out the typical ingredients to make the girls some typical scrambled eggs for breakfast. Spying the remains of the onion used for tacos earlier in the week, a half block of cheddar sitting with the processed cheese product slices, and remembering the cache of cooked bacon in the freezer, I pondered the delicious possibilities. But ::sigh:: the children wouldn't appreciate this. They don't like onions.
The internal uproar began. How many sacrifices have I made -- by my own choice -- as a wife and a mother for the sake of keeping peace and eating together? All the ingredients I've forgone, recipes I've skipped over or simplified, meals I've eaten that I'd rather not...
Fuck 'em, I decided. I'd make the eggs the way I like them. This is a battle I'm choosing to fight. As I put it to Bug as she later pontificated to me over the impossibility of eating around the onions on her plate, "You can't avoid onions all your life."
This, by the way, is the quote I'd love to see if I've any future inclusion in quote anthologies.
Surely they will hate me and CPS is going to be contacted before this battle is over. I'll be accused of starving my children. Really I won't be, but to get to the redundant wisdom of, "If they're hungry, they'll eat it," my children will have to be exposed to several meals that they refuse to eat before that hunger will become more important than their stubborn belief that distaste means inedible.
This will be a good thing. The girls will learn to appreciate food, or at least keep their mouths shut and eat politely; the pantry will be cleared of unfavored cereals and the whimsical ingredients for "someday" meals; and Momma may even start to enjoy cooking again.
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