On a random day I was preparing lunch for my young sons when I had an epiphany. As we age this tends to happen more often.
Smearing the peanut butter evenly across the bread with homemade jam, it occurred to me that the crust is not where all the vitamins are. And we don't have to eat the crust because that is the part that is good for you. That's right. When I was little and would ask my mom to cut off the crust because my friends had their mothers do it, she would say she couldn't because that was the part that was good for me to make me grow up strong and healthy.
"Hunh," I thought to myself, continuing to make lunch catching on to her deception which led me to another epiphany that she didn't peel my apples because the vitamins were in the peels. In reality, she didn't want to stop long enough to peel them. I didn't have to eat the banana skin or orange skins. This led me to wonder if carrots really did give me prettier eyes. And every time I balked at a casserole she made us; it really didn't use to be my favorite meal. I had never liked it. In my childhood impressionable years, I had perpetually been duped.
I started thinking back on my childhood. There really wasn't a girl my dad had known who once stood up on the bathtub and fell and busted her head wide open, or a boy he once knew who got too close to the lawnmower and a rock blew out hitting him, and he had to go to the hospital to get a shot. And the red mercurochrome she put on my scrapes was not really monkey blood. And then it hit me. They had killed my cow.
That's right. When I was a little girl living out on acres of farmland, we bought a grown cow that we kept tied up back by the quail and pheasant pens. I named the cow Daisy and every day after school I would race down the dirt lane from our house to pet her and tell her about my day. I had no idea what Daisy was doing there or why until the day she was not there. Mom and Dad said they had sold her.
And then one night at the dinner table Mom mentioned how tender the meat was in the casserole and Dad referenced the cow, Daisy.
I put down my fork in shock, but they quickly remembered their story and said it was a different cow. They had sold the one we had living by the quail pens and bought a different one to slaughter because Daisy had become my friend. Now, as a grown adult raising four boys it hit me like a ton of bricks. I had spent the remainder of that winter eating my pet.
Crust was not where the vitamins were. That was where the bread turned brown from being baked. Apple peelings housed pesticides not vitamins, and Mom didn't have to lock their bedroom door some nights because it would get drafty.
How much of my childhood had genuinely been real? The whole Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, and Santa Claus thing had been bad enough. The elves hiding all year round watching me to tell Santa if I was bad in order to make me stop having a tantrum because I was afraid I wouldn't get presents? I wouldn't grow tall if I ate my vegetables. I would grow as tall as my DNA was designed to grow. And if I swallowed watermelon seeds not a thing was going to grow out of my ears!
Just because I was a young impressionable child how dare I be manipulated out of fear and high hopes of being tall, strong, and beautiful. Wow, what a welcome to adulthood.
I called the boys to the table and when one began eating only the center, I informed him he needed to eat the crust because that's where the vitamins were, and if he didn't stop kicking his brother under the table I was going to tell Santa he was being bad.
Parenthood does not have to reinvent the wheel. But I did stop and say, "Hey, that cow you all named Rocky? We are planning to eat him eventually."
They shrugged and said Dad had already told them, and they kept eating around the crust and kicking under the table. I was obviously not a master at deception.
