All I Want For Dinner Is...

My mother confesses to me one day, with only mild shame, that after dropping my father off at the airport, she headed straight to the local pie shop. Knowing that she would be home alone for the entire weekend, she purchased a fresh peach pie. She went home and had a piece for breakfast, a piece for lunch and a piece for dinner. This eating habit continued until the whole pie was gone, which happened to coincide with my father’s return.

I find my mother isn’t alone. In the coziness of a front porch on a summer’s eve, my aunt confesses similar eating habits. After years of cooking for a large family, she now lives alone and has the freedom to eat whatever she wants, whenever she wants. She doesn’t realize how envious I am and how I look forward to the time when I can eat cake for dinner and won’t have to hide the M&M’s I’m eating for breakfast. But, for now I must act like a mother, the Trojan horse responsible for my family’s well-being and health. I will continue spending endless hours washing lettuce, boiling brown rice, sautéing onions, garlic and garden tomatoes, when all I really want for dinner is cookie dough or Breyer’s Bing Cherry ice cream.

Some mother’s I learn, create a loophole that allows them to retain their healthy-eating-habits-mother status while indulging in forbidden foods. My friend complains to her mother how her own children eat all the “good food” and she never gets any. Her mother confesses to harboring a secret snack stash for years. She calls it her “cheap therapy.”

Perhaps this desire is passed from mother to daughter. One night I make a wonderful dinner of steamed broccoli, cauliflower, rice, and marinated chicken. I call the children to dinner and my youngest daughter arrives first. “What’s for dinner?” she asks with suspicious accusation. I repeat the menu of which I am quite proud. She puts her hands on her hips and declares, “But I wanted rice pudding!” Knowing just how she feels I answer, “Someday you can!”

Postscript: I know what all you health minded people are thinking-- the way I really want to eat will drastically affect my health and well being, and I will be prone to excessive lethargy; but then again-- no one will know how often I nap.