Well, I’m back to meal planning.
Once every few years I try to be a whole new woman, and get my life together where the dinner prep and grocery shopping is concerned.
I already only wear Birkenstocks.
I can’t let EVERY part of me fall.
Once every few years I give myself motivational speeches in the mirror about reducing food waste, and spicing it up a bit.
“Come on, Kerri. You can do this. I know you can. You were made for more than this.”
I sit down with notebook paper and maybe some colorful pens.
(Everyone knows people who have it together use at least two colors on any list)
I feel pride in myself returning as I pin it to the refrigerator afterwards.
Heroes are made just like this.
“Hello, Old friend,” I sigh as the best version of me returns.
My use of a meal plan is like a leap-year, of sorts.
Once every four years you will know if on Monday it will be chicken or ham.
I really used to love cooking so much more when I didn’t feel so chained to it.
Being married to a man who has only made himself one sandwich in 17 years, (and I could tell you the exact date) and then giving birth to four daughters who fancy themselves food critics tends to take the wind out of your sails in the food department a bit.
My life as a mother has been filled with glowing compliments such as my favorite:
“This dinner is too hard to chew and to want.”
But, lately my old method of hiding my head in the sand about it until around 4pm the night of has been adding to my already mounting stress,
so I decided it was time to get back to some type of plan.
You know,
give my kids a tangible record of the next 7 days worth of food they will have to hate.
When, on Saturday, the girls asked me what was for dinner, I told them I was making a garlic ginger pork loin in the crockpot, and then pairing that with roasted bell peppers and pineapple, which I planned to put over brown rice and top with a soy glaze.
Sort of a Hawaiian-style recipe I thought sounded pretty amazing.
At the news of this, however, my two teenage daughters dramatically clung to each other and pretended to sob and shake.
I knew exactly what they were doing.
They do some version of this every time.
They have tried convincing me now for years that my use of the crock-pot is their single biggest childhood trauma.
One of them mentioned calling child protective services, and mused out loud about their business hours, and if it was maybe too late in the day.
They used the word “triggered” as they stroked each other’s hair and pretended to cry.
They have tried telling me of the torture that was coming home from school in the afternoons during elementary school, and spotting it plugged in on the counter; The smell of soup or stew filling the room.
They said that they knew right then in the doorway that whatever was in that pot was about to be all they ate for the next 8 solid days – Something that never once happened.
It was, maybe, 3 days tops.
This scene was night TWO of my meal plan.
Two meek little days into my attempt to self-reinvent.
Already the kids were complaining about something, and for the hundredth time in my life I wondered why I even bother with it.
Maybe I should let them just eat what is in their nature, and do away with homemade meals altogether.
They can just eat Takis and drink blue drinks and iced coffees until the age when the need for Tums takes hold.
They can make every box in the pantry look like it should have been stored in a bear box, ripped beyond recognition;
Because, apparently, this is what happens when I try for once instead of flinging Dino-nuggets at them:
An actual skit of their suffering.
A whole speech on how family dinners have, somehow, irreversibly wounded them.
If they think my delicious Hawaiian dinner is cause for therapy, I would like to present to them every recipe in my mom’s Weight Watcher’s cookbook from the years 1970-1988.
Kids these days know nothing of food torture.
They’ve never had Spaghetti suspended in a jello mold.
They have never looked at any plate I’ve ever given them and wondered why everything on it was a pale grey.
The night of this sob-skit,
in what I can only assume was an attempt to avoid that crock-pot dinner,
my 15 year old, Chloe, went to bed at 6:30pm.
I found her sound asleep with her mouth open in bed when I went to tell her to come fix her plate. This kid is usually awake until 1am.
“No matter,” I thought.
*pats down a tin foil wrap over a large serving*
I can manage child dinner warfare.
“A whole new me,” I say, pressing on with my meal planning.
Nothing phases me now.
It’s 2022 and I’ve seen WAY worse things than teen meal disdain.
*looks through the Weight Watcher cookbook*
*Writes “Jellied Tomato Refresher and Shrimp Salmon Mold” in for Wednesday*
Mom Outnumbered
Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.
