When my middle son was a toddler, he had a thing about food texture. In the family video vault, that place where VHS tapes go to die, there’s film footage of him sitting at the bar in a random rent house somewhere. He’s probably 3. He swears we had stuffed his mouth to capacity with green beans, French style, to be exact. He doesn’t know. He was 3. Ask me, the mom who was there. At most, there were 3 green beans hanging from his mouth. Also, there was lots of slobber and tears. See, he didn’t care for green beans or green anything or, really, any foods at all. Any edible substance placed into his mouth would result in a full, catastrophic melt down of epic proportions. He began dropping weight. The pediatrician became concerned. “Let’s try and get this guy to eat, shall we?” I cried all the way home. How dare that self-absorbed doctor dare to look at me and assume the problem was my lack of trying! So, I tried harder, hence the green bean episode. Finally, I caved. Fine, let the kid eat the only thing he’s willing to eat. Enter Peter Pan creamy peanut butter. That’s all he consumed until he turned 12. I am not kidding. If we were at a family wedding with a delicious buffet of barbeque and mashed potatoes and Czech delicacies like klobase and strudel and apricot kolaches (those sausage things at the doughnut store are pigs in a blanket, not kolaches, FYI), out of my mom purse would appear 2 slices of white bread and a jar of peanut butter. Relatives began gifting him with the industrial cans from Sam’s Club, as a joke. But, the real story was a mom win. I supplemented his 2-ingredient diet with Slim-Fast. I mean, there are nutrients in there. There was no Ensure back then. There were no calorie dense protein powders. It was the 90s. Eventually, he turned 12 and ate a hamburger at a friend’s house. I cried because I wasn’t there to witness the miracle. At least there were no more sightings of a kid who lived off of diet drinks and peanut butter. It was magic, though, that formula. That’s what mommas do. We make magic.
I think the most amazing take away of my childhood is my realization that I grew up poor. See, I had no idea. I just thought we were weird, but in a good way. Kids in school would listen to my rendition of home life with perplexing screwed up looks on their faces. I rocked their worlds. They thought bacon came from grocery stores. I had to teach them about friends who slaughter pigs and how the unclaimed freight store sold industrial bacon slicers. I was the first girl to wear makeup out of my friend group. My father would not allow makeup in any form. My mom covertly showed me that pool table cue chalk (other odd things: we had the remnants of my father’s pool hall inside our home – pool table instead of sofa, jukebox in my room…) subbed nicely as eyeshadow in the late 70s. Mom was an amazing seamstress. She sewed all my clothes. I did not relish walking around in her homemade version of high waisted flare leg jeans complete with decorative stitching on the back pockets, but I did appreciate how it reinforced my hippy narrative, especially during my Rita Coolidge wannabe phase. My hair was washed once a week and rinsed in rainwater. We used kerosene heaters in lieu of an HVAC system. We canned. We line dried. We thrifted. We did macrame. We took more things home from the city dump than we deposited. It was a wonderful childhood. Mainly, I owe it all to my mom, who took a bunch of junk and turned it into something so much more than passable. She was a homesteading extraordinaire before homesteading was cool. Sure, the kids at school thought it was a bit too Laura Ingalls Wilder meets Haight-Ashbury, but I was good with that reputa-tion. I thought it was magical.
Recently, the peanut butter kid called to chat. “Well, I really screwed up again,” was his intro line. I asked him to expand. We’re taking our first ever family vacay this summer: the big, blended fam bam, the grandkids, the wives, the SO. We are beach bound! Between 3 of us, we have 12 dogs. So, everyone has to board their babies. Peanut butter’s dog, Daisy, needed updated vaccines. There happened to be a low-cost veterinarian clinic set up at his local HEB, PB is a Houstonite these days, so he scooped up Daisy the wonder dog and went right down. He recalls the technician saying she would email the records to him, but he has this thing about keeping his email nice and organized, unlike his mother, who has 20,000 unread emails at this moment. He accidentally deleted Daisy’s proof of immunization. Then, he accidentally deleted the delete. He couldn’t remember the name of the clinic. He wasn’t even 100% sure which HEB he’d been to that day. Granted, he’s turning 33 soon, but to me he’s my baby with a mouth full of green beans. I thought, “Huh, I bet I could…..” An hour later I called back. “Google Blankety Blank Veterinarian Clinic,” I told him. “I think they’re contracted out to all of the HEB stores in the greater Houston area.” The next day I received a text from old peanut butter. It read “MOTHER HOW DO YOU TO THESE THINGS? That was the right vet! You saved the freaking day!” “I’ll never tell, son,” was my response. Mom magic comes with a strict non-compete clause. We must never give up the secret. Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms and the ones who helped raise us along the way. We are magic.
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