“Hey, Mom,” my 16-year-old son said to me as we sat in our sunroom together one Saturday morning recently, “how are you going to spend two entire nights at Uncle DJ’s house and not fight with him?” I paused, coffee cup halfway to my mouth, suddenly deep in thought. “I hadn’t thought about that,” I murmured. “Maybe we should cancel the trip.” My husband and two teenagers and I were planning to stay at my younger brother’s house in Las Vegas for two nights before hitting the MGM Grand for a night, then driving our rental car four hours to Los Angeles to spend the last two days and nights of our spring break trip hitting every single tourist trap L.A. had to offer (update: it was amazing) before hopping on a plane to fly us all the way back across the country to Missouri. My younger brother DJ has been in the military for the last 26 years and he’s always living in really exotic, faraway locations, so we don’t see each other very often. Maybe once every couple of ...
My boys once had a neighborhood friend we all grew to love. Notice how I said that: grew to love. It took a couple of years. When he was just a little guy, probably three years old, he would come toddling into our yard while my 1-year-old was playing with the big toy dump truck that one of his aunts had gotten him for his birthday. He would swiftly grab it from my son, who was a pretty laid-back kid. My son’s eyes would grow wide when he realized what was happening, and my son would snatch back the truck that he had been playing peacefully with for the last 30 minutes. The neighbor kid would look up at me and say accusingly, “Jay won’t share!!!” I would do what any good mother trying to teach her children valuable life lessons in a somewhat- functioning society would do: shrug my shoulders and suggest the neighbor boy play with a different toy or go home and play with his own. It didn’t take long for the neighbor kid to realize that he wasn’t ...
One Thanksgiving about 20 years ago, I made brownies. “They taste like….” my younger brother said, chewing around a piece carefully as he furrowed his brow in concentration, hoping to find just the right word, “…they taste like paint .” I snapped my fingers and nodded because he’d done it. He’d found the right word. Even though I had never actually tasted paint, not even one tiny lick of the wall when I was a little girl, they did. Those brownies tasted like paint. There were a lot of excuses made for me that day from well-meaning members of my extended family: the oil was probably bad; the butter might’ve been salted; maybe the chicken that had laid the particular egg that I’d used in the recipe had been feeling a little “off” that day… “Or maybe she just sucks at baking,” my older sister suggested as she floated through the kitchen to refill people’s drinks. Well, of course she would say that. She was the one hosting Thanksgiving that year...
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