I cannot tell you the number of times I tried to lure them into the kitchen with teasers like, “Have you no curiosity as to how the cereal gets into the bowl?” or “Come. Stand by my side and together we will ‘just add water.’” Once when I made my son watch as I made French toast, he looked at the egg and milk wash and said, “That’s gross” and walked away.
Take the kid in the utility room pushing every button in sight. Did I not try to share with him my years of experience? “You have to have patience for a ‘sparkling wash,’” I told him. “Wet is just not good enough.” For twenty minutes once, I shared with him the ecstasy of burying your face in a stack of clean underwear. You’d have thought I was giving him instructions on how to fuel a nuclear reactor. He said he was against it and he didn’t want to bring his children into a world of bleach.
I remember the first time I visited my son’s apartment. I stood at the door numbly. It was minutes before I realized that I had just handed my coat to a cockroach who hung it up on the curtain rod in the shower.
My eyes scanned his room. A sofa with a single sheet and a blanket. A card table with four folding chairs. Two cereal bowls, three spoons, a phone with a 50-foot cord, and a $4,000 stereo.
I opened the refrigerator door. On the first shelf was a container half full of yogurt. On the second shelf was a hardened lime. A doggie bag in the meat keeper was later identified as sweet and sour pork.
How did it happen that I raised three children who never picked up anything but a fork? Somewhere between boiling the pacifier and making my own pie crust, I lost ‘em. What really frosted me was that it reflected on me. You have to believe me when I say, they weren’t raised that way. I use soap when I do dishes. I don’t wear a shirt the fourth day by turning it wrong-side-out. I do not store Starbucks cups under the gas pedal. I do not sleep on pillows that have no cases on them, nor have I ever drunk milk out of a carton. Before every meal I used to ask, “Did you wash your hands and face?”
In reply, a 24-inch tongue came out of their mouths and, like a street cleaner, made a path, bordered on the north by a nose, east and west by cheeks, and on the south by a chin. A single “no” would have done it.
To test my theory of failure with my kids, I put a book on the floor and said to the first child to arrive, “There’s a book on the floor.” He said, “I know. I nearly broke my neck tripping over it. Better pick it up,” and disappeared. The second one came by and when I told him of the book said, “You’re real swift today.” I was too disgusted to try it with the third one.
Thankfully, I’m out of the woods. They married up.