For as long as I have known her, my mother has refused to wear a bra inside the house. Unless she had to leave the house, she wouldn't get dressed at all. Her usual nightgown -- and subsequently what she wore unless she was heading out -- was an exceptionally large, polyester muumuu. She had a collection of them, all in the same cut but different flowered patterns and colors. She even bought a slightly smaller muumuu for me when I was a child, but due to its wide neck coupled with her tendency to shop a few sizes larger than I needed, I couldn't physically keep it from falling past my shoulders and off my body.
My mother had a few regular volunteer jobs she did each month, either at my school or at the county health department's Well Child Clinic. She spent Friday mornings grocery shopping with her mother, and they spent every Wednesday together at Walmart, where my mother would buy several hundred dollars worth of paper goods, cleaning products that wouldn't be used, and dozens of small fad toys (think Koosh balls or Beanie Babies) that no one we knew wanted. These were the times my mother got dressed.
When my mother got home from grocery shopping, she would be too tired to do much else. I remember rushing to help my dad bring in the groceries when either it was summer or I was too young to attend full day school. My mother would carry grocery bags to the kitchen too. Then, as she always did when she returned home from somewhere, she would whip off her bra, settle in to the couch, and turn on the TV, while my dad and I put the groceries away in the kitchen. My job when I was little was to hand each item to my dad out of the bags on the floor where he couldn't reach them from his wheelchair. He would squeeze the vast amounts of new food we may or may not eat in among the rotting produce and meat left in the refrigerator from one week to the next. The various bags of potato chips usually went in the white particle board dresser that had inexplicably been in the kitchen since before I was born. The other boxes of junk food were mostly piled on top of the dresser, but I also remember them scattered over the counters, atop the kitchen table where we were theoretically supposed to eat but never did because it was buried under piles of food, and across the occasional flat surface in the dining room. There was one piece of furniture in the dining room that always held the most Little Debbie snack cakes, but I can't remember what it was -- a bench? A shoe rack?
I don't remember my parents cleaning out the refrigerator more than once, when the original, yellow, 20-year-old refrigerator stopped working and they had to replace it, though it might have happened a handful of times when I wasn't aware. I don't know how old the junk food was, but I remember finding a box of moldy low-fat Twinkies in the dining room in the early '90s. Something in the low-fat formula must have imbued them with the ability to mold.
After we put the groceries away, we would eat lunch in front of the TV in the living room. Sometimes it was grilled cheese; sometimes it was hot dogs. I usually drank milk while my mother nursed a 64 oz. cup of 7Up or Pepsi. What we watched depended on the year. My dad always had his own TV in another room, but the rest of us shared the one in the living room, so unless there was a particular show I followed that my mother liked enough to want to watch with me, we watched whatever she chose. When I was in preschool it was All My Children at noon followed by One Life to Live. At least one summer in the late '90s it was TLC's A Baby Story. I remember complaining to my mother that it was hard to eat on my lunch break from my summer job while watching a woman give birth, but she refused to change the channel regardless of how many times she'd seen an episode. There wasn't anywhere else in the house to sit and eat, so I eventually stopped coming home.
My mother's afternoons usually featured another nap, which usually meant changing out of the rest of her leaving-the-house clothes and back into a muumuu. I say "another" because she slept off and on throughout the day and night with little regard for the hour. If she had a regular sleep schedule, I never caught on to it. She usually slept on the living room couch, though there were a few years in the late '80s when she tried to share Dante's room with him. She bought him a set of bunk beds and a matching desk with the money that had been in his savings account supposedly earmarked for college. The lower bunk was hers, she said, as was the desk, which she positioned in the already crowded dining room, opposite her old desk. It was quickly buried under collections of pens, papers, old mail, and leftover Koosh balls.
Showing posts with label food. Show all posts
Showing posts with label food. Show all posts
Monday, July 18, 2016
Sunday, April 24, 2016
A Good Memory of My Dad
He used to drive me to White Castle. We would roll the windows down because my mother wouldn't allow it when she was in the van. He always played jazz or blues on the stereo because they were his favorites, and my mother wouldn't listen to anything but oldies when she was around ("the best of the '50s, '60s, and early '70s!" the radio ads used to tout). My dad and I listened to Wes Montgomery and Joe Pass and Muddy Waters. He liked guitarists because he played the guitar, or maybe he played the guitar because he liked the sound of it. I didn't like or understand jazz or blues at the time, but he seems to have planted a seed that grew up with me. Scarcely a day went by in the first 18 years of my life that I didn't hear "Misty" or "Willow Weep for Me." I have the voice for them now too. I didn't even know those songs had words back then.
We would order our tiny cheeseburgers at the drive-thru and then sit in the parking lot with the windows rolled down while we ate. I always took the pickles off mine, and he would add them to his own. I was a picky eater back then.
We would order our tiny cheeseburgers at the drive-thru and then sit in the parking lot with the windows rolled down while we ate. I always took the pickles off mine, and he would add them to his own. I was a picky eater back then.
Tuesday, March 1, 2016
Satirical Rhyming Verse
One of the ways I've processed my anger since childhood is through satirical rhyming verse. This is the sort of passive-aggressive, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog coping mechanism I learned growing up with my family. Where sharing your feelings would get you in trouble for inadvertently offending a parent or for "being too sensitive," mocking whoever upset me didn't seem to have a downside back then. Not even my parents wanted to lash out just to be accused of "not being able to take a joke."
I remember turning in a poem in elementary school about going out to dinner with my family. Each stanza featured a different dish my mother sent back for its unexpected imperfections. As I recall, she was more regal in my version, but also less embarrassing. I drew a picture of her cheeseburger and chocolate malt "with dots in it," as she'd complained repeatedly to the waiter, to accompany the poem. I got an A on the assignment, as per usual, and it even hung on display for my school's poetry month, to my mother's relatively quiet embarrassment.
In high school I penned a series of mocking poems about a character named Fattie. Sometimes Fattie was my mother; sometimes she was a classmate. They were vague enough in terms of detail that the people I wrote them about could never seem to identify themselves. I encouraged them to read the poems and then, when they laughed at my depictions of them, I fed off their reactions in a Palpatine-esque fashion. One particularly difficult classmate who had bullied me from before I knew who she was started collecting my poems to make into a Fattie Anthology, never knowing the first one she'd read had been about her.
A December or two ago I started writing a Christmas song about my dad. It includes lines like "My asshole dad, my psycho brother / I wonder how long till you kill each other," and ends with "Merry Christmas / I won't care when you die." It's cheerful and up tempo. I never finished it.
I remember turning in a poem in elementary school about going out to dinner with my family. Each stanza featured a different dish my mother sent back for its unexpected imperfections. As I recall, she was more regal in my version, but also less embarrassing. I drew a picture of her cheeseburger and chocolate malt "with dots in it," as she'd complained repeatedly to the waiter, to accompany the poem. I got an A on the assignment, as per usual, and it even hung on display for my school's poetry month, to my mother's relatively quiet embarrassment.
In high school I penned a series of mocking poems about a character named Fattie. Sometimes Fattie was my mother; sometimes she was a classmate. They were vague enough in terms of detail that the people I wrote them about could never seem to identify themselves. I encouraged them to read the poems and then, when they laughed at my depictions of them, I fed off their reactions in a Palpatine-esque fashion. One particularly difficult classmate who had bullied me from before I knew who she was started collecting my poems to make into a Fattie Anthology, never knowing the first one she'd read had been about her.
A December or two ago I started writing a Christmas song about my dad. It includes lines like "My asshole dad, my psycho brother / I wonder how long till you kill each other," and ends with "Merry Christmas / I won't care when you die." It's cheerful and up tempo. I never finished it.
Thursday, November 12, 2015
Mother Takes Her Cut
At the end of my sophomore year of college, I applied for and accepted a campus job as a Resident Assistant. My payment was a rent-free studio efficiency apartment that would normally cost a little over $10k for the school year. In order to accept the job, I had to quit my mail room job I had worked since freshman year. It had been my sole source of income during the school year.
Because my RA apartment didn't come with a meal plan, I had no way to pay for food. I also had no way to pay for the phone line the school required me to have, or clothes or anything else. My social security checks were still being kept by my mother to pay for my books and tuition. My parents kicked in a lot toward tuition, and I paid for the rest with a hefty academic scholarship and student loans.
After my explanation of the situation -- that she wouldn't have to pay for my housing and could redirect funds toward the things I'd previously paid for with my mail room job -- my mother agreed to give me a monthly allowance so I could buy food and necessities. I believe it was $150 per month, if I recall correctly. I know the budget I worked out allowed me to spend $20 per week on food, so I had to stop buying whole grain healthy stuff and eat a lot more ramen. Unfortunately, that was the same year I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, so I had a lot of doctors bills, and I had to pay bus fare three times per week to get to the hospital for my initial follow-up appointments and some related blood tests.
I called my mother and told her I needed more money to pay hospital bills, and she screamed at me for daring to pay any of them in full. ALWAYS put them on a payment plan, she told me. NEVER pay hospital bills in full! I hadn't known. I asked for payment plans going forward, but I still needed more money. I was barely getting by, and my boss got mad whenever I argued that I didn't have money to eat restaurant food with the other RAs. My boss expected me to pitch in an equal amount whether I ate their food or not. My mother eventually gave me a little more money and purchased me a small supplemental meal plan through the school so that I could eat larger, healthier meals occasionally. Then she spent somewhere in neighborhood of $70 -- more than three weeks' worth of grocery money in my world -- to send me a Hershey's Chocolate Tower of Treats made up almost exclusively of foods my doctors had told me to avoid, such as nuts and popcorn. I had even told her about the diet restrictions before she sent it.
After graduation, after my mother went off the deep end, my dad mentioned the monthly allowance I had lived off of for those last two years of college, except the figure he quoted to me was more than double what I had received. "She told me you hated me," he said. "She said I had to give the money to her because you would never accept it if it came from me directly because you hated me so much." And then she had taken a more than 50% cut for herself. Every single month. I'll let slide the fact that she told my dad I hated him because parental alienation was old hat with her and shouldn't have come as a surprise. But knowing I was struggling, hearing me cry over the phone that I couldn't afford anything and was embarrassing myself in front of my boss, she made the repeated decision to take her cut. Every. Single. Month.
My dad didn't even control their money. He only ever bothered controlling his own comparatively tiny social security checks, which were about 10% of their total monthly income. The rest was all hers. About $9k per month, all hers, at least $6k of which should have been disposable income. I guess she wanted more.
[Edited: I forgot to factor in my tuition and their various car payments -- I don't even remember how many cars they would have been paying off at that time -- when I said they had $6k in monthly disposable income. I was going on what their finances looked like when I took them over a couple years later. I think their mortgage payments were less back then, before the refinance, but I don't know by how much. They might have had as little as $4k disposable income per month. Of course that number also factors in if my mother had paid both the home equity line of credit payment and my tuition rather than paying the HELOC payment every month and then immediately borrowing against it again to pay my tuition, which is what she said she did (in one of her "you are why we're poor" rants). Actually, she said she paid for at least one car with the HELOC too, so that payment wouldn't have been extra. Never mind. I can't even picture what finances looked like when my mother was in charge of them. I've tried before, and that way madness lies.]
Because my RA apartment didn't come with a meal plan, I had no way to pay for food. I also had no way to pay for the phone line the school required me to have, or clothes or anything else. My social security checks were still being kept by my mother to pay for my books and tuition. My parents kicked in a lot toward tuition, and I paid for the rest with a hefty academic scholarship and student loans.
After my explanation of the situation -- that she wouldn't have to pay for my housing and could redirect funds toward the things I'd previously paid for with my mail room job -- my mother agreed to give me a monthly allowance so I could buy food and necessities. I believe it was $150 per month, if I recall correctly. I know the budget I worked out allowed me to spend $20 per week on food, so I had to stop buying whole grain healthy stuff and eat a lot more ramen. Unfortunately, that was the same year I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, so I had a lot of doctors bills, and I had to pay bus fare three times per week to get to the hospital for my initial follow-up appointments and some related blood tests.
I called my mother and told her I needed more money to pay hospital bills, and she screamed at me for daring to pay any of them in full. ALWAYS put them on a payment plan, she told me. NEVER pay hospital bills in full! I hadn't known. I asked for payment plans going forward, but I still needed more money. I was barely getting by, and my boss got mad whenever I argued that I didn't have money to eat restaurant food with the other RAs. My boss expected me to pitch in an equal amount whether I ate their food or not. My mother eventually gave me a little more money and purchased me a small supplemental meal plan through the school so that I could eat larger, healthier meals occasionally. Then she spent somewhere in neighborhood of $70 -- more than three weeks' worth of grocery money in my world -- to send me a Hershey's Chocolate Tower of Treats made up almost exclusively of foods my doctors had told me to avoid, such as nuts and popcorn. I had even told her about the diet restrictions before she sent it.
After graduation, after my mother went off the deep end, my dad mentioned the monthly allowance I had lived off of for those last two years of college, except the figure he quoted to me was more than double what I had received. "She told me you hated me," he said. "She said I had to give the money to her because you would never accept it if it came from me directly because you hated me so much." And then she had taken a more than 50% cut for herself. Every single month. I'll let slide the fact that she told my dad I hated him because parental alienation was old hat with her and shouldn't have come as a surprise. But knowing I was struggling, hearing me cry over the phone that I couldn't afford anything and was embarrassing myself in front of my boss, she made the repeated decision to take her cut. Every. Single. Month.
My dad didn't even control their money. He only ever bothered controlling his own comparatively tiny social security checks, which were about 10% of their total monthly income. The rest was all hers. About $9k per month, all hers, at least $6k of which should have been disposable income. I guess she wanted more.
[Edited: I forgot to factor in my tuition and their various car payments -- I don't even remember how many cars they would have been paying off at that time -- when I said they had $6k in monthly disposable income. I was going on what their finances looked like when I took them over a couple years later. I think their mortgage payments were less back then, before the refinance, but I don't know by how much. They might have had as little as $4k disposable income per month. Of course that number also factors in if my mother had paid both the home equity line of credit payment and my tuition rather than paying the HELOC payment every month and then immediately borrowing against it again to pay my tuition, which is what she said she did (in one of her "you are why we're poor" rants). Actually, she said she paid for at least one car with the HELOC too, so that payment wouldn't have been extra. Never mind. I can't even picture what finances looked like when my mother was in charge of them. I've tried before, and that way madness lies.]
Sunday, July 26, 2015
The Terrible Eating Habits of My Childhood Home
When I was little, I remember being yelled at on a fairly regular basis for not eating all the food on my plate at dinner. Actually, I remember this being a thing for as long as my mother cooked, which ended around the time I was in middle school, to be replaced with dining out, takeout, and fast food. My dad would sit with me and tell me I couldn't leave from the table until I "cleaned my plate," and I remember sitting for a few minutes until he would give up in a string of curses and scream at me to get out of his sight.
When I got older and moved out on my own, my mother told me about how she hadn't understood serving sizes when Dante and I were kids. She laughed about how she used to cook a roast or a casserole, divide it into fourths, and serve us each a quarter of the meal. From the time I was able to eat solid food, she had expected me to eat the same amount as my morbidly obese dad and mom, each of whom was eating at least two adult sized servings, often more.
She also laughed about how fat Dante had been as a toddler when she fed him two adult portions of sugared instant oatmeal every morning because one packet of oatmeal "just didn't look like that much." Toddlerhood was the only time the naturally thin Dante had been chubby in his life, though his eating habits never improved. His regular meals as a 20-year-old man consisted of hot dogs and lunch meat, potato chip sandwiches, a variety of Little Debbie snack cakes, and candy from the limitless supply my mother kept in baskets around the house.
I, on the other hand, spent my childhood wondering why I was heavier than most of the kids at my elementary school. The candy around the house didn't help, but it was a comparatively mild problem. My mother encouraged me to eat cake or cookies for breakfast on the frequent occasions that we had them on hand because "they have eggs and flour in them, just like breakfast food." In retrospect, she probably just wanted me to leave her alone so she could go back to sleep, but I took this logic so far that I ate Cadbury Creme Eggs for breakfast in the weeks surrounding Easter because I thought they were made of real eggs, not just chocolate and colored fondant. I knew nothing. No one corrected me.
I knew I was chubbier than I wanted to be, but my mother insisted I had inherited my figure from her and it could not be altered. "We're big boned," she said. I didn't get made fun of to my face often, but I do recall being called "Fatso" by a boy I didn't know and being asked by one of my best friends in elementary school if I oversalted my food because I was "overweight and had trouble losing weight," and I guess it didn't occur to her these problems could also come from eating mostly junk food.
My mother forbade me to drink low-fat milk with my school lunches because, as she explained much later, she had fed me skim milk as a new baby and been scolded by my pediatrician for doing so. I drank full-fat milk with every meal thereafter, blind to the fact that I eventually got older and had different dietary needs. We drank a lot of soda too. My mother kept a Big Gulp full of 7Up or Pepsi on the table beside the couch and drank from it all day everyday. I don't remember having a glass of water before the age of eight or so, when Dante started drinking water with his meals and I insisted on having the same because anything he did was "cool."
When I was ten or eleven, I had my first cholesterol test, and it was already over 200. For reference, an adult's total cholesterol should be below 150 for optimal health. My pediatrician told me I needed to lower my cholesterol, but I didn't know what cholesterol was, let alone how to lower mine. He was shocked to hear I was still drinking full-fat milk at my age, so we switched to low-fat and eventually to skim. My mother encouraged me to reduce my saturated fat intake -- another cause of high cholesterol, my doctor said -- by buying me countless boxes of Snackwells fat free cookies.
We were a "meat and potatoes" household at mealtime. And casseroles. Casseroles featuring Miracle Whip and cheese. We didn't eat a lot of vegetables. Sometimes we had salad, which consisted of iceberg lettuce, croutons, and a bottle of creamy salad dressing. Sometimes we had a warmed up can of vegetables, or a can of spinach dumped into a bowl. I lost a little of my chubbiness when I hit puberty and had a sudden growth spurt, but it got even harder to control my weight when we started having exclusively restaurant food for dinner. One night per week was devoted to McDonald's, one to delivery pizza, and one to Chinese takeout, which mostly meant crab rangoon. I tried to make up for the calorie dump at dinner by eating plain shredded wheat for breakfast and celery sticks for lunch. I was generally starving by dinnertime, which I knew wasn't good, but I didn't know what else to do.
When I moved out to go to college, I lost weight. I had starting reading books about nutrition after that first cholesterol test -- they became something of a hobby for me -- so I knew more by then. I also went back to eating normal breakfasts and lunches since my dining hall dinners were significantly more reasonable. I also walked a lot because public transportation cost money I didn't have.
I gave up meat, just because it had disgusted me for years and I finally had full control over my diet away at college. When I came home for spring break, my mother asked, "Why are you doing this to me?!" She said I was ruining spring break for her because now she would feel like she couldn't eat anywhere she wanted (she could and did -- I could find something to eat at any restaurant, and she didn't cook anymore anyway). She also said it was too expensive to eat vegetables so much. She said her own mother had stretched meals for their large family by adding ground beef to canned spaghetti. Her logic was presumably that, since her family had been poor and her mother had done this, it must have been the cheapest way to eat. And cheap was good. Especially if it was something for me. Also, my mother hates vegetables. Also, I think she wanted me to be like her.
I didn't know how to cook until I got a campus apartment. From the time I was in grade school until I moved out for college, our oven was mostly broken. My mother used a pair of pliers to turn it on and off, and it burned the bottom of any food she cooked in it. We couldn't get it fixed because we lived in a hoard house and she wouldn't allow a repairman inside at that point. My dad taught me how to boil pasta and scramble eggs when I was in high school. Beyond that, I learned to cook from the internet when I was 20. I turned out to be good at it. When I came home on break and wanted to show off some of my new cooking skills by making a simple side dish for my dad to try, my mother burst into tears. She said I'd make a mess, I'd ruin everything. I was taken aback at her crying. I had rarely seen her cry in my life. She normally defaulted to screaming or guilt trips. I promised to clean up after myself -- something I also started figuring out how to do in college -- and cooked my dish. I washed everything I'd used too. The kitchen was still a filthy, sticky mess.
I want to put a happy ending on this, but I don't want to sound like I'm gloating, so here: I'm in my 30s and healthier now than at any point in the story above.
When I got older and moved out on my own, my mother told me about how she hadn't understood serving sizes when Dante and I were kids. She laughed about how she used to cook a roast or a casserole, divide it into fourths, and serve us each a quarter of the meal. From the time I was able to eat solid food, she had expected me to eat the same amount as my morbidly obese dad and mom, each of whom was eating at least two adult sized servings, often more.
She also laughed about how fat Dante had been as a toddler when she fed him two adult portions of sugared instant oatmeal every morning because one packet of oatmeal "just didn't look like that much." Toddlerhood was the only time the naturally thin Dante had been chubby in his life, though his eating habits never improved. His regular meals as a 20-year-old man consisted of hot dogs and lunch meat, potato chip sandwiches, a variety of Little Debbie snack cakes, and candy from the limitless supply my mother kept in baskets around the house.
I, on the other hand, spent my childhood wondering why I was heavier than most of the kids at my elementary school. The candy around the house didn't help, but it was a comparatively mild problem. My mother encouraged me to eat cake or cookies for breakfast on the frequent occasions that we had them on hand because "they have eggs and flour in them, just like breakfast food." In retrospect, she probably just wanted me to leave her alone so she could go back to sleep, but I took this logic so far that I ate Cadbury Creme Eggs for breakfast in the weeks surrounding Easter because I thought they were made of real eggs, not just chocolate and colored fondant. I knew nothing. No one corrected me.
I knew I was chubbier than I wanted to be, but my mother insisted I had inherited my figure from her and it could not be altered. "We're big boned," she said. I didn't get made fun of to my face often, but I do recall being called "Fatso" by a boy I didn't know and being asked by one of my best friends in elementary school if I oversalted my food because I was "overweight and had trouble losing weight," and I guess it didn't occur to her these problems could also come from eating mostly junk food.
My mother forbade me to drink low-fat milk with my school lunches because, as she explained much later, she had fed me skim milk as a new baby and been scolded by my pediatrician for doing so. I drank full-fat milk with every meal thereafter, blind to the fact that I eventually got older and had different dietary needs. We drank a lot of soda too. My mother kept a Big Gulp full of 7Up or Pepsi on the table beside the couch and drank from it all day everyday. I don't remember having a glass of water before the age of eight or so, when Dante started drinking water with his meals and I insisted on having the same because anything he did was "cool."
When I was ten or eleven, I had my first cholesterol test, and it was already over 200. For reference, an adult's total cholesterol should be below 150 for optimal health. My pediatrician told me I needed to lower my cholesterol, but I didn't know what cholesterol was, let alone how to lower mine. He was shocked to hear I was still drinking full-fat milk at my age, so we switched to low-fat and eventually to skim. My mother encouraged me to reduce my saturated fat intake -- another cause of high cholesterol, my doctor said -- by buying me countless boxes of Snackwells fat free cookies.
We were a "meat and potatoes" household at mealtime. And casseroles. Casseroles featuring Miracle Whip and cheese. We didn't eat a lot of vegetables. Sometimes we had salad, which consisted of iceberg lettuce, croutons, and a bottle of creamy salad dressing. Sometimes we had a warmed up can of vegetables, or a can of spinach dumped into a bowl. I lost a little of my chubbiness when I hit puberty and had a sudden growth spurt, but it got even harder to control my weight when we started having exclusively restaurant food for dinner. One night per week was devoted to McDonald's, one to delivery pizza, and one to Chinese takeout, which mostly meant crab rangoon. I tried to make up for the calorie dump at dinner by eating plain shredded wheat for breakfast and celery sticks for lunch. I was generally starving by dinnertime, which I knew wasn't good, but I didn't know what else to do.
When I moved out to go to college, I lost weight. I had starting reading books about nutrition after that first cholesterol test -- they became something of a hobby for me -- so I knew more by then. I also went back to eating normal breakfasts and lunches since my dining hall dinners were significantly more reasonable. I also walked a lot because public transportation cost money I didn't have.
I gave up meat, just because it had disgusted me for years and I finally had full control over my diet away at college. When I came home for spring break, my mother asked, "Why are you doing this to me?!" She said I was ruining spring break for her because now she would feel like she couldn't eat anywhere she wanted (she could and did -- I could find something to eat at any restaurant, and she didn't cook anymore anyway). She also said it was too expensive to eat vegetables so much. She said her own mother had stretched meals for their large family by adding ground beef to canned spaghetti. Her logic was presumably that, since her family had been poor and her mother had done this, it must have been the cheapest way to eat. And cheap was good. Especially if it was something for me. Also, my mother hates vegetables. Also, I think she wanted me to be like her.
I didn't know how to cook until I got a campus apartment. From the time I was in grade school until I moved out for college, our oven was mostly broken. My mother used a pair of pliers to turn it on and off, and it burned the bottom of any food she cooked in it. We couldn't get it fixed because we lived in a hoard house and she wouldn't allow a repairman inside at that point. My dad taught me how to boil pasta and scramble eggs when I was in high school. Beyond that, I learned to cook from the internet when I was 20. I turned out to be good at it. When I came home on break and wanted to show off some of my new cooking skills by making a simple side dish for my dad to try, my mother burst into tears. She said I'd make a mess, I'd ruin everything. I was taken aback at her crying. I had rarely seen her cry in my life. She normally defaulted to screaming or guilt trips. I promised to clean up after myself -- something I also started figuring out how to do in college -- and cooked my dish. I washed everything I'd used too. The kitchen was still a filthy, sticky mess.
I want to put a happy ending on this, but I don't want to sound like I'm gloating, so here: I'm in my 30s and healthier now than at any point in the story above.
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