The Egg Salad Incident

Lots of people have been asking me about the raccoon but I can't worry about that now because I'm a terrible parent.

I came to this conclusion, that I'm an awful parent, because of the egg salad.

If you're a parent, or a kid, then you know that parents are never supposed to talk about the sacrifices they make or made. They can talk about the hardships they faced before the children were born - explaining why it was so difficult to grow up with only an Atari 2600 instead of both a Playstation 3 and a Playstation Portable - or they can talk about how great their life was long, long before the kids were around - like explaining to people who won't believe you anyway why those Atari 2600 games were so much better than "God of War II."

One reason, by the way, that the old games were better was that they had one joystick and one, maybe two, buttons. The Boy's Playstation 3 controller has a directional pad with four buttons, four buttons on the right side, two joysticks, and four buttons on the front. That is (help me check my math) 14 buttons or controllers, for human beings that have 8 fingers and two thumbs. If kids keep playing video games, and if Darwin was right (both seem to be pretty sure bets right now) eventually they'll have hands with sixteen fingers.




This was mine.


This is what they use now.

I've tried playing various video games against The Boy and they're getting well beyond my level of ability. For a while I could beat him regularly on Madden 2001, but then he upgraded to Madden 2007 and I'm lost again. I watch helplessly as his players spin and juke and do "power moves" or whatever they call them, and end up just bombing Hail Marys for the entire second half and hoping to make the score close. I sometimes make the game exciting towards the end, although I think The Boy enjoys playing against me not because of the level of competition but because of my tendency to sometimes forget myself and utter the occasional swear when things go wrong.

And don't get me started on the more complicated games, where you have to scroll through a variety of weapons and then execute a series of complicated button maneuvers to shoot a rhino-pig that's running at you. The most complicated game I played, growing up, was "Adventure." To pick up your sword, you steered your character - a square-into the sword, which looked like an arrow. Literally an arrow-and then stab a dragon that looked like a chicken.

Their games have trailers now; our games barely had graphics!

But while you can make those comparisons for your kids, you cannot, CANNOT, ever tell them the sacrifices that you are making right now. You can't tell the kids that the reason your laptop only has the second-best graphics card is because they had to have antibiotics to cure the flu, for example, because you just make those sacrifices naturally as a parent and don't complain. (And you justify getting that expensive graphics card so that they can play Doom on the computer, which is why you got the computer in the first place, so the kids could play Doom and The Sims, and not in any way to help speed up the process of downloading music on your iPod so you don't have to do that at work anymore and can actually get something done.)

But every parent has his breaking point, and mine was the egg salad, and I'm sorry. Here's how it went down.

I was cooking dinner one night. I generally do the cooking while Sweetie takes care of unwinding A and B from daycare-getting their snowsuits off, feeding them the mush of the night for dinner, bathing them (a necessity after feeding them the mush), then getting a new sleeper on them and giving them the multiple doses of whatever medications it is they're on for whatever it is will keep them from sleeping that night. That process is long; I could cook a full Thanksgiving feast some nights.

But on this particular night, I was making egg salad, a family favorite, simple egg salad sandwiches. Sweetie actually usually takes charge of this because the kids don't trust my egg salad any more than they trust my casserole. They suspect that I'm slipping something into it that they don't like, ever since the egg salad tacos, which is a real recipe from a real cookbook I have and which was quite tasty, but which also had salsa in the egg salad, and was served on a taco shell.

I've learned that while kids complain about having the same thing all the time, they don't mean it. They want the same thing all the time. They hate variety and distrust the novel. The kids have actually rejected meals because they did not like the shape of the bratwurst patty ("I don't eat round things." - Middle Daughter.) They refused pasta one night because the noodles were not the same kind they were used to. At least when I was a kid, I didn't complain about the same thing every night. I'd have loved to have the same thing every night. We had "hamburger night" every Friday for 18 years and I never minded that. In part because we also got to watch TV while we ate on hamburger night, which I think my parents did so they had a respite from the dinner table fighting. Much of which could have been avoided if they hadn't, for 18 years, enforced the rule that I sat on the right of my older brother, who is right-handed while I'm left-handed, causing our elbows to knock against each other constantly. 


 

Here's a famous lefty!

Or maybe the kids just don't trust my cooking since I over-barbecue-sauced a casserole trying to spice it up a little. The result was spicy. And toxic. And it was four years ago and the kids still give me the fisheye when they see me making a casserole, and then do things like they did recently when they complained that there wasn't enough sauce in one.

So I was making the egg salad and The Boy wandered in at the point where I'd finished shelling the eggs but hadn't yet mushed them up, and had a bowl of hard-boiled eggs on the counter. And he asked if he could have just a plain hard-boiled egg before or with dinner. And I lost it. I said:

"No, you can't. Don't touch the eggs. Just back slowly away from them. Everytime we have egg salad there's never enough to go around and I have to get served last and there's none left and then I have to tell everyone that I wasn't in the mood for egg salad anyway and have a different kind of sandwich but it's not true. I love egg salad and I hate it when I don't get any, and I've finally made enough eggs tonight and so nobody can eat them before dinner because I'm getting egg salad."

And, in my defense, it was all true! Sweetie usually makes the egg salad, and appears to believe either that nobody really likes it or that eggs are a scarce and valuable commodity to be strictly rationed, because there's NEVER enough egg salad and the last 5 or 10 or 50 times we'd had egg salad, that exact thing had happened and I'd had bologna, or liver sausage and Swiss cheese, while they all got egg salad.

Okay, I liked the liver sausage and Swiss cheese more than egg salad, but we almost never have that in the house, either, because I'm the only one who eats it and I forget to buy it. But the point is valid: I never got egg salad, because Sweetie didn't make enough, so I'd pass and let them all have it and suffer in silence, but no more, because that night I simply decided I'd make enough egg salad, and there was going to be enough, until The Boy came poking around and trying to get his hands on the eggs.

The kids were very chastened at dinner that night. Not A and B; they didn't know what was going on and continued practicing their hollering-at-the-top of their lungs. But the older kids seemed to feel guilty, and I tried apologizing and telling them that it wasn't their fault, and they seemed to get over it because they DID eat the egg salad (and there was enough), but I still feel bad because I broke the parental code of honor and told the kids about the sacrifices I'd made, and thereby placed a crushing burden on them.

Now, when we have egg salad, I can see on their faces the fear, the tension, as they serve themselves, no doubt thinking Will there be enough? Will he blow his stack again? Did he put mushrooms or something into it? And why are these noodles a slightly-different-texture from last time? I don't like that. I can read all that in their eyes.

So I can't talk about the raccoon right now, because I'm still trying to work out a way of making it up to them to ease my own mind. I'll end up falling on my sword, metaphorically speaking, for them. Although, in my mind, that sword will be in the shape of an arrow.

 

This article first appeared on Thinking The Lions. Life, only funnier.