Horseradish Sauce

This weekend, I traveled to Buffalo to witness my Godson's wedding.  I ate well.  It was an odd experience, being sans children.  You would think having time without household chores or people to serve, I'd have written something but alas, I discovered, my time management skills are worse than I thought, for I am a sufficient reason to not get to the keyboard.

While at the hotel, the Taste of Buffalo filled the street outside the lobby.  I enjoyed wine ice cream and fried risotto and even took a turn at Karaoke.  Mercifully, the video my mom took is too long to upload so my teens won't have to suffer having their mom's warbling preserved forever in internet amber.    It's good to know it's there though, sort of like a plausible threat of mutually assured destruction.  They don't want it out. I don't want it out. They behave, I retain a hint of dignity online, if not in reality.  

During the course of the weekend, I spent a lot of time thinking about having ten kids, raising them, and the ups and downs of it all.   Someone at the reception asked if I'd wanted ten kids and if I'd considered how much work it would be before beginning this journey.   I admit, sometimes the bills, fights, messes, assignments, schedules and demands for regular meals can overwhelm.  

I finished the trip with a dinner at the Anchor Bar annex at the airport.  I ate wings and Beef on Weck, which if you don't know, is a Buffalo specialty.  It is thinly sliced roast beef au jus on a crusty roll studded with kosher salt and caraway seeds. A thin layer of horseradish sauce is considered a must.   One would never think, you know what I want?  Horseradish sauce. If one considers horseradish sauce alone, one would never consume it. It's bitter, it leaves a bite on your tongue.  Why would you agree to have horseradish sauce?  However the whole sandwich rocks and I'm only sorry it isn't something that's caught on anywhere else but Buffalo.

Considering only all the labor and trials and scourges of having ten kids is rather like eating horseradish sauce alone.   Who wants to go to the DMV 20 times in one's life?  Who wants to fold 100 socks a week?  Who wants to do dishes for 33 every day if you count all the meals?  Who wants to drive a 12 passenger van?  Who wants to read aloud the Harry Potter series 7 times thus far, and try to must all the energy you had at the first go around?  Who wants to hear 10 "Hey Mom, guess what I dreamed last night?" summaries at breakfast?  Or change diapers for 23 years?  Or solve fights seemingly to the death between a five year old and her older sister over an invisible cat?  Alone, it's untenable, there's just no way, it's too much work, too hard, too expensive, too protracted, too much too much too much.

Absent love, it's overwhelming and at times, it even has a bite.

However...when it is spread over the whole of life, these trials augment everything else.  The sufferings of parenting, they fade like labor pains, even the big ones like teens rebelling or toddlers potty training. The bite doesn't remain, only the flavor, and the whole family, is one I'd order again in a heartbeat, horseradish sauce and all.   They are a feast set for me.  

I ate Charlie the Butcher's Beef on Weck too. Very tasty!

Bon Appetite.

Time to get to Work

The shootings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and of Philando Castile and of the five officers in Dallas?  All of these executions were obscene acts of evil.

I spent the day in transit to a wedding, but know social media exploded with respect to these acts, all of which bring to the public conscious the need to really look at ourselves and have an honest discussion about what we want as a nation, and what we don't.

Here's what I know.

There is a disproportionate level of incarceration, stops, arrests, charges and abuses of people of color by law enforcement, and we as a nation have to recognize that level of systemic abuse of power breeds nothing other than resentment.  

We also have to remember,  most cops don't make the news.  Most desire to protect and to serve, Most cops offer their lives on a daily basis, dealing with the hard reality that people do act badly, people do break the law, people do sometimes do those horrible things that make the news and need to be stopped.  It is not a disconnect to say black lives matter or to also say, blue lives matter.

The reality is always both and.   Neither should be ignored.  Both should be addressed.  Both must be if we want something other than what we have.

But being a ring side observer to the actual incidents, it's only human that we want to do something.  The temptation is to either rage or cry or to pray, but the reality is, we have to do more than feel, more than symbolically gesture.  We must somehow stand and speak and help make things happen so that these sort of things stop happening.  

So now you're wondering, what?  What do I do.

Blessed Mother Teresa was asked, "How can I change the world?"  She answered, "The best thing you can do is go home and love your family."  and she meant it.   I view our whole world as our family, and we've done a poor job of loving many of them.

Today, the best thing any of us can do is to go and be kind to every person we encounter and then, to keep doing it tomorrow, and every day after, until the violence of this week becomes something unthinkable for everyone, always.

Pray for peace, work for peace by being a source of peace to all you encounter.  We've watched, but the sideline times are over if we want a less angry world.   Time to get to work.

Brotherly Love

I understand from my own experience growing up, brothers and sisters have a dog cat relationship. There may be siblings out there who regard each other with mutual respect, but most of my own life, children see the pecking order, and if they're lower down, they want higher up. If they're higher up, they want to keep everyone else lower down.

Son A wants eggs. Son B owns a skillet.  He refuses to share. I agree, his skillet, his rules.  He (Skillet boy), then offers to help Son A, but only if he's allowed to cook.  Son A refuses.  Son B in an odd show of charity, gets out the ingredients, the butter and as he calls it, the older carton of eggs.  His brother should ONLY use the older carton. He explains to me that I really shouldn't let Son A cook.  I ignore.  He suggest Son A will get hurt.  I ignore again.  Son A gets out the other skillet and cuts some butter. I sense a trap.  The four eggs in the carton are hard boiled...like Skillet Boy's heart.  I consider switching the eggs to pull one over on Son B but opt to get out the proper eggs instead and tell Son B, if he complains about his brother again, he's going to lose out on all the not hard boiled eggs.  

When the sole goal is to make sure you look good or at least better than your brother or sister, even virtue becomes a battlefield.   "I did the dishes."  Sister says.

"Oh yeah?"  Brother turns, scheming, how to come out smelling better, "Well, I agreed to clean the basement."  That works the first time it's tried, but after that, everyone knows it's put up or shut up, promises don't count.  

So you get minute by minute up to the second updates of how kid A is doing so much more work than  Kid B that really, you should just pack Kid B up for someone else's home, or you should send Kid A out to a hammock, bring him a fifteen foot meatball sub and a soda and make Kid B work sun up to sundown until the age of sixty-five.

Corrective measures, even well meant at the start, become fighting grounds for proving one's greatness as versus the other.  "Pick up the markers..." one child barked.  "They're not mine." the other countered and continued making an illustration on a dry erase board.  "They're under your chair." He pointed.

"So? I'm drawing."  She explained they weren't dry erase markers so it wasn't her problem.  He picked them up but not before erasing the head off her drawing.   Having to calm a daughter's irritation at his willful desecration of her artwork, I did fire off a warning to both.

"See the task, be the task." and "It's no virtue to destroy someone's emotional mood because they don't do what you say."   "But Mom, the markers would have dried out."

"So you wouldn't pick them up to prevent that from happening?"
Cue silence.  

No one it seems, is more interested in protecting the actual markers than proving they're the more virtuous person of good intentions.

So when my daughter opted to make cup cakes and said brother wanted to help decorate, I had reservations.   Since he doesn't eat frosting, why would he want to put frosting on the cupcakes?

So the man boy could custom make the desserts and let us all know his true feelings for his sister. Each of the cupcakes had a frowny face  like this:  :(     Alternatively, they had a tongue sticking out like this:   :p   and lastly, in case we somehow missed the point of his efforts, one cupcake had "X's" for the eyes, indicating the face was dead.

But I've promised parity.  His sister will get to frost the cupcakes for his birthday which is coming up.  I foresee a lot of pink glitter and sparkles in his future.  Should be a memorable party.