Ketchup Is a Vegetable: And Other Lies Moms Tell Themselves (15 page)

Every conspiracy theory movie and book I’d ever digested chose
this
moment to give me the worst media inspired reflux I’ve ever experienced. I had split-second premonitions that their software didn’t
look
for pornography but
planted
it. They needed a scapegoat, a patsy. They found some liberal, free-thinking, pseudo-communist and knew it would be the perfect setup. Zeb was going to jail and I would end up working with Oprah and the Innocence Project to prove it. We would lose the house because I wouldn’t be able to afford it after going back to work and paying for daycare. I wondered which of our friends would let me and the kids sleep on their futons, and which would shun us.

The agents ran their computer program as Zeb and I waited anxiously. They didn’t find one single pornographic image on our computer. (
Boo-yah!
How ya feelin’ F.B.I.?) One agent looked Zeb square in the eye and said, “Sir, I’d highly recommend encrypting your wireless connection.” My nerves were so frazzled after they left, I drank a big glass of Mommy Juice (refilled seven or eight times) and laid down for a nap (as I could no longer sit upright.)

Several weeks went by and I assumed that my brush with child pornography was a thing of my past. (A slightly hazy memory, thanks to Mommy Juice…) I ordered some online prints of my two girls from our local Wal-Mart. I went to pick them up with both of my children in tow. It was summertime and there were lots of pictures of the girls playing at the beach, in sprinklers and in our backyard baby pool.

My children
love
to be “nekkid” more than anything in the universe, so there were quite a few heinie shots. One of my personal favorites was of Aubrey, who was two-years-old at the time. She had gotten one of my mixing bowls from the kitchen, filled it with water and was sitting in it naked as the day she was born. The bowl was so small, only her feet and her tiny little booty fit inside it.

The clerk in the photo lab gave me my prints and I quickly leafed through them before I paid for them. I noticed that many of my pictures were missing and in their place was a piece of paper which read, “Several of your photographs were deemed inappropriate by management. Due to their pornographic nature Wal-Mart has chosen not to print them.”

I felt my face flush and I heard brakes squealing in my head.

Excuse me
, but they think I’m a child pornographer and all they have to say about it is, “You can’t have your pictures?” Oh, heeeell to the no. I don’t think so.

I turned to the clerk, “Excuse me, ma’am. I’m missing some of my pictures and there must be some mistake because they were NOT pornographic. They were just of my kids running around in our backyard.”

The clerk looked flustered as she replied, “Well ma’am, I was working last night and I asked my manager about those prints and he said we weren’t supposed to print ANY nudity…”

“I’m sorry. Don’t you print pictures of men in bathing suits all the time? Naked babies fresh out of the womb? You can’t possibly be serious.”

“It’s our store policy. I’m sorry for the inconvenience.”

Inconvenience, my right foot!!! There was no way I was going down like this. I wasn’t about to be accused of being a child pornographer (
again!
) without throwing a good old fashioned hissy fit. I gave a silent prayer of thanks that my children were not yet old enough to be humiliated by me.

I looked the clerk in the eye and threw down the gauntlet. “I need to speak with your manager, NOW.”

The manager came out and gave me the same spiel as the clerk, apologizing profusely but still refusing to give me my pictures. This was not working out for me,
at all
.

“Let me see if I understand you both correctly… you think that my pictures were pornographic in nature and all you have to say to me is ‘I’m sorry’? You think I was EXPLOITING A CHILD and YOU are apologizing to ME? Is that right?”

They looked nervously at one another but didn’t say a word.

“Here’s the deal, people. My kids run around in my back yard butt-nekkid ALL the time and I want to document it. My baby book is full of pictures of me doing the exact same thing. Those pictures are in NO way pornographic…”

I thought back to my recent visit from the FBI but didn’t bring up that I had
actually
seen child porn before, and these photos weren’t even in the same ball park. Somehow I didn’t think it would strengthen my case, so I decided to keep that little tidbit to myself. I continued to rant with increasing volume as Emma screamed from her car seat propped in the cart and Aubrey stood up in the back of the cart and took off her dress. She stood there naked for a few minutes while she turned it inside-out and then put it back on.

“If you think I’m a child pornographer and all you have to say is I can’t have my pictures, then SHAME ON YOU! You either call the police RIGHT NOW and have me arrested or GIVE ME MY FREAKIN’ PICTURES!”

The manager was sweating bullets as he quietly printed the rest of my pictures, slipped them into an envelope and passed them across the counter, without saying one word.

W
hy is it exactly that no matter what I am eating my children must have a bite? I have spent the better part of more days than I care to count, trying to eat something,
anything
that my children wouldn’t want a bite of or try to appropriate for themselves.

I find it hard to believe the pancakes on my plate taste any different than the ones on my three-year-old’s plate. Truly, the only thing I have to do to get my children to try a new vegetable at this point is to pretend I’m going to eat it myself and then refuse to share.

My sweet mother-in-law used to howl at my husband and his four siblings, “It wouldn’t matter if I was eating a plate of dog crap, you’d STILL want a bite!” And I believe it.

Panic ensues if my children think I have something they do not, or cannot, have.

“Mommy, Mommy… PLEASE, I want some. I’m soooo hungry.”

Hungry? After three chicken nuggets, a heaping helping of macaroni and cheese and a pile of steamed broccoli? I think not.

“You aren’t hungry,” I want to scream, “you’re jealous of my food! You can’t stand for me to have something that is mine!”

“But I AM hun-ga-ry Mommy. I weally am!” Emma will protest. At three-years-old she barely weighed in at twenty five pounds, but to this day, my little angel can eat more than my husband.

“What do you want?”

“Ummm, I fink I want a see-sah sah-wid…” she’ll say as she eyes my low-fat Caesar salad with grilled chicken.
What
a coincidence.

I picture myself running to my room, locking my bedroom door and hiding under my bed to eat in peace… or ordering a pizza and having it delivered to my bedroom window so I don’t have to touch every slice in the box, to find the right match for each child.

“Thanks for calling Papa John’s can I take your order?”

“I want a medium thin crust supreme pizza, and I’ll pay extra for the delivery guy to sneak through my neighbor’s yard, scale my fence and bring it to my bedroom window. If one of my kids sees him, I‘m not tipping.”

Or maybe I should just start going through drive throughs and eating while they watch helplessly from the backseat — locked into place by their five-point harnesses. But I don’t do any of these things — I make another plate of food, or even another see-sah sah-wid for them.

I’ve heard these people who say, “I’m not a short-order cook; I’m only cooking one meal and my kids will eat what I make or be hungry.” Maybe you are simply a better mother than I am and all of your kids eat whatever you put in front of them. But I have a picky eater at my house and unless everybody is eating French fries, Easy-Mac, chicken nuggets and Oreos for dinner we aren’t all going to be happily eating the same thing every night.

I don’t fancy myself a short-order cook, either, but I would like for my children to be well fed and eat of their own volition. I have no desire to have a Super Nanny Jo Frost show-down at the kitchen table every time we sit down to eat. If that means I have to make steamed broccoli every single night so they can eat a vegetable they like, so be it.

I would rather let my children try something new and say, “No thank you, I don’t care for that,” than have to listen to them sit at the table and cry until they finish their carrots, or what have you.

There are a lot of things you can make your children do, but putting food in their mouths, chewing and swallowing are
not
on that list, as evidenced by The Sunday Soup Standoff of 2008. Aubrey and my husband went head to head in a battle of the wills over a bowl of homemade vegetable soup. Aubrey chose to sit in time out for
hours
as opposed to taking one bite of soup. Kids: 1 Adults: 0

My point is further proven by The Green Bean Incident of 1989, when Linda Murphy, our next door neighbor and surrogate mother, tried to make my sister Blair, eat
one
green bean. Blair tried without success to convince Linda she did not like green beans. Linda would not be dissuaded and kept on until Blair finally chewed and swallowed a single green bean. But my baby sister firmly proved her point by promptly throwing up all over the kitchen table. Kids: 2 Adults: 0

I’ve seen the score card and I realize odds are this is a battle I’m not going to win. I’ll take a “No thank you,” over puking at the dinner table any day… but that’s just me.

I am a Southern girl; I was born and raised in the great state of Alabama. My Momma taught me how to make cornbread, how to pray and how important it is to have family dinners several times a week. Nothing says “down home goodness” like the whole family sitting around the dinner table passing the gravy and talking about the day’s events. Even though I have three young daughters and life gets really hectic, I still try to have a sit-down, home-cooked meal several nights a week.

Momma taught me to cook “from scratch” but sometimes a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do, and every once in awhile I have to take a few shortcuts. It’s hard enough making gravy when you’re holding your two-year-old and trying to calmly discipline your four-year-old Super Nanny style, without spilling your Mommy Juice, but once you start breastfeeding your infant whilst doing all these other things (save the Mommy Juice, I do have standards people), it’s damn near impossible to keep the gravy from burning.

Because of this I have developed a few quick and easy meals that wouldn’t shame Momma too badly. One of these go-to meals consists of pre-marinated pork tenderloin, with steamed rice and broccoli. It’s quick, easy and delicious. But most importantly every member of my family will eat it (as long as there is ketchup involved.) I was preparing this standard meal one evening when something went horribly,
horribly
wrong.

As I was removing the tenderloin from its package, part of it broke off. No big disaster, I just lined it up where it had broken off and placed it in the oven. About twenty minutes later I opened the oven to check on it and screamed as I was sexually harassed by my dinner for the first time in my entire life. There in my very own oven was the largest penis I had ever seen. I was equal parts horrified, fascinated and really, really impressed.

Naturally, I did what any good Southern girl would do… I grabbed my camera and while screaming at my kids, “Hot! Hot! Hot! GET AWAY FROM THE OVEN! IT’S HOT!” and took a picture to send to my sister and my closest friends. I must say it is one of the only times I have been truly offended by my dinner (the other being the time I was served “chicken knuckle soup” in Thailand.) It was impossible to keep a straight face as my husband walked in from work and asked, “What’s for dinner?”

When I could wipe away my tears of laughter and finally speak I replied, “I believe Juno would call it a pork sword.”