Feeding Yourself

It's always hard to know what balance to strike between doing things for your children, and having them do them for themselves. Sometimes, I think I get it right. Sometimes, I'm not so sure.

When my kids were little, I made breakfast for them every day. We only had the whole family at breakfast - at family meals, really, meals including all of us - when their dad had days off. He was working a rotating schedule of day shift, swing shift, graveyard shift, then back to day shift again. Weekends could be a day and a half, two days or four days (the rotation from graveyard back to days). When they were older, he worked steady hours, 3 am to 3 pm, which meant family dinner at about 5, but there was no way we were getting up at 2 am to have breakfast together.

I don't make elaborate meals. One of their favorite breakfasts was microwaved scrambled eggs and cinnamon toast. Another was sliced fruit, usually bananas and apples, in yogurt, topped with granola. We went through our fair share of cold cereal, oatmeal and Cream of Wheat, as well.

Once the kids were in school, I insisted that they be dressed before they came to breakfast. If we were running late, they could eat in the car on the way to school, but they couldn't get dressed or brush teeth in the car. This plan went pretty smoothly until they got a bit older. Then, obsessions with the "right" outfit, requests for fancy hairstyles and general dawdling meant that there was less and less time for breakfast. I resorted to toast, muffins or Pop Tarts in the car, until it became clear that I'd spend my days fishing untouched food out from under my seats. When I insisted that food be eaten at the table, even if it meant no fancy hair, there was much howling. I found myself thinking, "Are you kidding? You're upset because you're being fed? How is that even possible?" I even caved to them - and their dad - and bought cereals that were little more than spun sugar. They still griped.

By the time they hit middle school, in seventh grade, griping about "having to eat" was a pretty firmly established routine. It still astonished me. (Years later, I'm still astonished.) When they were asked to skip a meal for fasting with the church, or when meals were late on weekends or while traveling, they wailed about being "starving," yet they howled about being "not hungry" on school mornings. It had nothing to do with hunger, and everything to do with a power play. I even let them drench their oatmeal in syrup, or otherwise make sugar the main course, and they griped. Griping was a reflex action.

When the oldest kids were 12 and 11, and the third child was almost 4, we had Baby #4. One Saturday morning, when we were still measuring her age in days, the big kids were just waking up and coming down the stairs while the baby had just finished eating, and I was hoping to head back to bed. I resigned myself to more exhaustion when I suddenly realized, hey, I can put the big kids in charge! I mean, they can handle breakfast and Saturday morning cartoons, right?

My oldest was deeply scandalized by this request. "You want me to feed everyone so that you can go sleep?" It should be noted here that my Firstborn has always considered sleep to be a weakness. Even as an infant, she slept less than the other children. Sometimes, her dad would come home from work and go straight to bed, and this also scandalized her. She'd demand, "Why is Dad asleep?" and she did not understand why the answer was, "Because he's tired." This made no sense to her.

"Yes. I'm tired. This is the fourth time I've been up to feed the baby since I went to bed. I'd appreciate it if you could feed the rest of you." Surely, this request made sense.

"Can't you make breakfast first?"

"I could, but I'm exhausted. By the time you're done with breakfast, the baby might be awake and hungry again." (The baby was breastfed; Mommy was the only possible feeder.)

"I can't believe that you want me to make breakfast!" Really, Kid? In actuality, I shouldn't have been surprised. Asking the kids to do anything resembling work elicited wailing, and complaints that all household jobs belonged to me, and I was just farming out the work because I was lazy and mean. Still, I was taken by surprise at the level of outrage she was showing over a simple task.

After a few more moments of back-and-forth, I snapped at her.

"It's cereal! If the three year old could reach the cupboards, he could do it himself!"

This stopped the complaining for just a moment, while it occurred to her that this was not a sentence of hard labor. Still, in her mind, it was clearly the mother's job.

Eventually, the 11 year old started looking through the cereal cupboard. The baby and I went upstairs to sleep.

The oldest still recounted the story to her friends in horror - "Mom slept, and I had to make breakfast," as though this demonstrated clear hardship.

It occurred to me that I wasn't asking them to help out nearly often enough if a simple pouring of cereal brought on such a ruckus.

As an adult, my Secondborn insisted that part of her getting ready for school routine was spoonfeeding the babies. "No," I corrected, "you and your sister sometimes fed them on weekends, but never on school mornings." School mornings were short enough on time without trying to get the big kids to do anything besides get dressed and feed themselves. But yes, I did ask them to help feed the siblings once the babies could eat in high chairs. Being part of a family means pitching in. Kids learn to be responsible by being given responsibility. Taking care of siblings also brings the siblings themselves closer.

She still isn't sure that I'm right about this. In her mind, it was so burdensome a task that it had to be every day.

"But sometimes, I was late to school."

"I know! That's because you dragged, and I had to cattle prod you through the mornings. That's exactly why you only fed the babies on weekends." (It's also why we had a "no TV in the mornings" rule; turn on the TV, and everybody ground to a halt.) She doesn't remember it that way.

At least, by the time she was in high school, she got ready in 15 minutes. Foodless minutes, but progress is progress.

Once they hit high school, I stopped making their breakfasts, in another attempt to teach responsibility and time management before they moved out of my house. I didn't want to send them away to college without them having done the basics for themselves. I still fought the "eat something!" battle. Many days, a glass of milk was all I'd get a child to consume before leaving, but it was something. I bought granola bars, string cheese, applesauce cups - all kinds of convenience food, but they rarely ate it. I said, out loud, that Oreos and milk would be acceptable, but nobody took me up on it. They were determined to skip breakfast, which makes me crazy. I'm hypoglycemic, so skipped meals are BAD. Plus, I'm a mom; I need to feed. Study after study shows weight gain, lower productivity, reduced concentration and lower job performance for breakfast skippers. It was maddening. In a nation brimming with both food and actual deprivation, and in a house full of food, should it be this hard to get people to eat?

Secondborn is in her late 20s, and after seeing something recently on TV about moms making breakfast, said, "You never made us breakfast."

"Not in high school," I said, sure that she was ignoring the actual meaning of the word "never."

"I don't remember you ever making breakfast."

"I did it for the first 14 years of your life, and I often had to fight to get you to eat it."

"Yeah, I hate breakfast. But I don't remember that." Wow. So glad that I spent all that time slicing, sprinkling, and buying stuff like Dinosaur Egg Instant Oatmeal.

When the Firstborn graduated from high school, she went to Hawaii with her two best friends. After we'd gotten the call saying that they'd landed safely, the Secondborn started to worry. "How will they eat?"

"You remember Honolulu. There's tons of places to eat."

"But how will they eat? What will they do when it's dinnertime?"

"They'll go to a restaurant, order food, pay for it and eat it." That seemed pretty obvious to me. I wondered if she was concerned that restaurants might not serve them, so I added, "They are legal adults, you know."

"But how will they know where to eat or what to eat?"

"They'll say, 'Hey, what do you want to eat?' and choose."

This conversation was sounding more and more bizarre to me. I'm sure that she was actually anxious because her sister, who'd been right next to her for her entire life, was now thousands of miles away, and after she came home,  she would be preparing to move hundreds of miles away, so the anxiety wasn't actually about food, but food still seemed an odd thing for the anxiety to attach itself to. She wasn't worried that they'd be mugged, or get lost, or lose their luggage, or be assaulted, or miss their flight, or be on a plane that crashed, or miss their connecting flight home and be stuck in an airport in California, or anything else that was a much higher probability than starvation. No; she worried that three eighteen year olds with honors diplomas couldn't figure out how to feed themselves.

"They might get some stuff, especially for breakfasts, at a grocery store, too. That's cheaper than breakfast out." We've traveled a lot; I thought that how one fed one's self away from home would be familiar.

"What if they don't have enough money?"

Wow. "They'll have to figure out how much they can spend every day. But if something goes wrong, they have the credit card for emergencies."

"How will they know how much they can spend? How will they know if they can afford something?"

More wow. "If they can handle honors calculus, honors trigonometry and honors statistics, I think they can figure out how to make their cash last for a week. They can divide by seven."

"What if they can't?"

"Then they use the credit card."

"What if they lose the credit card?"

OK, this conversation would have made sense to me if I was having it with the seven year old, but this was the seventeen year old. "If they have reached the age of 18, and graduated from high school, without being able to feed themselves, we as parents have done a terrible job, and they'd better start catching up so they can be functional adults."

"I can't believe you're not even worried."

"Not about them feeding themselves!"

Then it occurred to me; this child usually worries based on things that she thinks might happen to her. "Do you think that you could feed yourself if we weren't there?"

"Me, yeah. I just don't know if she can."

Sisterly love.

As it turned out, by day seven, one girl had run out of cash, and the rice cakes she'd packed. The other two pooled their money and covered the third for those last meals. For instance, they bought 99 cent fruit and yogurt parfaits for breakfast, and ate them on Waikiki Beach. Go, girls!

The next year, when Secondborn went to Florida with her best friend on their graduation trip, everyone was fed, without much angst.

I still find myself having to cattle prod people to EAT at home. (Not literally - don't bother the authorities.) My household seems determined to skip meals. The Thirdborn averages two meals a day - he's an adult now - and the teenaged Fourthborn will go until midafternoon without eating, and then graze for the rest of the day, if I let her. My husband will be up for hours before he thinks about breakfast.

Is it me?

Is it them?

Should I have had the kids making breakfast, and dinner, for the whole family regularly, from an early age? Probably.