[Content Warning: physical abuse]
I am in a shitty mood.
Part of it is that my period is going to start. Part of it is that I still feel raw. And part of it is that my children can be annoying.
I yelled at Cookie Monster (8) a lot today at dinner. Gamera (6) spent all day crying about stupid shit and exhausted all my patience so by the time dinner rolled around and they were hungry and bitching about corn (Cookie Monster hates corn) I lost it at him. All the other kids ate their dinners. He didn’t.
I knew he was shutting down. But I just couldn’t stop laying into him.
I feel like a shit.
I mean, I get it. He doesn’t want to eat the corn. But so fucking what? Eat the fucking corn.
[socialpug_tweet tweet=”You know what my favorite type of food is? THE KIND I DID NOT HAVE TO MAKE. It could be fried poop and because I didn’t make it, I’d say, “This is fucking delicious.” #parenting #pickyeaters #truth #realtalk” display_tweet=”You know what my favorite type of food is? THE KIND I DID NOT HAVE TO MAKE. It could be fried poop and because I didn’t make it, I’d say, “This is fucking delicious.” “]
I even told him he could pick most of it out and not eat it. And STILL it takes him fucking forever. And then finally after me giving him shit for 15 straight minutes, he took about half a minute and finished his dinner.
30 fucking seconds and he was done.
This is why food is so triggering for me: my father once tried to kill me because I refused to eat celery.
I know it’s not the first time I’ve told the story to my children. But I am always reminded of it when my kids don’t eat their food.
I know that my father trying to literally kill me is not a normal reaction. (He beat down the door of my bedroom and picked up the broken wooden poster of my 4-poster bed and was about to swing at me like with a bat except that his mother stood between me and him and saved my life).
I’m not a fan of my maternal grandmother, but she saved my life. I guess it’s okay to beat the shit out of your daughter but not your mother. Go, filial piety.
Anyhow, that’s what my mind always goes to when my kids refuse to eat my food.
So though I berate them and yell at them and get mad, I tell myself that at least I am not trying murder them. (Though, quite frankly, I have often felt mad enough to do it!)
I explained to Cookie Monster that when I was little and didn’t eat what my parents gave me, my father would hurt me and then make me eat what I didn’t want to eat. I wasn’t even making him eat the corn, FFS!
It’s still shocking to me that my father started to swing the wooden poster at me and would have kept swinging if his mother hadn’t have been in the way.
What kind of father does that?
It’s not the corn, stupid. It’s not the celery.
I told Cookie Monster that I didn’t really care if he ate the corn. If he ate it, it wouldn’t kill him. And if he didn’t eat it, it wouldn’t kill him.
What bothered me is that I absolutely despise cooking and thinking about what to cook them and he and his siblings nonstop ask what is for lunch or dinner and then when I tell them, they complain nonstop about it without ever having eaten it.
You know, when Hapa Papa and I lived together before we had kids, we ate out all the time.
It’s not that I don’t know how to cook. It’s just that I don’t enjoy it.
You know what my favorite type of food is? THE KIND I DID NOT HAVE TO MAKE. It could be fried poop and because I didn’t make it, I’d say, “This is fucking delicious.”
[socialpug_tweet tweet=”This is why food is so triggering for me: my father once tried to kill me because I refused to eat celery. #abuse #pickyeaters #parenting” display_tweet=”This is why food is so triggering for me: my father once tried to kill me because I refused to eat celery.”]
So, twice a day, I have to do one of my least favorite activities in the world and then have my children be ungrateful shitheads about it. Needless to say, I often wish I could just shove IV’s into their bodies and they’d get all the nutrients passively from some Soylent Green type product. I wouldn’t even care that it was made of people.
Maybe the only thing I’d enquire about is if the people were organic. I have standards, you know.
