Three’s a Crowd

Tag: motherhood

  • Saturday night special.

    Growing up, one of my least favourite home-cooked meals was spaghetti and meat sauce.

    Dubbed “Saturday night special” more than twenty years ago by my dad, spaghetti and meat sauce was a staple dinner in our house. With the benefit of adult hindsight, it genuinely isn’t that bad – it’s pretty hard to ruin pasta, ground beef, and tomato sauce, and my mom isn’t a bad cook.

    As a teenager, I hated it.

    I hated it straight off the stove at dinner time. I hated it after four hours of congealing in the microwave, waiting for me to come home from work and eat it. I hated it on Saturdays, and on every other day of the week it landed on the table. Much like green eggs and ham, there was nowhere and no way I wanted to eat Saturday night special.

    I couldn’t understand why my mom continued to make it. It was clear that I didn’t like it (sorry, Mom!), and it wasn’t like it was anybody else’s favourite dish either, as far as I could see. She made a fabulous penne and meatballs dish – why not make that?

    When I moved out, I promised myself I was done with spaghetti and meat sauce. I love pasta, and my cupboard always had a good stock of rotini, ziti, macaroni, penne, rigatoni, and farfalle in it in the early years of my marriage. But never spaghetti.

    Eventually, when we switched grocery stores and my pasta options became a bit more limited, I started buying spaghetti. It was cheap, and it’s not like the shape changed the taste. I’d do it with olive oil and parmesan like I did other pasta, but never with tomato sauce. I was still determined that Saturday night special would never make an appearance on my table.

    And then, one night about six months ago, staring into my cupboards with the age-old question What can I make for dinner? cycling through my head, three kids yelling at each other in the background and thirty minutes or less to get dinner on the table, I caved. The box of spaghetti was sitting right there, with its cheerful “Ready in 8 minutes!” label on the side of the packaging. The shelf below had jars of tomato sauce, ready to go.

    With no small amount of self reflection, I grabbed the spaghetti and the tomato sauce and got to work. Twenty minutes later, as I put bowls of spaghetti and tomato sauce down on the table and called the kids in for dinner, Bea came running to check what we were eating. “Yay!” She yelled. “Spaghetti!”

    The kids cleaned their plates that night. So did Marc. I cleaned up the dishes and had a good laugh to myself as I washed and dried the pasta pot and sauce pan. What an easy, simple dinner to make – we could make it a weekly thing!

    I get it, Mom. Fifteen years too late, maybe, but I get it.

    Since that night, I’ve made spaghetti and tomato sauce at least once every two weeks, if not more. And when I do, I like to imagine my kids in the future, sitting down at the table and moaning “Spaghetti again? Mom, I hate spaghetti!” It’ll be the perfect full-circle ending to my spaghetti journey.

    Humble pie, it turns out, tastes a lot like pasta and tomato sauce.

  • Get up and go.

    Inevitably when someone is expecting their first child, they get a lot of advice from other parents. Much of it is useless – get your sleep now! You won’t sleep when the baby comes! – but if you’re lucky, some of it might carry you through some rough times.

    After four and half years of frankly harrowing parenthood, my advice is this: comparison is the thief of joy.

    When Bea was born, I bought myself a copy of What to Expect: The First Year. In no way do I mean to disparage this book; it was an excellent resource during those first few months when I worried about everything and anything. But it has a fundamental flaw: it’s organized according baby’s developmental milestones throughout their first year, with summaries of what baby should be doing by what week or month.

    I checked those summaries religiously in the first six months of Bea’s life. At first, everything seemed fine. Bea was a happy, healthy little baby girl, and there wasn’t much to concern myself with. But when physical developmental milestones came due, like holding up her head and rolling over, the anxiety took over.

    The designated week by which she should be able to hold her head up came and went, and Bea was still pancaked on her play mat. When she was finally able to lift her head and keep it up for any length of time, we were honing in on being able to roll over. That one, too, came and went without Bea being able to so much as roll to her side.

    I was a mess of anxiety. Were we doing enough tummy time? Was I holding her wrong to breastfeed or cuddle? Maybe I should have held her upright to soothe her – except doing that always made her angrier. Was it something I was doing wrong?

    In retrospect, it was none of those things. I know now that guidelines are just that – guidelines, based on aggregate data and not on individual children. No teacher looking at a fourth grade classroom can tell you which kids were early to walk and which were late.

    Bea, it turns out, was just a lazy kid. She has never met a developmental milestone she was inclined to meet. She rolled over late, sat up late, crawled late, walked late.

    When she was six month olds (and finally rolling over, thank goodness) I put my copy of What to Expect away. I’d spent so much of the first six months of Bea’s life stressing over what she should have been doing that I missed what she was doing.

    By the time Bea was two and George was born, I was much better as letting the milestones coming to us rather than trying to get us to them. George, too, was not an early developer, but this time, I was able to let go of my worry and enjoy watching him meet his challenges in his own time.

    By the time George was 17 months old, he had been “kneeing” it around the house for two months and tearing out all the knees in his pants. We’d encouraged him to get up and walk, but so far, he wasn’t interested. I shrugged it off and bought iron-on patches for his pants (if you really want to know, yes, a determined little boy can also tear out patches in his mended pants, too).

    That Easter, we took the kids over to my parents’ house for Easter dinner. All my siblings and their kids were there, including George’s cousin Henry, who was born just four days before George and who had been proudly walking for a few months already.

    George sat on the carpet in my parents’ living room for an hour or so, watching Henry walk by as he played. And then, without any fanfare (and surprisingly little effort), he got to his feet and walked off to follow him, and never looked back.

    Two years before, I’d have agonized comparing George’s progress to Henry’s. It would have worried me to death wondering why my son couldn’t do what his cousin could. But on that day, I’d already let go of my worry over when he would take his first steps. And in doing so, the joy of watching him proudly march across my parents’ living room was so much sweeter.

    So, if I could go back and give myself the advice I didn’t know I needed before Bea made us a family of three, it would be this: every kid does things at their own pace. Take it one day at a time, and enjoy where you’re at today, because tomorrow, it will change. And in the immortal words of Bluey: Just run your own race.