My son, Clyde, has always hated fruit. Doesn’t really matter what kind: apples, grapes, kumquats, persimmons (which I also think are gross)—it’s all yucky to him. There are two fruits, however, that he holds in particularly high disregard, and those are watermelon and bananas.
It makes sense, I suppose. There is nothing halfway about either one of those fruits: they can’t play both sides, like tomatoes, avocados, or even cranberries. Watermelon and bananas are some of the fruitiest of fruits. And so of course they would just happen to be the two fruits that other people are always the most likely to try to get him to eat.
The watermelon thing comes up every summer without fail, but the banana thing can happen any place, any time. It just so happens that the most memorable banana experience also happened to take place in the summertime. We were vacationing with friends, and in an effort to make the last day’s clean up easier we made a meal out of all of the various bits and pieces of food that were left over, including a very large fruit bowl. Unbeknownst to me (I was in the kitchen attempting to make a thirty-six egg omelet), the fruit from this fruit bowl was handed out one piece per child, with instructions to “eat this before you eat anything else.”
Clyde, of course, got a banana.
My husband eventually found him sitting at the table, banana in front of him, sad but defiant. “What are you doing, Clyde?” he asked. “We need you to help pack.”
“I don’t want to eat the banana,” Clyde replied.
My husband, also unaware of the fruit proclamation, was understandably confused. “So don’t eat the banana,” he said.
“Okay,” Clyde answered, relieved, and scampered off to not help us pack in some other way. And that was that. Until his banana mutiny was discovered, some yelling happened, and my husband put his foot down and defended Clyde’s right to not eat the banana. On the drive home we all joked about it, turning Clyde’s refusal into a kind of McArthur moment complete with Clyde standing atop the dining room table declaring, “I shall not eat the banana!”
For months after that we used those words as shorthand in our family, our way of saying, “Look, I know you really want me to do this thing, but I’m just not into it, okay?” And then we forgot about it. Until last week, when Clyde’s ballet class had “Parent Week” and I caused a minor kerfuffle by refusing to go dance in the studio with all of the other parents.
Clyde was mortified. Apparently I embarrassed him. I tried to explain my reasoning to him, tried to explain that I had every right to say no, all to no avail. He just didn’t get it. At least he didn’t until we got home and told my husband the whole story. My husband nodded his head knowingly, looked at us both, and then summed up the situation perfectly.
“She didn’t want to eat the banana.”
And Clyde finally understood. If he was allowed to have autonomy—if he was allowed to have his own set of likes and dislikes, preferences and hatreds, then maybe I was, too. Maybe I was something more than his mother—maybe I was actually a person in my own right.
At least I hope that’s what he got from the whole thing. I guess the only way I’ll know for sure is when Parent Week rolls around again next year, and we are once again “invited” to come up and dance. Because I’m pretty sure that a year won’t make any difference whatsoever. I still won’t want to eat the damn banana.