When my daughter, Clementine, pens her first tell-all memoir, the book’s most Mommie Dearest moment will undoubtably involve not wire coat hangars, but rather, food. Specifically, any food that has left the Mommie Dearest-approved “green zone” of the kitchen and/or dining room. What’s more, I’m sure that in the made-for-TV version of her book I will be played by a (hopefully) recently “Jenny Craiged” Kirstie Alley (obviously she’ll still have to wear extensive make-up in order to appear older than her 140 years, and therefore closer to Clementine’s estimation of my true age),and that the drama’s opening scene will feature Kirstie/me lurching into the living room, clutching handfuls of stringy gray hair and screeching:
“No…Food…In…The…Living Room!” Meanwhile, a suitably cowering Clementine and Clyde (played, no doubt, by Lindsay Lohan and the latest Culkin child) will carry their offending pieces of organic celery sticks and spill-proof Perrier boxes back into the kitchen. And then they’ll cut to the scene of me eating a Snickers bar with a knife and fork.
That will be her version of it. My version, and the one you are getting to read now, is a little different. For one thing, I am nowhere near to being the obsessive-compulsive food freak that Clementine will undoubtedly paint me as; while in her version I will be an uptight foodaphobe who can’t see a bowl of fresh raspberries without reaching for the spray bottle of “Shout,” the truth of the matter is that I am just the opposite; at one time I was a child with “food/boundary” issues very similar to her own. Not that I could ever get Clementine to believe it when I’m in the midst of admonishing her for attempting to carry a handful of ice cream into the living room (the theory obviously being that if it never touches a dish, it’s not really food), but the unvarnished truth of the matter is that I was once more like her than I now care to admit.
I can understand why she might reason that a couch cushion is as acceptable as a plate for holding a few pieces of hot, greasy bacon, or that the best place to set a lipping full glass of chocolate milk is halfway on/halfway off of the VCR because in my youth I made similarly ill-advised decisions such as hiding a can of frozen orange juice overnight in my sock drawer. (The vision of my mother pacing the floor and seemingly interrogating the carpeting with “why, why, why?” no doubt has something to do with this particular memory being permanently etched in my mind).
It is, in fact, my own childhood memories that cause me to be so hard on my own children now: I am like the ex-smoker who can’t see someone light up without nagging them about the dangers of smoking; except, in my case I cannot see a popsicle being waved around within a 6-foot radius of a set of lace curtains without immediately sounding the alarm. Nobody knows as well as I that in the child mind the neuron pathway between no napkin and well, here’s a nice pillow is a very, very short one indeed because my neurons once traveled the same route.
Of course, since that explanation doesn’t translate into drama as well as the image of the food-obsessed mother freaking out over a breath mint on the couch I guess I’d better get used to the idea of there being a little (or a lot–depending on Jenny Craig) of Kirstie Alley in my future. Still, it could be worse: Clementine could hook up with O.J.’s old publisher, and I could look forward to holding the starring role in a gruesome tale of the mother run amok over a box of spilled Saltines. I can already picture the title: If I Ate It.