W
e were standing waiting to pay in the supermarket. My daughter, then about three, had been keeping up a slow whine for some time already – apparently, she desired to eat a vienna sausage right at that very instant.
See, there are proper mothers, who wouldn’t dream of feeding their children vienna sausages, and then there are exhausted mothers, who just think, ah, what the hell – what’s a bit of compacted offal compared to five minutes’ respite? I belong to the latter category, albeit slightly complicated by a strong desire to simultaneously maintain the moral high ground in any given circumstance.
So although I fully intended to deliver on the vienna, the vienna itself was going to be delivered in a healthy wholewheat bun with good-quality butter, freshly sliced organic tomato and superfood yak cheese sensitively sourced from the highest reaches of the Himalayas.
“Vienna!” said my daughter, waving it in my face.
“When we get home, darling,”
I said through gritted teeth – although naturally the words came out in a warmly loving tone, for the benefit of the interested audience of Better Mothers lurking at the tills pretending to focus on their quinoa.
“When we get home, I’ll put it in a bun for you.”
My daughter was outraged. “But I don’t want it in my bum!” she yelled. “I want it in my mouf!”.
The Better Mothers all instantly reached for their cellphones, clogging up the lines at Childline. Not only a shocking diet, but clearly some kind of weird abuse, too.
My daughter has never been as interested in food as I am, so I should have known right from the start that when it came down to it, she would always have the upper hand. Over me, at least. Not her grandmother, who is made of sterner stuff.
When she was even younger than this – maybe about two – she was sitting in the kitchen one day while my mother tried to feed her. Never particularly gripped by the whole eating thing (she was still living in pre-vienna misery), she was snaking her head from side to side, lips firmly closed, while my mother tried unsuccessfully to land various foodcarrying “aeroplanes” in her mouth.
“Vrrroooom, vrrrroooom!” said my mother encouragingly. More car than aeroplane, perhaps, but hey, millions of children have fallen for it before, including me. Not this one.
My daughter finally stopped bobbing and weaving and looked my mother straight in the eye.
“You,” she said firmly, poking her tiny finger accusingly at my mother,
“are getting on my tits.”
I can’t imagine where she’d ever heard that before, Your Honour.
My mother didn’t even skip a beat.
“Be that as it may,” she said. “You’re still going to eat another mouthful.” And she did.
Now 19, my daughter has forsworn viennas completely. In fact, she no longer eats any meat at all. Literally overnight, she evolved into Madame Nineteen of the House of Brokensha, Queen of the Scornful Vegetarian Gaze, Kohlrabi of the Great Non-Dairy Lake, Protector of the Righteous, Scourge of the Carnivores,
Lady Regent of the Three Remaining
Food Groups, Breaker of the Braai and Mother of Seitan. To give her her full title.
We still all try to eat together because I once read that if you do, your kids are slightly less likely to become psychopaths (too soon to say). It’s just increasingly difficult to come up with a meal that we can all eat: Nineteen’s boyfriend is an omnivore, as are the rest of us; my husband and I try to eat fewer carbs than we really, really want to (oh, how very, very much we want to) and my son’s girlfriend eats a little meat, but is gluten intolerant. The bottom line is: Monday Night Spag Bol is no longer an option for at least two-thirds of us, and that is an enormous loss in my eyes.
But I’ve been thinking … does anyone actually know what viennas are made of? Any meat at all? They could well be the answer to everything. And, thanks to my daughter all those years ago, at least we know where to put them.