Freezer full of empty boxes, irony

As I opened my freezer and picked up the box, I fully expected the weight of the sugar, fat, and general deliciousness that I had been craving would, naturally, resist my urges.

Instead, my hand launched up to the wire bars of the shelf above it, quite possibly sustaining a bruise that would slowly develop as I stood there and fumed.

Why doesn’t anyone in the house throw out empty boxes?

It was a rhetorical complaint that could as quickly ricochet and cover me in sickly sweet irony.

As if they didn’t come from me - my children! Don’t they know, I asked the air quite plaintively, how much of their own gratification is lost by this lazy omission to the effort of recycling?

Don’t they understand that if I knew the icy fudge-ribboned delicacies had been scarfed or the cream-filled treasure boxes had been scraped to barren that I would dutifully replace them?

Who do they think does the shopping?

OK sometimes their dad ... but he never buys the good stuff.

I’m the one buying the food that I wish they wouldn’t eat and hiding it in plain sight.

The temptations I face in the middle of the night would not weigh as heavily in the morning when I can’t face the scale.

As I stand there holding the box, letting the cold of the freezer escape, I can’t help but think of younger me.

I wish I didn’t know where I had tucked the dollar store cookies and the fun-sized candies to pulverize one at a time and sprinkle on top of a mountain of ice cream.

Oh, the rub that I should be so vexed.

Wasn’t my college minifridge stocked with empty containers?

Milk, eggs, orange juice containers all rang hollow.

“Why don’t you throw these out,” asked a laughing guest with an unquenched thirst for Vitamin C.

I just shrugged my shoulders and admitted I didn’t want my oft-visiting parents to notice the cupboard was bare.

It wasn’t so much that I didn’t want them to worry as much as I didn’t want them to judge my choices.

The shame of which I realize I might not have outgrown.

Maybe I haven’t worried as much as I needed to that the crimes in my own nutrition have crept into the genes of my youngest child, who hasn’t consumed a vegetable since 2010. I profess not to worry since I, myself, consumed only the sparest of no-thank-you portions from the time I was eight until sometime mid-college.

The “better choices” I’ve made at the grocery store – truth be told – have been mostly in air quotes-marketed “health” foods and guilt-curated shopping arrays one week out of a month after greedily binging on junk food for the other three.

The freezer door is still open, and I am still standing in front of it, staring at the empty box, when my daughter gently nudges past me to grab an apple.

“I would have recycled that … but I kinda didn’t want you to know I ate the last of it.”

Siobhan Connally is a writer and photographer living in the Hudson Valley. Her column about family life appears weekly in print and online.