My father had peanut butter for dinner every night – two or three globs wedged between two pieces of white bread. Now, whether he had an undying passion for peanut butter or a strong distaste for my mother’s cooking, I can’t be sure. I just know it infuriated my mother. Every time he reached for the Skippy, she’d sneer at him behind his back.
The nerve of him! Why couldn’t he appreciate what went into her meals? Didn’t he know she spent hours cooking a piece of meat that the average housewife spent a fraction of the time preparing?! (Between you, me and the lamppost, his callousness probably added seven years to his life. The cholesterol-laden peanut butter was the lesser of two evils.)
I have my own theory in regards to my father’s menu choice. I think my father used the peanut butter as an excuse not to talk to my mother. Every time she brought up an unpleasant subject, he would point at his lips and pretend his tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth. Angry and impatient, she would wave him off and target one of us instead.
I tried his peanut butter trick once, but my mother wasn’t about to tolerate that from a snotty-nosed kid like me. She figured a good, clean whack to the back of the head would surely free up my clogged tongue. Not only did my tongue come clear out of my mouth, but my brain sloshed to the front of my skull, resulting in about a week’s worth of headaches. I guess you’d call it a concussion, according to today’s terminology. We just called it ‘persuasion’ in our household.
Yeah, I was persuaded to go to school, to go to bed, to go to catechism, to stop touching my sisters, to kiss my grandmother, to stop whispering in church, and to never interrupt when adults were talking. That was a big one. I’m sure there were hundreds more, but I’m drawing a blank (probably too much persuasion.)
Interrupting adults during a conversation...whew...I shudder at the thought. The conditioning I received as a child still haunts me to this very day. Allow me to explain.
My mother’s kitchen was the coffee klatch for half the women in the town of Lincoln. My mother was a stay-at-home mom and, therefore, constantly accessible. From sunrise to sunset, housewives and working women from all over town would straggle into our home for an hour of idle gossip and a cup or two of Maxwell House instant coffee. When I was little, I would sit under the kitchen table and play with my Matchbox cars, while above me sat six or seven women, smoking cigarettes and swapping dirt on everyone from the school custodian to the local priest.
At first, I never paid much attention to their conversations. I was preoccupied, maneuvering my toy cars in and around the women’s high heels. Then I turned five or six and became worldlier. I began listening to what they were saying about this person and that person...people I knew! Suddenly, I had the urge to share my opinion. After all, I had a mind…slightly persuaded, but a mind, nevertheless. I waited until one of the women came up for air, then rose to speak.
“Well, I think....”
One glance at my mother’s face made me clam right up. The look she was giving me would have halted a charging rhinoceros! I took a step backwards. I could feel the daggers in her eyes and taste the venom behind her lips. I braced myself for the inevitable.
“No one gives a shit what you think!” Then she persuaded me to sit down on the floor. But she wasn’t done there. She proceeded to belittle me in front of the other women.
“Do you think anyone cares what a five-year-old boy thinks?!”
I was six, but I didn’t think it was a good time to point that out.
She waved her arms and cried, “Look! Look around the table! Do any of these faces appear the least bit interested in what you have to say?”
I glanced around the circle. Her friends just sat there, casually puffing on their cigarettes, while nibbling on my mother’s endless supply of rock-hard ginger snaps. They were no more interested in me than they were in meeting their husbands’ sexual needs. You want to talk about feeling small.
Wow, I thought. I ‘am’ an insignificant turd. Gee Mom, thanks for pointing that out.
She had a parenting style second to none. I’m just glad she didn’t wait until I was at the ripe old age of seven before setting me straight. Otherwise, I might have ended up like the kids in my class that raised their hands when the teacher asked a question; those poor misguided children who felt compelled to show their trumped up importance and radical free-thinking. No…not me…no sir-r-ree. I had learned my lesson. If my first grade teacher, Mrs. Towers, wanted to know who discovered America, then she’d better ask an adult…cuz I knew she didn’t give a shit what I thought. It didn’t matter if I knew Columbus’s favorite color! My lips were sealed.
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