Allergies and Breakfast

When I was a child, our family ate breakfast together every morning before school.  Seated around the kitchen counter that was our dining area, each in our own place, we shared the first meal of the day.  Now that I am a parent, I am at a loss to recreate this childhood experience for my children.  The work required to make that happen is a Herculean effort for me. 

In my not-so-small family, we all have different schedules.  One leaves at 5:30am, one at 6:30am, two at 7am, and the rest a bit later.  We all rush about on our independent paths, grabbing breakfast as we run out the door.  Some of us don’t eat that meal at all.

But when I was small, my family all ate breakfast together.  Cereal bowls all around.  Passing milk and juice, toast and muffins across the counter.  The vision is so vivid that I sometimes feel as if I am still there.

Mom was a stay-at-home mother for the first decade or so of my life.  She had one rule when we claimed illness to get out of going to school.  “Get up, shower, get dressed, eat breakfast, and we’ll see how you feel.” It was her consistent response to the inevitable “Mom, I don’t feel good.”.  Of course, if we had a fever or were throwing up breakfast, we got a pass on going to school.  Otherwise we were up, dressed, fed and out the door to walk to the bus stop.  Getting a ride to school wasn’t possible.  Mom didn’t drive and we didn’t have a second car.

Years later, I discovered the reason for her firm policy had nothing to do with her Army boot-camp training or her desire to have the house to herself for a few precious hours during the day.  Every morning when my mother woke up, she felt a cold coming on.  Stuffy head, itchy eyes, tired, and a touch of nausea greeted her every morning.  She would get up, shower, dress, and feel better by the time she got to the breakfast table.  Now with the miracle of new allergy medications on the market, she no longer wakes to this annoyance every morning.

However, back when I was a child she didn’t even know that she had allergies.  So she applied her own morning routine to her children and had them up and dressed and fed.  We were on our way to school and able to face the day even if we didn’t feel like we could do it an hour before.  To her credit, each of her children has developed a strong work ethic, based partly I’m sure on our daily training to get up, shower, get dressed and eat breakfast before you make the decision to cancel your day.  I think about that fact of my young life and wonder what life would have been like if Mom hadn’t had allergies, or if those medications had been invented 10 or 20 years earlier.