Ugh!

Ugh!  (E) We never thought we'd still be quarreling about food after all these years. #2001160 by Chinabara

“Ugh.”

“Never mind ugh. Eat it!”

“It’s gross.”

“I know. But it’s good for you.”

“I can’t believe you’re making me do this.”

“Someday you’ll thank me.”

How many times does a kid have a conversation like this with her mother? I’d been such a compliant child. We seldom squabbled over friends, fashions or curfew hours. I usually fixed my hair the way Mom wanted me to, and when she thought it was getting too long, I let her trim it. The only thing we ever disagreed about was food.

We had so many arguments at the dinner table, I got to where I even disliked the look of Mom’s favourite china. It was thick ironstone with country scenes on it, mostly in brown with a few colours daubed in here and there. She had bought it one piece at a time from the grocery store where she did most of her shopping, one winter when it had been featured on special sale before Christmas. When it hadn’t all sold by New Year’s (no kidding!), the price continued to drop every week until finally, triumphantly, she came home just before Valentine’s Day with the last five plates in the store plus a serving bowl and the matching sugar and creamer set.

Mom had been raised in relative poverty; Grandma, a widow who supported herself and six children by taking in paying boarders, had served whatever comestibles she could come up with, on whatever plates happened to be in the cupboard at the time. They were bought for pennies in thrift shops or at estate sales. They were usually good, solid pieces, but they never matched each other unless it was by accident. Now, for the first time in her life, my mother had a collection of coordinated dishware. Ugly—but coordinated.

She wasn’t the kind of mom who saved her favourite china just for special occasions, either. We ate off those dishes every day of our lives. So, as you can guess, with my persnickety food preferences, those dishes were the background to many heated discussions. And the dishes weren’t only ugly; they were badly painted, too. Grocery-store china didn’t get much attention in the factory, it seemed, and the hit or miss blobs of coloured glaze meant to enliven the design offended my youthful artistic sensibilities almost as much as Mom’s cooking did.

Now, Mom sighed as she looked down at her own plate. “I never thought we’d still be arguing about food after all these years. Look at these dishes, now. I can hardly eat off them without hearing your voice inside my head, asking if you really have to eat the fat from the meat, or if you can put sugar on your rice.”

“I’m surprised you still have so much of the original set,” I commented.

“Well, I might not have been able to get you to like everything that was served to you at the table, but I’d have to say you and your brothers did at least learn to wash dishes properly. You hardly ever broke one.”

“A skill that helped pay my way through through college,” I agreed.

“But I never thought our roles would be reversed like this,” she complained. “Why do I have to have stir-fried vegetables with scrambled eggs for lunch instead of a sandwich? I’ve always had a sandwich for lunch, and I hate cooked peppers.”

“Just try it. Maybe you’ll like it. You know what the doctor said about cutting out those extra carbs.”

“I suppose you’re right,” she grumbled, picking up her fork and glaring at me over her glasses, “but I’ll bet other people’s daughters don’t make them eat garbage like this.”