I Overcooked My Family…

I think there are two ways to depict family. One is what the audience wants to hear. The other is how it really is. If you ask me, I like the audience version, better.
Aaron Spelling

Okay… so I was a teensy over-controlling, a bit misguided, and completely oblivious at the time.

Marissa and Ken were reminiscing about a few of those things. “Remember the time mom grounded me then came into my room and asked if I was ready to talk and I said no? So she took away my stereo? Then my phone? Then my alarm clock? I never understood the alarm clock. I was like cool! Now I can oversleep for school!”

“How about the crash test scores, remember those?”

“How could I forget? I was only allowed to ride in certain vehicles. If a crash test score was less than ‘very good’, I wasn’t allowed to ride in that friend’s car. Of course my best friend’s car scored the worst.”

Ken nearly fell out of his chair imitating how I used to look everything up on the internet… “I looked it up”, cackle, cackle, “and Marissa is not riding in that car!”

“Okay! Okay!” I join their cackles, “I get the picture! I overcooked you but I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“Gee mom, ya think?”

Think? Who had time to think back then? I was busy. I was running two restaurants, producing and hosting a food show-ironically called “Thinking Outside the Box”– yet I could hardly think outside of how to get Kyle from baseball and Marissa to dance. I was stuck on a treadmill. In a glop of osmosis trying to hold everything together. I rushed from fridge to stove trying to finish one thing so I could hurry up and do another. All this in between bouts of, Mommm! Marissa changed the channel!

Yes– that was us before everything I thought I knew about being a mom, shifted. Our family was in a restaurant. Laughing instead of fighting over who gets to sit where. Our waitress literally stopped refilling our tea. Ken was standing in front of his chair pretending to be a Harlem Globetrotter. We were hysterical. Our baffled waitress assured us, “families do not have this much fun together”.

It was an epiphany.

She asked for the ‘recipe’ - wanted to know how she could do that with her kids. So that is what this blog is. Real human life truths in all their bittersweet overcooked glory. Past and present and in no particular order. I figured who better than bona fide moms and dads to empower other moms and dads? To come together with genuine smidgeons of what they’ve learned and are still learning. Hope, thoughts and joy. We are shaped by such things. No wonder they are as essential as food. I look forward to getting to know you.