Confessions of a Misguided Mother - Part 2

I loved food.....eating it and cooking it. Equally important was it's total environment. For example: Gourmet Italian food that I had labored over, was served on special hand-made china with pictures of pasta, mustachioed chefs , and Chianti bottles on it. The phonograph played "O Solo Mia", "Come Back to Sorrento" and various Puccini arias. The aromas were wonderfully appropriate. Oriental food was also a lot of fun to cook and serve. (Our dishes were those that were chosen in San Francisco's Chinatown. No easy feat, because we visited there before leaving our home in California, in order to move back to New York City (from whence we all came) We were pulling a U-Haul trailer up and down the hills of San Francisco. I would spot a store where I could purchase dishes, records, ingredients for Chinese meals and Happi Coats for the family.

They would drop me off ...while they would drive around the block a few times because they couldn't park. When all of the shopping was completed, we headed for New York. Asian meals were really something I prided myself upon....we all wore Happi Coats, listened to exotic Chinese and Japanese music and ate with chopsticks from those San Francisco dishes. I learned to make egg drop soup, wontons and fried rice to mention a few of the dishes. My husband pretended to enjoy my efforts, but the brats (sorry, I mean children) said they much preferred hamburgers. After too many dinners of wasted effort, I decided to "fix" them. I announced that I would serve them hamburgers for a full month straight. I went to a discount food store and bought a huge package of 75 hamburger patties and an equally large size of buns. On the 1st of the month, I began the hamburger menu. The kids loved them. I assumed they would get tired of it, as I continued to cook different foods for my husband and myself. At the end of the month, I served my gourmet food to the four of us...and lo and behold....they requested another month of hamburgers. YUKKO!

Last example: The children were now twelve-years-old.....and their table manners were non-existent. (as was my husband's) I decided to make up a game and call it " Table Manners" In the center of the table was a big ceramic piggy bank that I had used as an ornament. My plan was that each evening meal, I would teach them all one lesson....for example, the first one was, "Elbows Off the Table" If any of us were caught with our elbows on the table we would point it out to one another.. The second night the lesson was," No Talking with Food In Our Mouths". That lesson was free, but if anyone "goofed" on the previous lesson, and it was pointed out to them, the one who goofed would be fined one penny, which was put into the piggy bank (pennies to be accumulated and spent to take us out to some special place.).....And so it went. I got up to lesson five....and realized that no one was appreciating my lessons or their fines...and their table manners didn't seem to improve. I found out many years later, that the children would remove their penny fines right after dinner. And so ends my sad tales of "Lessons in Futility."