My Family’s Kitchen

Posted on February 13, 2009 in Childhood Journals & Notebooks Writing/Darkness

The refrigerator was coffee brown until late in my adolescence when my mother had it changed to the usual white. Cartoons hung by tiny fruit-shaped magnets. One of them showed a man sneaking oh so quietly down the stairs to the kitchen and then, suddenly, being intercepted by the dog who appeared out of nowhere.

I remember those little fruits well – there was a banana, an apple, and a sprig of cherries. I often salivated for the cherries but this was a fruit that seldom came into our house because of the expense. My mother bought the smallest, meanest apples she could by the dozen – Red Delicious which I never liked to eat because of their mushiness and lack of flavor. Despite her failure at getting me to eat them, she bought them time and again, scolding me for wasting good food. She was likewise frugal with our bread which was always the cheapest 29 cent loaves of white she could find. We kept the bread in a drawer. Now and again, she would pull out of the stale pieces to grind into bread crumbs. No slice went unused in our house unless it happened to grow moldy in the bag. Despite the starvation rations I managed to grow to more than six feet. I ate ample amounts of oatmeal in the morning which we kept in a cabinet over the stove. I liked it on the dry side so I added just a little water and milk.

My father did not approve of my drinking milk: this was his strange frugality. “Are you a baby cow?” he’d demand when he saw me having a glass or pouring it on my cereal. Milk was always skim. I seldom drank it, but put it on cereal so there was some flavor.

My mother hated fat and fat people. I think she thought the Great Depression was the best years of her life because after I moved out and she had some money she bought everything she could find that had the Campbells Kids on them. She liked to tell me stories about how, when she was a child, she ate pasta with only butter on it. (Recently she cooked me a dinner of gnocchi that had no sauce, no butter. She obsesses about my weight.)

Her stories about how hard she had had it indicated to me that she expected that I starve myself and be poor. “Suffer“, I used to mutter, the word full of breathiness. When I was having a hard time with my depression, she would tell me to “offer it up to God”. I didn’t find that much of a solution. But I could not escape the Sax household, so I ate meager portions of the “snacks” she bought, endured her over-boiled vegetables and burnt pork chops, and listened to her sanctimonious stories of her life in Omaha and the trek she once made with her family to Buffalo so that her father could find work ((It’s clear that she needed to bring herself up to the decade she was living in. I get a little peeved with often female therapists who tell me on one hand to understand why my mother was as she was and then in the next breath telling me that I have to forget the past. Why did she get to have the past molding her and I have to pretend as if mine never existed? The double standard is infuriating now as it was then.)) .

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The sink smelled of Ajax. The silverware all matched, and the plates were plastic just in case I dropped one of them. I had the job of unloading the dish washer during commercial breaks. If the break was short, I was expected to keep working until I finished, but then I caught flack for making noise while everyone else was watching television.

The worst thing when I was young was having to take the trash out. Mother would save the grocery bags for this chore. I had to take them out every night, out the back door of the garage and into the very dark area between the garage and the neighbor’s fence. Night and I were not friends: where today I look up to see the silver clouds and the reach of the universe with its stars and nebulas, then I saw skeletons, boogiemen, and black-skinned predators waiting in the shadows. Sometimes my family of bullies sneaked out behind me and scared me. One time I reacted by hitting my mother who had waited at the door to cackle and hiss at me after I had run out and run back in. For this I received a beating.

This is an exercise from [amazonify]1587613190::text::::Writing Through the Darkness: Easing Your Depression with Paper and Pen[/amazonify]