Life Interrupts Daddy’s Plans for Dinner

Dear Skeeter,

Leni had to work late, so I had the kids last night. No, your daughter’s not abandoning your grandchildren, she just got caught in a scheduling squeeze, and she planned out a perfectly good meal.

Fajitas--what could be simpler? Heat up a few tortillas, fry this meat-green pepper-and-onion mix Leni picked up at Mrs. Gooch’s. Leni and Mrs. Gooch have done all the work. I’m just the delivery system.

So brimming with competence I whip out a skillet and a frying pan, turn on the flame, put on the tortillas and the mix--and Ariel promptly falls off the rocking horse (the plastic thing on springs that makes that whinnying sound you hated so much when you could hear better).

Tears, and worse--two toes have been scraped. No blood, just a light onion peel of toe skin. But demanding the full treatment as far as a 4-year-old was concerned.

Not, let me say, as far as I was concerned. And that was a lot of the problem. From my perspective, hardly worth aborting dinner for.

So I race into the little bathroom off the kitchen and open a drawer with half-a-dozen bandage cans in it. Bandage cans are very useful things for kids, like film canisters or shoe boxes--they have that neat hinge, they close with a snick, and they’re still made of metal (how much longer, I wonder). So, of course, this drawer of bandage cans has not a single bandage in it.

Now I’m beginning to worry about my dinner--in fact I’ve thrown out the first tortillas, turned down the flame on the meat--when I get this great idea: use Eric. He’s finally big enough to run this sort of mission, right? Seven years old and all. So I send him up to the bathroom to find the Band-Aids and I go back to my hot stove and crying daughter.

He finally returns, just as the meat is about done, and announces he can’t find any. Now I know they’re there--I put them there--so I tell him to look again. Next thing I hear is a crash, and Eric comes down to tell me he broke something. So I turn off the fajitas (Ariel has now forgotten her hurt, right, since this new adventure is much more exciting) and I go upstairs and discover that Eric has somehow smashed a bottle of one of Leni’s magic skin potions all over our bathroom floor. Dinner getting cold, I clean up the stuff and as much of the glass as I can find and go into THEIR bathroom where sure enough there are the bandages where I said they were.

Here I lose it. I call down to Eric and summon him in my best “I will not be denied” voice, open the drawer with the three boxes of bandages, and point out that there was not just one Band-Aid, there were 50 and 30 and 20, all of 100 Band-Aids. (Eric is into numbers now in a big way, and that 100 really got to him.) A hundred Band-Aids and Eric couldn’t find ONE.

Now I have a crying 7-year-old on my hands. And while I was trying to pacify Ariel, before the big Band-Aid discovery, I’d sprayed Novocain stuff on her little toes so now when I try to apply these Band-Aids (the sight of the Band-Aids made Ariel remember her agony, of course) they just kind of slip around anyway, and I’m trying to make them stick knowing it’s impossible while I’m really thinking about my food getting colder and greasier by the minute.

So Eric is weeping and Ariel is hopping around on one foot and the tortillas are burned again and the fajita stuff is cold and we finally sit down to dinner.

By now I am in no mood to humor anybody. I gruffly tell Eric not to be so hard on himself, that everyone makes mistakes. The sniffling slows, and in a trice the kids are munching away contentedly on their cold dinner and crispy tortillas.

The kids cool off faster than the fajitas, but I’m left with all the residual frustration of having this simple plan laid out neatly in my head, with the taste of a warm home-cooked Mrs. Gooch’s ethnic health food dinner already in my nose, only to see life conspire to rip it from my grasp and replace it with this weird combination of dinner interruptus and child-induced guilt. Was having a warm meal really so important that I should torture my kids for it?

I thought so. But then when I laid this on Leni (back at 9 with a cheerful, “How were the kids, dear?”) she seemed remarkably unsympathetic, you might say completely unmoved, except for a certain residual satisfaction in my experiencing What Life Is Really Like. “Why didn’t you just reheat the fajitas again and put on some more tortillas?”

I glowered.

“Whenever you have the kids,” she says, “you assume you’re doing something with them. It’s event programming--it’s all so focused. What makes you think you can get away with doing one thing at a time?”

You’ve really got to work on this sympathy thing with that daughter of yours.

Ever your loving

son-in-law, Jon.