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Dalai Mama Dishes

by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

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Chilling Out

Posted July 15, 2008
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It may look like a Louie-Bloo Raspberry Otter Pop to you, but to me it's a frozen plastic tube of resignation. I seem to have stopped micromanaging my children's every worldly experience. Don't get me wrong - I'm still manning the drawbridge over here. But I'm dropping it down for the occasional blue food, the Juicy Fruit gum, the plastic swords, the late bed times, and even some of the popular movies. I mean, you can only check Heidi out from the library so many times. Right?

But I have wanted more of a bread-and-cheese Alpine childhood for these kids than a Lunchables Hollywood one, if you know what I'm saying. I have wanted the children to be flushed with the wind and propelled by their imaginations; I have wanted braided hair and practical clothing and wholesome meals, old-fashioned toys and old-fashioned manners and, God, I don't know. I suppose I have wanted them to be Amish. Amish as represented by the movie Witness, of course - with Harrison Ford, natch, but also with cars and a few well-chosen DVDs and feminism.

And so my kids have grown up under the sheltering branches of the willow of my nostalgia. Which sounds good, until you come closer and see that this tree is smothering the children and nagging everybody, wagging its deciduous fingers like those guilt-mongering forest monsters from The Wizard of Oz. No that's not quite right. It's mostly been great: reading Little House on the Prairie, making fairy houses, finger weaving, and lighting beeswax candles by which to dine on a beautiful spelt-fed roast of organic free-wheeling pork. I am not kidding. Well, a little, about the spelt. But you know what I'm saying. It's important not to capitulate to marketing and violence and the everything-for-sale plastic grossness that this world can offer us. Right? Plus, you have to be somewhat vigilant about health and safety. I mean, I remember camping with friends when Ben was a baby - Ben who'd ingested nothing in his few earthly months but breast milk, liquid Tylenol, and the plastic stem of a plastic lemon - and I was setting up our tent when they yelled from the picnic table, "Is it okay that we're feeding him a peanut butter sandwich?" Sure, but after you resuscitate him with the Epi-pen, go ahead and plunge it into my stalled heart.

But boy, have I been a ridiculous caricature of my own fretful self. Michael and I were just reminiscing about the time my father was reading The Cat in the Hat Comes Back to toddler Ben, and I interrupted him to say, "Oh, Dad, no. No no no. We don't read the G-U-N-S part. We just call those poppers. Also, we don't say K-I-L-L. We read that part Pop snow spots with poppers? That just could not be." Indeed. As I recall, my Dad smiled, closed the book, handed it to me, and said, "Be my guest." Or how about Ben's first birthday cake - the one that was actually zucchini bread baked festively in a bundt pan? It's not that I regret that level of protectiveness exactly - it's that I'm happy to relinquish it a little bit now. Against the solid backdrop of years of good nutrition and nonviolent teachings, I feel like my kids can suck on a blue ice pop and watch a little Sponge Bob Squarepants without turning into Augustus Gloop getting their greedy ungrateful selves stuck in the chocolate chute. And I can watch their lips turn a vivid artificial cobalt without feeling like they're being tattooed with carcinogens.

So, when we spent this past wonderful week in Virginia with 20 of Michael's family members, including 8 kids who ranged in age from 2 to 10, it was great to be able to let go. The kids stayed up until 11 and munched bowls of Captain Crunch. They watched Finding Nemo ("I guess it was a little sad when the mom got eaten by a shark," Ben confided later, shrugging coolly but with wet eyes.) and they walked barefoot to the swimming pool bathroom. (Okay, even writing that just now I wanted to run downstairs and bathe their feet in boiling rubbing alcohol.) But they had the time of their lives.

Don't worry. My laissez-faire persona, while shocking, was not universally applied. I did, for example, interrupt the children's enjoyment of Jamestown with a political critique of the propagandistic film ("That movie makes it sound like the colonists and the native Americans were kind of mutually disappointed in each other," I said to the kids, and Ben, our beautiful child, said, "Oh I know! I mean, hello, we stole your land and killed you, what are you so angry about?"). I also prepared to interrupt a gender stereotyping moment - we were acting out a castle-and-knights play, and one of Ben's cousins was aghast over the idea of a boy playing the princess - but Ben beat me to that one as well. "It's called acting," he said, wisely. "I mean, it's not like anyone's actually a dragon either, right?"

If this is what it looks like to pick your battles - consistently strong beliefs and occasional blasts of high fructose corn syrup - well, consider mine picked.

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About Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman is the author of the memoir, Waiting for Birdy: A Year of Frantic Tedium, Neurotic Angst, and the Wild Magic of Growing a Family, available online and in bookstores nationwide.

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