Category Archives: Parenting

Oh, for the love of…

When we were little, my siblings and I would ask our mother, “Who’s your favorite? Which one of us do you love the best?”

We’d always get the same exasperating answer. She would hold up her hand and say, “See my fingers? Which finger do I love best?” With her other hand, she would point to one finger and then the other and say, “Do I love this one the best? Or this one? How could I answer that? Of course, I love them all the same!”

(Secretly, I’d think, “Oh come on! Surely, you love the thumb or maybe the pointer the best…?“).

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Everybody has a favorite finger.

Only once, when we were all grown did she admit to me that she does, in fact, have a favorite child.

(Yes, siblings, it’s true)!

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My mother and her dearly beloved firstborn daughter.

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Daughter #2 – Best at Everything, Couldn’t be More Perfect if She Tried, and did I mention she had triplet BOYS?!

 

 

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Me and my long-awaited baby brother…so longed-for, so cherished that he was named Theodore, i.e. “Gift from God.” (It took four tries, but they finally hit the jackpot)!

 

 

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My mother revealed to me that she loves best…whichever one of us needs her the most at the time.

I thought of that when I was driving my son to his gym this weekend. I was ranting and raving about the state of our nation’s affairs as I have been since November. My son interrupted my diatribe to ask: “Do you want to move to another country?”

It’s not a crazy question. My husband is from the U.K. and has often fantasized about returning to Scotland, where he spent his childhood. Every time he visits Scotland, I get a spate of real estate listings in my email inbox. As for me, I am the child of immigrant parents, who freely changed their country of residence from Korea to America as often as some people change the oil in their cars.

“HELL NO!” I said with a vehemence that shocked even myself. I struck my own chest in a melodramatic gesture I’ve only seen performed by my own mother and maybe a few Korean drama heroines: “This is MY country!”

What the hell has come over me? I thought as soon as the words flew out of my mouth.

To be honest, I’ve always been somewhat suspicious of the very concept of patriotism…I’ve thought that being patriotic was corny at best and slightly sinister at worst. But now I understand what my mother meant…I love our country more than ever before, because it desperately needs us right now. The American values upon which our country was founded are being hurled to the winds. Your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free are having the door slammed on their weary faces. Citizens of countries where the president does not happen to have business dealings are being denied entry. Even permanent residents have been turned away. As one of the speakers at a rally I attended this weekend said: This is a civic emergency.

I’ve always considered myself to be an apolitical, introverted couch potato, but I spent the weekend at rallies and marches, joining in the shouts of “THIS is what America looks like!” and “THIS is what democracy looks like!” and “No hate! No fear! Refugees are welcome here!” As I squeezed in alongside other protesters and activists, I felt my heart swell with love for this country and for the people who are doing whatever they can to make this place a more perfect union.img_2812-2 img_2819img_2822img_2830img_2836

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“Love thy neighbor”

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I guess that makes me a radicalized patriot.

God bless America.

What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part – through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk – to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.
– Barack Obama “A More Perfect Union”

Related Post: Their Country

Chance

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One in a gazillion

As I was braiding my daughter’s hair this morning, we were chatting about one of her teachers who is about to have a baby.

“Does she know if it’s a boy or a girl?” I asked.

“No! They want to be surprised!” she replied, “Did you know that I was going to be a girl?”

“Yes, I did! You know how I hate suspense!”

“So they could tell that I was a girl before I was born, but they couldn’t tell that I had this disease?”

My daughter was born with a condition that allows her to live a perfectly normal life as long as she takes medicines throughout the day.

“Yes, that’s right. We didn’t realize that until you were born.”

“What were the chances that I would be born with it?”

“Well, we didn’t know it at the time, but it turned out that there was a 1 in 4 chance that you would have it.”

“Oh GREAT!”she replied, “So there was a 3 in 4 chance that I wouldn’t have it?”

“Yes, that’s true,” I replied, “But there was only a 1 in a gazillion chance that you would be the amazing and awesome person you are…so I think we really lucked out.”

Weekend Snapshots 44

Friday

I took the day off work so that I could spend it with my kids who had the day off from school. After a long and arduous quarter, and a week that felt like a hurricane on the heels of a tornado followed by an avalanche…it felt soooooooooo good to have a day of rest.

I took the kids to lunch at The Bebedero, a newish Mexican restaurant in Charlottesville…

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The friendly bartender explained that the service can be slow sometimes…

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So tired, but so happy.

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“Where’s the food?”

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Mmmmmm…delicious nachos.

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Camarones Ensalada Frio

We strolled along the Downtown Mall…

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“So that‘s how they change those letters!”

We had dessert at The Flat Takeaway Crêperie:

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We can highly recommend the Chocolate Chip Cookie Crêpe!

That evening my friend and I returned to the Downtown Mall to take our daughters to the Paramount to see their beloved violin teacher perform with the Waynesboro Symphony Orchestra:

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Saturday

We spent the morning getting ready for my son’s Halloween party…

img_7232The day was punctuated by soccer games…My husband took our oldest son to his game in Lynchburg; I took our daughter to her game at Booster Park in Orange County. The park also happens to be adjacent to an airport and a skydiving outfit. I tried to pay attention to the game, but every thirty minutes people would fall out of the sky:

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Oh sure, that’s not at all distracting!

We rushed home to finish getting ready for the party:

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Ghosts in the Graveyard – a nostalgic favorite!

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Apple cider with a vanilla flavored bone and a gummy eyeball.

After dinner the kids took their flashlights and went outside to hunt for Halloween candy and to have an epic game of flashlight tag. They came in sweaty and red-faced and ready to watch their scary movie…

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Popcorn and candy corn fingernails.

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Vampire blood: Hawaiian Punch, cranberry ginger ale, grenadine, and a dollop of vanilla ice cream. Oh, and the blood of a vampire, obviously – (Preferably O positive for the best results).

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Thank you, Pinterest!

Sunday

Church! Choir! And Marie-Bette Café & Bakery in between!

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Trying to behave like this, when…

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…you really feel like this.

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Ebony and Ivory

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I’m shriiiiiiiiiiiinking!

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Happy Halloween!

Weekend Snapshots 43, or: The Ice Queen Cometh

My husband went to Scotland last weekend to give a talk at University of Edinburgh. He got to spend some time with our niece at her new school and he’s been able to check in on his parents in England. He’s also carved out a little time to do some hiking. It seems like he’s been gone for an eternity, a feeling that is only exacerbated when he texts me photos like these:img_7081

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…complete with breathless, rapturous captions about the wondrous beauty he is experiencing.

We’re having much smaller-scale adventures at home. For example, on Friday my daughter spotted this in our backyard:

img_1683We think that rather fearsome bird perched on the run-in shed is a Red-tailed Hawk. I had never fully appreciated what the phrase “sitting duck” meant until recently. My daughter did not at all appreciate my observation that this would make Reason #927 for not getting the pet ducks she’s been pining for…

On Saturday I made shakshuka for the first time, which – miracle of miracles – everyone liked:

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Oh, shakshuka, where have you been all my life?!

I adapted this New York Times recipe for the dish, substituting in ingredients we happened to have. (Sautée an onion, a bell pepper, and a few cloves of garlic. Season with salt, pepper, cumin, paprika, and cayenne. Add a carton of diced plum tomatoes and stir until sauce thickens. Stir in about a cup of crumbled feta or goat cheese. [I used a little of both]. Crack eggs over the mixture and bake in 375 degree oven for about ten minutes). The kids ate it all up with slices of buttery toasted sourdough bread.

On Sunday morning I picked up my daughter from a sleepover and we headed out to the field for her brother’s game. His team won by a large margin, but in the final moments they failed spectacularly at one attempt to get the ball into the net. A player kicked it from only about a foot away, but instead of going in, the ball got a little too much loft and improbably landed on top of the net.

“How in the world did they not get that into the net?” my daughter spluttered, clutching her head in disbelief, “Grandma could have gotten it in!”

“Grandma’s Grandma could have gotten the ball in! I mean…”

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She plumbed the depths of her wildest imagination to come up with an even more preposterous scenario: “I mean…YOU could have gotten it in.”

end of the middleTears of remorse sprung to her eyes as soon she saw the shocked expression on my face. Of course, they immediately turned into tiny little icicles…

Brrrrrr, that was cold, little Ice Queen, but I still love you anyway.

img_7072I’ll probably forgive Mr. Scotland too one day…

Weekend Snapshots 42

My family and I went to NYC this weekend to see my cousin in one of the final performances of Julia Cho’s Aubergine. It’s a play about the barriers to communication and understanding; it’s about the ways in which we try to commune through food; it’s about how we live and die. Our cousin played the part of Ray, a Korean-American chef who is taking care of his dying father. They have always had a tortured relationship marred by the inability to truly connect with one another. As his father lies comatose, unable to utter more than a groaned word now and then, Ray wrestles with the weight of all that was unexpressed between them during a lifetime. The play was beautiful and moving, funny and desperately sad, and so much of it felt very close to home…

Thursday

There were a lot of loose ends to tie up before heading to Arlington, where we would spend a night at my parents’ house before driving the rest of the way to New York. For one thing, we had to make sure the pets were set with everything they needed while we were gone. I did an inventory of their food supply, then handed my phone to my son and asked him to run down to the basement to take a picture of the new kitty litter we’ve been using so we’d remember which kind to restock. Feeling rather smug about my prudent foresight, I strode over to the pet supply aisle in the grocery store and pulled up the pictures on my phone to discover this:

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The Failure of Communication: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts

Friday

The next day my mom cooked my kids’ favorite lunch: tender, salty mackerel with crispy, crackly skin.

In Aubergine, one of the characters talks about how her father would always eat the head and tail of the fish and give her the middle of the fish. One day she serves him the head and tail of the fish and magnanimously announces that she’s giving him his favorite part.

“Rice pot!” (i.e.: Dummy!) he says with exasperation and explains that he had always eaten the head and tail so that she could have the best part of the fish.

As the audience absorbs this revelation, Ray asks, “What part did your mother eat?”

As so often happens these days, my mother was too exhausted by her culinary labor of love to eat any fish herself.

She wasn’t too tired, however, to take care of some other pressing business. Before we left for New York, she handed me a thick envelope. She had prepared an identical one for all of her children. I opened it to see that it was a map and description of the burial plots she and my dad bought for themselves a few weeks ago. She had also included the contact information for two minister friends who already agreed to perform their funeral services.

“We got a 10% discount for buying early!” my mother chirped brightly as she dropped her latest weapon of mass destruction on our heads. “I thought we should be buried right under some pine trees, but your daddy was worried about the roots spreading. So we picked a nearby spot where we’ll have a good view of them. Remember! Put your dad on the left side, and me on the right. We’ll be able to call to each other in the morning and say, ‘Good morning! Have you eaten breakfast yet?‘”

Oh, dear God! Waterboarding? The rack? These don’t hold a candle to the myriad creative and devastating ways this woman devises to torture me.

img_7041We drove up to NYC where we met up with the rest of our family:

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Admiring photos of the grandkids who couldn’t be there…

Saturday

Breakfast of the Champions.img_7022

My brother took my boys to the Pan-American No-Gi International Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Federation Championship at City College of New York. Got that? Pan-American No-Gi International Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Federation Championship at City College of New York! Now say it quickly ten times!

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Meanwhile, the rest of us wandered around the vicinity of our hotel.

We stopped in at St. Patrick’s Cathedral:

img_1659img_1662Had lunch at Rosie O’Grady’s…

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Then headed over to the theatre to see the play…img_7028img_7037

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That night my four siblings and I spent a few quiet minutes with my parents in their hotel room, just the six of us. We thought we’d just have a casual chit-chat, but then my dad, a man who favors stiff pats over hugs, asked us to all hold hands with each other. He said a prayer for each of one of us and all the spouses and children in our family, asking for blessings for each of us by name.

Damn. Nothing like a good old-fashioned Pan-American No-Gi tag-team loving beatdown from your parents, the reigning champions of the emotional choke-hold. Clearly, this kind of thing should be banned, as there is no possible maneuver by which to escape.

Sunday

We drove back to C’ville. I decided to give my son some much-needed driving practice, and let him take the wheel for the last fifteen minutes of the drive:

img_7046It went pretty well until he almost drove off the side of the road…

There’s a line in the play I can’t remember exactly, but the gist of it was:

In the midst of life, we are in the midst of death…

I texted this photo of his traumatized little brother to my siblings:

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My sister wrote back, “Oooooh. So that’s what faster than a bat out of hell looks like!”img_7050

Despite the plot twists and turns, we made it back home safe and sound.  img_7051

I’m a Korean mother, and I can’t help it.

When I was growing up, I never experienced a summer of complete freedom. My mother believed in the power of math workbooks as fervently as she believed in the power of the Bible. Every day I would have to labor away doing the prescribed five pages of what she called “Daily Math.” Ugh. I hated it with every fiber of my being. My friends were spending their days at the swimming pool, at summer camp, or just loafing around watching tv. How Korean of my mother, I thought, to ruin my summer by making me do math!

I vowed to myself that if I ever had children of my own, I would let them enjoy their summers unencumbered by scholastic assignments. When I finally did have children, I remembered that vow. I signed those kids up for all kinds of fun summer camps and activities. I’d pull into the parking lot to pick them up, basking in the glow of virtue you feel whenever you do a kind turn for someone.

“Oh, thank you, beloved mother,” I could practically hear them say, “Thank you for letting us go to this magical place where we could work on God’s eyes rather than algebra problems!”

“Thank you, sweetest and kindest of mothers, for letting us frolic with our friends getting bronzed in the golden sun, rather than making us hunch over a math workbook at the kitchen table all day growing as pale as grubs…”

But no. Every day, three slump-shouldered, resentful grouches would climb into the car and inform me that they didn’t want to do “Summer Playground” or “World Cup Soccer Camp” or anything really, other than hang out at home. “Don’t sign us up for any more camps!” was the message I heard loud and clear, and I was actually ok with that.

So this summer the kids basically became feral. I would come home from work to see them sprawled in exaggerated poses of relaxation as if they were posing as allegorical statues of Indolence, Sloth, and Torpor. I bore it for as long as I could, but as it turns out, I’m way more Korean than I thought I was. Their sleepy eyes, uncombed hair, and languid movements began to offend me. I literally couldn’t help myself. I started leaving them lists of things to accomplish by the time I got back from work. Nothing too onerous, mind you! The tasks were on the order of: “Load dishwasher,” “Do one load of laundry,” or “Put shoes away in the mudroom.” But every once in a while I’d slip in a small directive that might require slightly more effort:

  • Brainstorm ways to alleviate the refugee crisis.
  • Come up with an action plan to reunify the two Koreas.
  • Find a cure for cancer.

The other day I overheard my son talking to his younger sister.

“Now when Mom asks me what I’ve been doing all day, I can honestly tell her I really have been working on a cure for cancer!”

Apparently the kid has connected his computer to a massive global project out of Stanford University, which harnesses the collective power of volunteers’ computers to crunch numbers. I can’t really understand the science of it all. (Despite my mother’s attempts to stack the deck with “Daily Math,” all those workbooks did nothing but send me reeling straight into the torrid embrace of Russian Literature). But here’s what the website has to say:

“Help Stanford University scientists studying Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s, and many cancers by simply running a piece of software on your computer. The problems we are trying to solve require so many calculations, we ask people to donate their unused computer power to crunch some numbers.”

You can check it out for yourself here:

http://folding.stanford.edu

and here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home

As far as I can tell, the boy has discovered a way to plug into an astonishing feat of alchemy by which supreme laziness is transformed into something rather enterprising…It’s genius, really, and it makes this Korean mother so proud!

Related post: Amadeus and my own preternaturally precocious offspring.

The End of the Middle

I was complaining to my 16 year old son about a litany of problems – my inability to read small print, creaky joints, grey hairs sprouting with cruel, mechanical rapidity…

“I’m SO OLD!” I wailed in despair.

“Oh, Mom. You’re not old, he replied, “You’re just at the end of the middle.”

Perhaps I should be grateful that he didn’t situate me at the beginning of the end…?

A few weeks later I asked him, “Do you think I should try to figure out how to do Snapchat?”

Without a moment’s hesitation he answered, “No. Don’t bother. Snapchat’s not for people like you.”

Hear that, fellow geriatrics?! Snapchat? Not for the likes of us! Thus spake the 16 year old, so it must be true.

Maybe as a result of being “at the end of the middle,” I’ve been experiencing some really weird symptoms lately. For example, my legs feel unbearably hot, especially at night. Once I emailed my two sisters to ask them if they too felt like their legs were as hot as the barrels of curling irons. One of my sisters thought this was crazy talk. The other one said: YES, she too experienced that very same phenomenon! She is the researcher extraordinaire of our family, especially when it comes to medical conditions. She told me for years she was dying to google “hot thighs,” but was scared it would unleash a Pandora’s box of internet porn into her computer. When she finally broke down and did the search, she discovered that we are both suffering from a form of neuropathy for which there is no cure or treatment. Diagnosis: decrepitude.

Speaking of ancient things, my husband and I had been sleeping on the same mattress for eighteen years. I actually started campaigning for a new mattress eleven years ago, when I was pregnant with my daughter. Every time I moved in bed, I felt like I was being stabbed by a gang of vicious mattress coils. Because it always takes us forever and a year to do anything, eleven years later I was still waking up sore every morning on that very same, stabby mattress. Finally, I decided that as someone who was at the end of the middle, I deserved, nay: needed a new mattress to help me ease into my twilight years.

“AND it should be a king size bed, because you’re so tall,“ I announced to my husband, “and it should be a memory foam mattress with cooling gel, because I’m so. freaking. hot!”

My husband raised an eyebrow, but wisely remained silent.

We got a Loom and Leaf mattress, which is sort of like the poor man’s TempurPedic Breeze, and I love it, by the way. What in the world were we waiting for?! I love having a king size bed…It’s so big I feel like I need a passport to visit my husband’s side of the bed. I got linen sheets in keeping with my “cool” theme. They’re heavenly. We slept without any blankets or bedcovers for a couple weeks. I would have been fine with this arrangement, but I finally had to take pity on my husband, who begged me through blue lips and chattering teeth for a quilt.

This being at the end of the middle business has necessitated a whole slew of changes…We moved our queen size bed to our son’s room. We moved the full size bed that had been in our garage apartment to our daughter’s room. And we moved the twin beds from my son’s and daughter’s rooms into the apartment. The new king size bed made the placement of my dresser and our nightstands problematic. For weeks I’ve been moving heavy furniture around, trying to solve the puzzle.

I had given up on ever making our existing furniture work, and had resigned myself to buying a new dresser and new nightstands when inspiration suddenly struck. After removing the mirror from my dresser, it fit perfectly into the bedroom alcove:

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I think I need a longish vertical something for that space to the left of the window…

With the dresser out of the way, we could fit our original nightstands where they were in the first place.

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And now this elderly, Snap-Chat-unworthy senior citizen needs to go take a looooooooooong nap to recuperate from her labors.

Weekend Snapshots 41

Saturday

We set our alarms for 5 am. My oldest and youngest were playing in a soccer tournament this weekend in Lynchburg, which is about an hour and twenty minute drive from where we live. Getting up at the crack of dawn to drive to Lynchburg brought back a lot of memories. I used to teach Russian language and literature at what is now Randolph College, but back then was Randolph-Macon Woman’s College. I think I owe my life to audio-books, which kept me awake during the interminable drives back and forth. During the years I worked there, I had a constant eye twitch from fatigue that only went away when I stopped commuting. When I was pregnant with my first child, I would get so tired on the way back home, I would have to pull over at the Nelson County Wayside to have a fifteen minute cat nap before driving the rest of the way home…

My son’s first game was at 8 am, and he was supposed to be on the field by 7 am for warm up. Fortunately for their personal chauffeur and cheerleader, my children were playing at fields that were only a five minute drive away from each other.

Surveying the field…

We spotted this car on our way to dinner at the Depot Grille:

Sunday

Another early start:

My daughter gave me a makeover while we were waiting for her brother’s game to start:

Before
After

Both kids’ teams were knocked out, so they only played one game on Sunday. We went to lunch at the Liberty Korean Market and Restaurant, which is run by the parents of an alumna of the university where I now work:

My daughter declared their bulgogi the best she’d ever had!

After our huge Korean lunch, I found myself slipping into food coma on the way back home. Fortunately, the good old Nelson County Wayside was still there:

I closed my eyes for a few minutes to rest, with my son sitting in the passenger seat next to me. I thought about the last time I was here with him. Now he’s a strapping 6 foot 2 inch sixteen year old, but back then, he was just a little dream floating around inside me…

Art for the People!

Here’s a suggestion! Instead of buying expensive art, how about just mounting pieces of paper on your wall with painter’s tape instead?

Just kidding…though this is actually what my bedroom wall has looked like for the past couple of weeks.

When I was in Seoul last year, I bought some prints at the National Folk Museum of Korea and stuck them on my office wall with adhesive mounting tabs. They are a type of minhwa (folk painting) I’ve long admired, called chaekkori or munbangdo, i.e.: still life paintings of books and other scholarly paraphernalia. I have some reproduction scrolls featuring this genre of art:

including this one:

…which is still hanging on my office wall:

This style of painting became popular in the late 18th century during King Jeongjo’s reign in the Joseon dynasty. In these paintings the scholar’s “four friends”: paper, ink, a brush, and an inkstand are always depicted. Additional symbolic items may also be included, such as a pomegranate to represent fertility, eggplants to symbolize male children, or gourds to symbolize long life, wealth, and happiness. In King Jeongjo’s palace, chaekkori paintings were mounted on screens and used as a backdrop behind every scholar’s desk. What began as a royal conceit to reflect a reverence for scholarship, became the height of fashion. Korean parents would sometimes hang these paintings in their children’s rooms to inspire them to study, which, when I think about it, strikes me as possibly THE most Korean thing ever.

Lately we’ve been making some changes to our master bedroom, and I decided the prints would look perfect over our new bed. Michael’s had ready made frames on sale for almost half off at $22.49 each. The prints are not all the same size, but that problem was solved when the framing department custom cut mats for me for about $25 each. They would have charged about $60 more per print just to insert them into the frames, but who needs that?! So, to frame all three prints, it cost less than $150.

This is as far as I’ve gotten:

I removed the paper inserts from the frames, attached them to the backs, and marked where the hooks are:

…Which brings us back to this:

One of these days, maybe tomorrow (?!), I’ll actually get around to putting in the nails and hanging the pics. Stay tuned for the finished look!

Until then, because I am a Korean mother after all, I thought I’d create my own modern day chaekkori tableau to inspire my children to greater heights of academic achievement:

So uplifting, right? (Those poor, poor children).

 

Meat

Squid kebob, anyone?

We were in a local kebob restaurant the other day, pondering the wide array of choices.

“Do you guys know what you’d like to have?” I asked my kids.

The boys wanted beef kebobs. My daughter was more uncertain.

“I think I want to try the kibbeh,” she said sheepishly, (there’s no other word for it).

“What’s kibbeh?” I asked.

“Lamb,” she whispered guiltily.

“Oh! It’s OK! Go ahead and try it!”

When I asked her how it was, she replied, “I really feel bad about saying this, but…it’s delicious.”

Sometimes my 16 year old likes to mess with his sensitive little sister.

When she coos over a panda video, for example, he might casually interject: “I wonder what panda tastes like?”

We had a conversation like this just the other day…Almost all of my daughter’s friends are into horses these days. The 16 year old wondered out loud how they’d react if she asked them what they thought horse tasted like. And then he had a sudden thought.

He turned to me and asked, “Wait a minute, have YOU ever tasted horse?!”

“Ummm, yes, actually, I did once.” I was forced to admit, “It was served to me in France a long time ago.”

“How did it taste?”

“I don’t even remember…gamey, I guess?”

“But what does ‘gamey’ taste like? What does that word even mean?” he persisted.

His brother gave him an authoritative answer, “‘Gamey’ means it tastes like bullets.”

Clearly our family has a somewhat tortured attitude toward meat. I’ve been a vegetarian for years, but the rest of my family eats meat. It’s led to some interesting situations…

Last summer I tried to pick up my daughter from Camp Barbara‘s after work one day. As I approached the door to our neighbor’s house, I detected the unmistakable smell of bacon. My daughter saw me coming through the glass of the storm door and her eyes widened in alarm. As I opened the door, she backed away, shook her head vigorously and practically shouted, “NO! You can’t take me home now…I’m about to eat bacon!”

Wild horses couldn’t have dragged that girl out of the house. And she wasn’t the only one. The three other little girls at Camp Barbara also had vegetarian mamas. One of them was Jewish to boot. They were all allowed to eat meat, but they had to get their fix outside of their own homes. Miss Barbara was their dealer.

Not long after, my kids and I were visiting my parents’ house. My mother watched suspiciously as they devoured the bulgogi (Korean beef barbecue) she had made for them. They were eating with a little too much enthusiasm. She swiveled her head until her narrowed eyes locked onto mine.

“You never give them meat, do you?!” she asked, as if she had just discovered that her daughter led a secret double life as a serial killer, “YOU can be a vegetarian if you want, but you better feed your children some meat!”

My mother’s words were ringing in my ear when I picked up some bacon at the grocery store last week. The kids were overjoyed when I told them they could have it this weekend, but then I noticed a cloud pass across their faces.

“Awww, poor Mommy! But what will YOU have for breakfast?”

“Oh, don’t worry about me! I’ll have something else!”

On Saturday I awoke to the aroma of bacon wafting up the stairs and all throughout the house. My 14 year old son poked his head into my room. He had a grin on his face, and said they had a surprise for me.

I came down to this:

Those sweet kids felt so sorry for me that I didn’t get to eat bacon that they made me this instead.

I don’t deserve them, but I’m sure glad they’re mine.