Dinner Struggles

Can you believe you have to feed your kids Every. Single. Day? You feed them dinner one night, and for some reason they want dinner again the next day. Dinner with my kids is so loathsome to me that I start having anxiety around 4 PM. What will I make for them? Will they eat it or will they throw it? Can I survive the onslaught of whining? Have they had any vegetables today? Do I really need to provide a vegetable? Is protein actually important to their growth? But none of these questions actually matter in the end because dinner is always a shit show that we simply must attempt to survive. Dinner is the time of the day when I get in the majority of my 10,000 steps. I’m not a mother. I’m not even a cook. I’m the personal servant to three tiny humans who refuse to say please, who throw themselves on the floor if heaven forbid I switch their plates and forget the 4-year-old is the one who can’t stand to look at blueberries. Thank goodness for hotdogs, without which there would be no meat that all three are satisfied with. But how many days a week can I serve hot dogs without risking child protective services showing up at my door? And would people judge me if they knew I let me kids put ketchup on EVERYTHING? Apparently, according to my 2-year-old, ketchup and cantaloupe is a real delicacy. I’m not going to sugar coat things: there have been multiple occasions that I am so overwhelmed with fetching milk and answering questions about how many more bites of broccoli it will take to earn dessert that I have mindlessly eaten the chewed-up and spit-out mac-n-cheese on the floor. And I’ll tell you something else. It was fucking delicious…

And I know I must work to pass on a healthy relationship with food, unlike the one I was taught, but the new recs to provide all parts of the meal (including dessert) at the same time so that they can figure out what their little bodies are dictating about their hunger is either bullshit or my kids have superhuman bodies that when left to their own devices can survive entirely on sugar…

Last Friday I was so tired and sick of the shenanigans that I heard myself say “Shabbat is a privilege and I’m taking it away.” I’m not sure God agrees.