Lies my father told me
The husband and I have very different view points when it comes to food. He grew up in a family that ate everything. Right down to the brains of a cow. (that those crazy Greeks for ya) While I was raised on good, old fashioned comfort foods. If a recipe didn't include ground beef, cheese or butter, chance were it didn't belong in our house. That's not to say my mother couldn't cook. She was a fabulous cook, everything she made was my favorite. She just had certain likes and dislikes.
Take fish for example. Fish was not something EVER served in my house. My mother didn't like it, my father still doesn't like it (unless that's the only food option, then he'll eat it to keep from going hungry). And my sister believes that if she doesn't eat fish, other little fishes all over the world will spread the good news of her sacrifice and they'll spare her when she chooses to swim in the ocean. She's got some crazy theories....
The closest a fish ever came to being in our house was when my sister was 5. My dad went out fishing without her, which she was DEVASTATED about, and she made him bring home a fish for her to see. When he returned home he had a huge catfish (in retrospect, it probably wasn't all that big) and he had it in his metal minnow bucket with some water. My sister was ecstatic. She was so proud of the fish dad caught that she announced she was taking it to show n tell on Monday. My mother, however, announced it would have to live on the back porch. Perfectly understandable. [nods] This was Saturday. And by Monday morning we discovered that we probably should not have let the fish live on the back porch. Because Sunday had been hot, and fish do not survive on hot days. In metal buckets. We now had a nice steamed catfish. Swimming belly up. It was end of my sister's world. She cried and cried and cried and cried some more. Over a fish. But to make matters worse, she demanded that my dad take the dead fish back to his family. At the lake. An hour away. Perfectly logical to a 5yr old. A fish has got family, a family needs to grieve.
It can easily be assumed that my father was not about to drive an hour away just to throw a dead fish into a pond.
My dad, however, being the crafty father he was, explained to my sister, that if we put him down the storm drain in the front of the house, it'll take him straight back to his family, and everyone would be happy.
She bought it; Hook, line and sinker (pun very much intended).
And she believed that fish had gone back to his family until dad dusted off this old story about 10 yrs later in front of a large family gathering. My sister of course was shocked to find out my dad had lied. How could he?!
To which my father replied, "that's just what parents do..."
And that statement has never been more clear than now. Now that I'm a parent, I find myself "lying" to Tyler out of pure convenience. Alot.
"No, we can't go see the steam shovels at the construction site for the 5th time today, they're sleeping. We don't want to wake them up, right?"
Right.
