Conducting Precise Military Operations From the Kitchen Table
Dear Jessica Brennan,
Your grandma operated our home like an army camp to keep her three offspring on track. So, we lived and died by specific, unwavering laws.
Here are some of my mother’s directives:
- You can have an ice cream cone when you’re 6. Before that, you get a popsicle. The end.
- You can have a hamburger when you’re 6. Before that, you get a hotdog. There should have been a celebratory age-6 birthday party with hamburgers and ice cream, but that would have broken the following law.
- You can have a birthday party when you’re 10 and 16. If you remain unmarried and are living at home when you’re 21 (heaven forbid), you can have one then, too.
- Laundry is done on Monday and Thursday. On Monday, you change the beds as well. This is still how it is. When Dad asks, “What difference does it make?” I throw my hands up in disbelief.
- Practice the piano. I know you hate it, and it’s summer holidays and 82 degrees and sunny, and your friends are outside playing badminton, but practice the piano. You’re 7 now. It’s time to grow up.
- You can wear pantyhose when you’re 16, which is also when you can double date if you can find a guy born after 1910 who will agree to these terms.
- Don’t roll down the car windows or click the ashtrays. It bothers your dad.
- You can have a small juice glass of Coke, not a whole tin, and no, you can’t have more.
- Don’t tap the fish bowl, or the angel fish will go into shock.
- If you get summoned to the living room to play the piano and sing a hymn in front of complete strangers, arrive, sit and perform. Then go back upstairs.
- You can have 2 cookies without asking permission, but not a third.
The “2 cookies and then you ask” rule has stuck with me. One night, when I first met Dad, he sat down in front of the TV with a whole bag of cookies. I almost hyperventilated. I snatched the bag from his hands and stared at him like he had just eaten the family pet.
Love,
Mum xo