The Green Cheese Sticks

We had kind of a rough week around here.

I’m trying out (and don’t get me started on the fact that I have to do this) for a daily writing gig a lot like the one I used to have before The Greek fired everyone.

(Parenthetical aside: When SNL did a send up of her recently I almost peed my pants. How will I ever forget her interviewing me for a job over the phone while simultaneously calling her doorman “dahling” and talking to her daughter on her OTHER cell phone?)

Anyway, this gig is in the morning and ya’ll, we are not morning people. The girl needs three cups of coffee and an hour of ‘Good Morning America’ before she can get moving and the boy wakes up with a list of ridiculous demands spilling out of his mouth.

He wants candy. He wants the iPad. He wants a snuggle. He wants a fruit roll-up for breakfast. He wants to wear his pajamas to school. He doesn’t want to go to school.

And so on, and so forth.

This morning was particularly fraught because today I had to write three blog posts between the hours of 6 and 9 a.m. It should have been a piece of cake, but it wasn’t. It was hard. The light touch I spent so many years perfecting here and elsewhere apparently stepped out for coffee. It didn’t help that it was a slow news day.

The mister will have a new role in the mornings if I do get this gig, and he and I are doing that awkward dance spouses do when a well-established routine has to get changed up. I’m not too keen on it either, considering I’m the one who has to jump out of bed with a fully-functioning brain at an hour I find disagreeable, but he’s …

You know.

He’s Not The Mom.

So he took an ill-timed shower and I tried to hide in the dining room while the kids ricocheted around with dazed looks on their faces because suddenly the assistant coach was running the plays.

One eye on the clock and the other on my clunky words, I had just five minutes left before my deadline when Henry yanked on my arm repeatedly until I finally turned to him, fully exasperated.

What? I said. What could you possibly need right now?

He grinned up at me, his eyes sparkling half-moons. He opened his closed fist slowly and revealed a handful of quarters. He pressed the warm coins into my palms and stood on tippy toes to whisper in my ear.

“Here’s some money, Mom, so you can buy Emmie her green cheese sticks,” he said.

This week at the store I bought the wrong cheese sticks. Emmie’s palate is still being held hostage by her anxiety and the specific brands and kinds of foods she will eat is fairly restricted. Cheese sticks are a staple for her, and I got the ones she doesn’t like.

She asked me to get her some of “the ones in the green wrapper, you know, mom,” and, during my too-short-but-too-long week, I forgot to go get her the kind she will eat.

Her little brother, however, did remember.

Henry’s been a pill this week. He’s sick and he isn’t sleeping and, you know, he’s 3-and-a-half. He likes to run around the house naked and climb the pantry shelves to get to my secret stash of Little Debbie snack cakes. He throws impressive tantrums and likes to leave the Legos exactly where I step out of the shower every morning, so I have a piece of Lego Buzz Lightyear permanently embedded in my foot.

I love him more than the sun and the moon, but he’s trying my patience. And, in that same vein, his … developmental spurt is causing me to siphon off attention from his big sister.

So when he asked me to buy her some green cheese sticks, I melted.

I have a younger brother and sister and we three are all really different people. I mean, like, really. We fought a lot, and we nurse our old scars and wounds from the kinds of sibling dynamics I see in my own kids now.

But when my dad died? When the shit really hit the fan?

We knew where to get the green cheese sticks.

I was very worried before Henry was born that having two children would be too hard for us, that Emmie would lose out on something precious.

Now I know I could not have been more wrong.