Escape Points by Michele Weldon Read Free Book Online

creamer. After dinner, while we were all doing the dishes, Weldon and Brendan would stop to stand before the opened refrigerator door and graze.
    “We just finished eating,” I said. “You can’t possibly be hungry.”
    But they were. If it wasn’t processed, canned, or frozen, or if I made it from scratch, they would devour it almost without chewing. Each one of them would ask for seconds, rave about how it tasted, thank me for making it. They loved it all—the roasted chicken; the turkey meatballs; the homemade apple pie I made with butter, cinnamon, and apple cognac; plus the fudge brownies with a dash of lemon extract.
    “They’re good eaters,” my mother had remarked about the boys. They ate first, asked questions later, and tried anything.
    This constant, daily stream of affirmation was a very good thing; I cooked, they ate, everyone was happy. I was a good mother making sure my boys were healthy. They smiled at dinner. Each one of the boys would eat as if he was on fast-forward, often finishing the entire meal before I even sat down.
    “Wait for MOM!!” Weldon would shout at the other two—after, of course, he had downed several bites.
    I clearly stated my objection to two-handed eating, one hand gripping a fork and another hand with a knife at the ready. Like Popeye.
    “One hand,” was my abbreviated reminder.
    I reprimanded them over what I called shoveling—introducing new bites of food before the old bites were chewed and swallowed.
    “You’re shoveling,” I would say, trying to model appropriate dinner etiquette. “Put down the fork and chew. Wait. Wait. Wait.”
    Then I threw in what I considered the clincher. “Women would prefer to eat across from someone who was not acting as if he was in a hot dog–eating contest.”
    Sometimes I thought they were afraid there would never be another meal after this one, and that if they did not eat the last chicken breast, sparerib, or baked potato, another brother would get it and they would lose out. Only the alpha male won the food. If I made chicken pot pie for dinner, or turkey chili with three beans, the first son up the next morning would finish it off before his brothers could slip the bowl of leftovers into the microwave.
    “I have thirteen muffins in my cargo shorts,” Brendan announced in the van.
    We were in Florida visiting my brother Paul one spring break and were headed back to his house after dinner at a salad-and-soup buffet restaurant. When we got to Paul’s, Brendan emptied his pockets and put the muffins in a bowl on the kitchen counter. They were all gone by the morning.
    I wondered what all this consumption really meant; if there was some deep psychological need to nurture themselves with food, if they were overcompensating for something. But they didn’t horde food, they didn’t eat in secret; they just ate a lot. They worked out three or more hours every day. Sometimes I swore they each consumed up to five thousand calories a day.
    There is a primal relationship between a mother and her children’s nutritional intake. Without exaggeration, my sons’ lives depended on the food I provided.
    When each boy was an infant, I worried at first about where I would breast-feed him every hour and forty-five minutes. Then when they were toddlers, I packed enough formula and crackers, Ritz Bits, or Teddy Grahams in plastic sandwich bags in the diaper bag to get through a few hours. Then I graduated to making sure they each had a good lunch packed for school—sandwich, fruit, pretzels—which I made the night before to avoid the morning chaos.
    I aimed to give them a balanced dinner when they came home each night. Working every day, the healthy sit-down dinner was a challenge. A few of the sitters would cook dinner—chicken soup, broiled vegetables, and whatever meat I defrosted in the morning. But most of the sitters over the years refused to cook. I prepared enormous amounts of food on the weekends—meatloaf, turkey burgers, chicken