"Traditionally, the world over, the woman in a house has been known as "the keeper of the keys." To hold the keys to the household, its storerooms, attics, chests, and cupboards, was a position of great responsibility and, therefore, of great honor. In a season of impoverishment, it was the woman's wise allocation of limited supplies that would see the family through, and in times of plenty, it was her foresight that provided for future needs."
It all started with a sale on Breyers* ice cream. Well, really it started way, way, way before that. Generations and eons before. But it's a nice intro, don't you think?
Ice cream, for me, is a special treat. It's the epitome of summer on a clear, bright day. It's a comfort food to accompany me as I settle onto the couch. It's a celebration to mark the passing of a childhood.
And if I'm going to bring ice cream into the house, I'm going to do it right. It has to be Breyers.
Yes, I like Ben and Jerry's, and I love Häagen-Dazs (their Dulce De Leche is the absolute best), but I have five kids and three grown-ups in this house. I can't abide by the Whale-of-a-Paile stuff, so we reserve our ice cream moments for special occasions so we can get the good stuff.
The difficulty has always been in the timing of the purchase. If I buy any creamy frozen goodness more than a few hours before the approaching celebration, it will be gone before you can say, "cut the cake." And it's not my kids who are the culprits. Oh, no.
It's my father.
Okay, so I'm on a father-bashing kick lately, but honestly, the man has driven more women over the edge than...well, I can't think of a good analogy right now, so you'll have to come up with your own. I'm thinking, like, pack mules over the Grand Canyon. The next analogy that I can come up with is Thelma and Louise. The men in their lives literally drove them over the edge.
Since my father lives with me, I'm determined not to allow him to drive me over the edge. He has tried. Believe me, he has most definitely tried. But I'm resisting. I have a good husband who keeps me grounded, speaks goodness and truth into my life, and, probably most importantly, listens to me go off about the ignorant, coniving, manipulative so-and-so that is my father.
We have two birthdays coming up. Imagine my joy and ecstasy when I walked into the local grocery and found that Breyers, all flavors, was on sale for, get this, $1.98 a half gallon!* No limit!! I was amazed. I was inspired. As the Keeper of the Keys, I knew that I could spend twenty dollars and buy enough ice cream to last our family for six months or more. I told each of the two kids who were in my company that they could pick two flavors each. No, make that three. And I chose eight myself. Fourteen half-gallons of the finest ingredients from all natural sources.
Getting it in the door would be the biggest problem, because if my sweet-toothed father saw it, it was as good as gone. But when I arrived home, he was out riding his bike, the daily obsessive activity that keeps him from looking like he eats nothing but sweets and drinks nothing but coffee. He calls himself a vegetarian, but never, ever eats vegetables, hardly ever eats proteins and doesn't drink milk.
The kids and I smuggled our booty into the basement and stashed it in our renters' freezer, which they keep in our house. Surely, my dad would never look there. When I told the renters about the ice cream, she told me that another local grocery had it on sale for the same price. I went back and got more ice cream for my dad, just so I could be sure he wouldn't eat ours should he have the gall to find it.
Money's tight right now. Very tight. We don't buy diamonds or furs, we don't have a housekeeper (well, except for Bard and me), and we don't even buy new furniture. My older kids get clothes from the thrift store, clearance racks and Sam's Club. The younger kids get hand-me-downs and an occasional new outfit for birthdays or weddings. When I get a freezer-full of ice cream, you better know I intend to ration it wisely. I have two birthdays this week. Two! And after a very intense discussion of finances with Bo, it became clear that the boys' birthday celebration was in peril. It's 9-year-old Monet's first double-digit, which we use as a good landmark, since we don't have birthday parties every year for every child. I went to sleep depressed, in tears, knowing that I may even have to cancel our surprise birthday trip to the local pool for lack of money. I don't care if I only hit the salon once a year, but if I have to disappoint my babies, it rips me to pieces.
I awoke this morning, though, and thought about the goodness of God. I have more wealth than most third-world nations. Yes, my car broke down and will take two weeks to fix, but at least it waited until after I'd bought my groceries, taken back my library books and finished soccer for the season, and it had the good sense to break down in the grocery store parking lot while I had my AAA card in my purse and actually had my purse with me. And, because I'm the keeper of the keys, I have some gifts stashed away in the basement (where my dad won't find them and give them to the kids) that I bought at after-Christmas sales. They're not cheesy gifts, either. I know my boys don't read this blog, so I don't hesitate to tell you that a Playmobil castle and an electronic change sorter along with a half-dozen sets of AstroJax and a series of beach toys aren't lightweight gifts, especially when I paid less than $50 for all of them!
And, Good Lord, I had ICE CREAM! LOTS AND LOTS OF ICE CREAM! All I needed was to make a cake recipe I found in a magazine, one I'd been wanting to try anyway, and we'd be set! We might even be able to scrounge up the $36 it takes to get into the water park!
That's when I opened my freezer to get out the frozen vegetables for tonight's Crock Pot Vegetable Soup***. And there it was. A container of Breyers Very Chocolate Cherry ice cream, nearly empty, in MY freezer compartment. Not in our renters' freezer, where I'd left it, but in MY freezer compartment! At that very moment, my father came up the stairs with a bowl and a spoon in his hand. A used bowl and spoon. Used for, you guessed it, Breyers Very Chocolate Cherry ice cream.
"Did you take that out of the renters' freezer?" I asked.
"What?" he responded. Very unconvincingly, I might add.
"Did you take that ice cream out of the renters' freezer?"
"Well, it's ours. Isn't it?"
"Did you ask if it was ours?"
"You weren't here to ask."
Never mind that he calls me on my cell phone to ask me where the refrigerator is, or how to lick an envelope. He couldn't call me to ask if the ice cream in someone else's freezer, which he had no business opening anyway, was our ice cream.
"I bought you two gallons of ice cream," I said, "and I ask you if you need anything every time I go to the store."
"I didn't need anything."
"Then WHY did you eat that ice cream? I bought that ice cream because it was on SALE for $1.98, so we could have it for special occasions! Not so you could eat a half-gallon a night!"
"Gads! Why do you jump all over me for two bucks worth of ice cream? I have to eat something!"
It escalated from there, with me saying that ice cream isn't a balanced meal, and him saying, "Gads!" and me saying, "You don't respect boundaries," and him saying, "I don't belong here," and me saying, "You just need to respect others' boundaries! Don't give me your manipulative crap! Jut stop taking the kids' money. Stop eating their candy. And STOP stealing food. Especially ice cream!"
And then it ended with him packing his bike, hitching a ride with my husband to my aunt's house, and maintaining silence for the hour-and-a-half ride.
You might think I'm being over the top, here. But the truth is, my dad has an addiction. His father was an alcoholic. He has the potential for being an alcoholic. One of the conditions on which we let him live with us is that he no longer buys alcohol.
A sweet-tooth is a marker for alcoholism.
"Patients with a history of alcoholism on the father's side of the family are more likely to have a preference for sweets than those without such a history, says Alexey B. Kampov-Polevoy, M.D., Ph.D., of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. Those with the strongest attraction to sweet taste were linked five times more often to a family history of alcoholism than those who disliked sweet tastes."
Men's Health News
Published: Wednesday, 15-Sep-2004
So, you see, this is more than just a wise allocation of limited supplies. It's about more than being an inconvenience for me to endure his compulsions, though those are really, really big annoyances. It's about dealing with a man who is in denial of his genetic makeup and how it affects others. It's about him taking his weaknesses and turning them into aggression towards me.
I live daily trying to know how to handle this man, in a way that Christ would handle him. As I told a friend this morning, I would almost say I hate him, but I can't stand the thought of him dropping over and me living with that guilt. It's a long, hard road.
After he left this morning, I thought about making a loaf of bread. I picked up Laurel's Kitchen and read the paragraph at the top of this post. A word there, just for me. While I've always thought of myself as the manager of this household, maker of rules, cruise director and probation officer, I'd never thought of myself as the keeper of they keys.
Keeper of the KEYS.
Which I infer to mean there must have been locks. Which means I'm not the only woman in the history of the world who had to lock her food away to keep it from being stolen by her family members.
I just wish that doggone freezer would have had a lock.
*Before you blame me for forgetting an apostrophe, let me assure you that I didn't forget it. The Breyers company did.
**They aren't even half-gallons anymore. They're 1.75 quarts.
