“Lick It!” (1991)

I had recently commented on the fact that the reality of motherhood is a far cry for the idealized version that most of us tend to carry around in our heads before real life intrudes and teaches us differently. It seems that the other side of the coin…how our children see us as parents and their perceptions of their own upbringing…may be similarly flawed. I discovered this last week when I went out to lunch with three of my children.

They were all in town for my parents’ 50th anniversary and before they returned from whence they came, we all went out to eat. We headed over to our favorite seafood place and as we demolished the chowder, clam cakes, steamers, and fried clams, we chatted away. We talked about the anniversary celebration of the day before and the party that we’d had at my house afterward. We discussed plans for our annual clambake, something we all really look forward to every summer, and the big family reunion in New York which is still two years in the offing.

Then I notice that the conversation had suddenly shifted.

“I was eating ice cream the other day when I got this flashback,” my son Tom announced. “I could suddenly hear Mom’s voice saying, “Lick it! Lick it! Oh no, it’s dripping!” It happens every time I have an ice cream cone.”

“You, too?” chorused his sisters together. “I thought I was the only one that happened to. I can’t eat an ice cream cone without hearing “Lick it! Lick it! Oh no, it’s dripping” in my head.

“I know,” said Tom. “Sometimes I wanted to say ‘Keep your damn ice cream. I like the ice cream, but I just can’t stand the stress of eating it.’” And they all laughed.

“Yeah, and if you dripped any on yourself, out came the dreaded hanky.”

“Oh, no! Spittle!”

“I really hated that. It always grossed me out. Being cleaned with spit.”

“I thought all kids went through that, but when I mentioned it to other people they had no idea what I was talking about,” said Barbara. “We seem to be the only ones who were traumatized by eating ice cream cones.”

“Well maybe they came from single child families,” I interjected in my own behalf. “Maybe if it’s only one kid with ice cream dripping off their elbows and through the laces on their shoes it isn’t so bad. But four kids covered with melted ice cream is just too nasty to even contemplate. If I had known how you guys felt about it I could have saved us all the trouble, skipped the ice cream and just stayed home.”

“Sometimes I think we had a really weird upbringing. I never knew anyone else whose mother had an asparagus fight with them.”

Years before I had been trimming asparagus stalks and one of the kids…they were teens by then…was standing behind me yammering that I was doing it wrong. So without even missing a beat, I snapped the end of the stalk off and tossed it over my shoulder at the offender. Snap, toss. Snap, toss. And the offender began tossing them back. It didn’t take long for the rest of the gang to pick up on it, and before you know it all hell had broken loose, with us whipping pieces of asparagus stalks at each other, chasing back and forth between the kitchen and the living room with everyone laughing and yelling.

“I can still see Dad’s face, months later, when he found a dried up piece of asparagus somewhere and wondered what in the heck it was and we were all laughing so hard we had to leave the room!”

“I also don’t know anyone else whose mother ever had a water fight with them…in the house.”

(What can I say?)

“But you know what really scares me,” remarked my daughter Kathy, the only one with children of her own at the time, “is that sometimes when I’m talking to the kids I hear my mother’s voice coming out of my mouth.”

Like on the old TV series “Welcome Back Kotter” when Gabe would suddenly realize that he was “making his father’s noise,” the inexorable progression of life is beginning to make itself felt. The baggage of childhood you thought you had ditched somewhere along the way suddenly appears on your doorstep and you hear yourself “making your mother’s noise.”

Don’t worry, Kathy, it happens to the best of us. You just do the best you can with what you’ve got, try not the sweat the small stuff, and thank God that Handi-Wipes have replaced the “dreaded hanky.” Maybe now eating ice cream cones will no longer need be a traumatic childhood event.