The Ghandi of Breakfast

I know there is such a thing as a hunger strike, but the concept boggles the mind: an adult of otherwise sound mind deciding not to eat food in order to get what he or she wants? Things must be pretty freaking bad if not eating is the only way to make them better. Yet judging by my kids’ daily effort, I must be running a Siberian Gulag.

It starts with Archie, the Ghandi of Breakfast. He’s prepared for his difficult challenge by bringing along an illustrated Hansel and Gretel to distract his mind from food. I could not make this up; The book he has at the table to use as a wedge between his face and the food is a fairy tale about starving kids.

“Archie, that book is distracting you from eating. It’s got to go.”

“No, it’s not. I promise it’s not.”

“Take a bite.”

“I think I want to sit more next to you.”

“Here. Now take a bite.”

“Oh, look, daddy. Hansel is doing something we can’t do. He’s on the roof of his house!”

I don’t yet know what his demands are, probably to reconcile the warring factions of plush and hard-plastic animals that have staked claims on opposite ends of his bed.

Meanwhile Augie picks at the top of the toast to pull off the jelly and eat it. He’s fairly successful, getting the blueberry remnant bits off the surface and leaving only a thin, pale layer. He won’t eat the toast, though. Why? There’s still jelly on there. “Sticky” he says, and he’s got the jam in his hair, making a kind of Ed Grimley/Something About Mary spike. He tries to knock the food away when I try to feed him a bite. His cause in this hunger strike remains known only to him, or perhaps to other toddlers somewhere, his allies. I give up on Archie and go to the mat with Augie. It’s down to a standoff.

“Your want to get down? Eat one bite.” I give the signs for eat and down. He understands, I’m certain, event though he turns down his lip and holds that face. He’s stubborn. He cries. He grabs the bread and smashes it through his fingers.

Archie says, “I think Augie wants his toast to take a bite of him so his toast can get down.”

Archie and I try to break him, chanting “Augie eat, Augie eat!” pounding on the table. We’re like Cazale and Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon, chanting “Attica, Attica!” He stares, listens, wonders. Whole NPR segments of time go by. Finally as I go to type this line, he takes a small nibble. We cheer. Archie is ecstatic and considers for a moment breaking his own hunger strike.  Augie finishes the whole piece in a minute, as I thought he would. I win, I win. The causes of social justice lose the day, as I comfort myself that I’ve preserved the status quo and have only two more meals to go until I can lock their cell door for the night.

“Now do that to me, daddy,” Archie says.

 

 

The Long National Nightmare Known as Breakfast . . .

. . .  ended in a draw. The decisive battle in the war involved possession of a strategic stool. In the end the carnage included half a slice of toast with jelly, or was it jam?, and many tears. Neither side was satisfied with the terms of cessation, which was basically me grabbing the stool, throwing it the next room, and shutting the door.

Things calmed. As I cleaned up, Archie pretended to be a kitty cat, sitting on the floor singing “Oh, Christmas Tree” in meows. Augie rolled around on the bed and screamed, short high-pitched bursts, insanity in his face, clenching a shaker egg and an toy excavator. Soon they were playing together again, much to my horror, as I scrambled to get our junk together and get us out the door. The timebomb ticked.

“Look, Daddy, your little kitties are playing in a tent. It’s okay, meow, it’s fun any way you do it.”

Then it went off. Archie wailed his monotone, extended-day cry that howls along at a certain pitch straight to a pain receptor in my brain.

“Nooooooooo! Augie’s messing up the tent! Aggghhhhhhhhh! Whhaaaaaaa!

Archie’s low level cry is deadly, insidious. It winds and whines and digs in.

Next Augie’s head hit the ground in an audible thud and he cried. You’re probably thinking, why don’t you stop writing and go see what happened, try to help, do some parenting? Thing was, they had already ebbed back to fun. That is the pattern: a constant ebb and flow between fun and rage. Quite exhausting, and it requires calories.

In the end, just before we made it out the door. Augie ran around with the tent on his head, falling and flailing and crashing into furniture, like Thing 1 and  Thing 2.

On day two of The Summer of the Finger, we got corn dogs. I let Archie pick what he wanted from the frozen case at the grocery store, and he picked corn dogs. Don’t worry, though, they were organic tofu dogs coated in minimally processed whole grain batter made in sustainable and diverse small family factories. Just kidding! They were Winn Dixie-brand “classic”corn dogs. I resisted and ate my leafy vegetables and whole grains, a hard man with complete command, until the next day when I was hungover and crushed a corn dog with yellow mustard in about ten seconds after pulling it out of the oven.  Finger culture took that round.

The next day, The Breakfast Wars fired up again. This time it was me against the both of them, though, instead of them against each other. I stood over Archie and held a half piece of toast with blueberry jam near his face, while he sat with his head down playing with an toy alphabet-saying dachshund and taking nibbles of the toast that left little marks that looked like a gerbil had gotten ahold of it.

Meanwhile Augie smashed his half piece of toast and blueberry jam into his face first chance he had, getting it all over his face and saying, “sticky.” I put Archie’s piece down and went to tear a piece off to try to feed Augie, but Augie got angry that I tore his piece, enraged, and smushed the whole thing up in his hands, balling it up and squeezing it through his fingers. Once he was satisfied and his anger subsided, he held hands up and said “sticky” again.

“a constant ebb and flow between fun and rage.”