Kat Zacharia writes about the trials and rewards of being a sole parent to two young children. Read her first piece about how she became a sole parent here.
As we drove away from a lunch meeting at one of Burbank’s oldest institutions, my colleague and close friend Kiki turned to me and said, “Wow! The way you eat reveals to the whole world your socioeconomic status.” I burst out laughing. She shook her head and chuckled in a kind, gently-mocking way. “My goodness, you really need to reign that it in. Why bother with the patent leather pumps and purse if you’re going to wolf down your food and clear your plate like you’re half starving? You’re giving yourself away.” She laughed again, “I don’t even think you took a breath once. Just came up at the end gasping for air.”
Our laughter filled my small, air-conditioned Toyota Corolla Sport Coupe (or what Kiki jokingly refers to as “the silver bullet”). I had no idea how deeply my life as a sole parent had etched itself onto the most mundane functions and activities in life, such as eating.
Let me paint the picture of our family meals so you can better understand how I developed my strategy of streamlining, scrapping, and scarfing. My family consists of my five-year-old daughter, my two-year-old son, and myself. We have two tables in our apartment: the adult table that we never use sits pressed up against a wall, as far removed from our daily activities as something can be in an 800-square-foot apartment. Then we have the child-size Kidcraft wooden table and two chairs I ordered from Target when my daughter was one. That’s where my kids enjoy almost 99 percent of the meals we have at home.
Feeding time itself is simple and functional. For my daughter’s breakfast, I remove frozen pancakes from the box, put them on plate, throw them in the microwave, and 30 seconds later I’m delivering them up with butter, a glass of milk, and some sort of fruit. My son enjoys something resembling a toddler version of a three-course meal: he starts with yogurt, moves on to cereal, and ends with a waffle smeared with peanut butter and jam. I eat a rice cake with peanut butter and jam standing up while I prepare my kid’s lunches for school and daycare.
I streamline dinner in the same easy fashion. Sprinkle some salt and garlic powder on chicken, steak, or pork and either broil or pan-sear it. Saltines or goldfish fulfill the bread, cereal, and grain “food group” requirement. Sometimes I just leave off the grain. They never eat it anyway. My kids are natural subscribers to an Atkins diet. I also add some type of frozen vegetable, sometimes served right from the freezer. Yes, it’s true, not only do I feed my children frozen vegetables, but I often don’t even defrost the veggies. My kids love vegetables frozen. I didn’t get it at first. I questioned it, I tried to change it, and then, one day, I grabbed a frozen pea and thought, “Not bad. Kinda fun, actually.” And my kids will eat bowls of them.
Who I am to impose on their tastes? Frankly, it means one less plate to clean and one less step in the dinner process, saving me approximately 5 minutes in cooking and cleaning time. Five minutes in my world is the exact amount of time I need to eat my own dinner, which, by the way, normally consists of my kids’ dinner scraps (hence, the “scrapping” part of my meal strategy). Basically, a normal dinner for me is some steak gristle wrapped in raw spinach chased by a spoonful of hummus along with a slice of cheese and occasionally a wet cracker pre-tested by my son. I scarf down my scrap meal standing up (the third tenant of my meal strategy) and move on to the next order of business in the mad dash toward bedtime.
You see, with a 6 p.m. pick-up time at my kid’s school, I’ve got 1.5 hours to feed them, bathe them, and settle them down by 7:30 p.m., when we sit in their room to chat about the day and read bedtime stories for an 8:00 p.m. lights out.
Five minutes in that 1.5 hours is the difference between a clean kitchen and a dirty one. And when the kids go to sleep I like to step out of their room to a clean kitchen – and a happy, pristine tea kettle. In that combination lies my sanity. I’ll take the next four hours to catch up on work I did not finish at the office, connect and crack jokes with the friends who keep my exhausted world full of laughter and inspiration, and finally clean up the apartment and take some time to be present with myself so that I can be present with the world.
I know all the parenting articles about fostering good, healthy eating habits always include, “Sit down with your children for a balanced meal.” You might be saying to yourself, “She really should sit down with her children for dinner.” Well, I don’t read those parenting magazines anymore – they assume a two-parent household and their researched parenting tools and techniques are useless for a sole parent. And to you I say, “Ehhh…” I used to be a member of the choir to whom those magazines and enlightened parents preach. I cooked everything from scratch, from my kid’s baby food to healthy snacks to elaborate dinners. Broccoli-cheese croissants, curry-infused red lentil soup, slow-roasted lamb over lemon potatoes, gourmet purees of God knows what. I can’t remember. When I became a sole parent, I traded in the eggs, pastry flours, Madagascar vanilla extract, and gourmet kitchen appliances for boxes of frozen, pre-made pancakes and Nutrigrain waffles.
The change didn’t happen overnight. In the first six months of being a sole parent, I tried to maintain the gourmet kid-friendly kitchen. We didn’t even have three chairs then, so we couldn’t possibly sit down together. It took me some time, but one day I realized I was spending way more time in the kitchen getting my kids a healthy, home-cooked meal and less time sitting on the floor playing Legos with them. Looking back at my own childhood, I have fleeting memories of the food I ate, but I have rich memories of playing backgammon with my father and doing arts and crafts with my mother.
When I streamlined my kitchen production I simultaneously cut down my eating time by 20 minutes and my cleaning time by 30. Frankly, I now see eating as a royal pain the ass. I’ve even turned down meals at the finest restaurants in the pursuit of other kinds of fun. If I do have that extra time, I’d way rather be out in the world than sitting down to a meal. When a colleague recently inquired, “You turned down a dinner at Nobu? Are you crazy?” I responded, “Are you kidding? I don’t have the kids with me. A walk through Central Park with a stale-ass street pretzel is way more appealing than the best sushi this side of Japan.”
When my kids and I eat out I order one item and split it three ways, not necessarily to cut costs, but to cut down on time. I have a very small window of opportunity to enjoy food and conversation with my children before they want to get up and move around. By the time I finish cutting the meat, splitting the veggies between their plates, and serving up the ketchup, I’ve got just enough time to scarf down the scraps. Once the kids start eating, a clean-as-they-go mandate sets in: wiping ketchup off hands that are reaching out to touch a recently dry-cleaned skirt, mopping up a water spill, picking up and replacing a dropped fork. At some point I realized, “Why bother with my own meal? I’m stressed out trying to enjoy it.”
I scarf down my food so I can get to the next task.
And that reality is what my friend Kiki saw the afternoon we met an executive for lunch. I’ve forgotten how to sit and eat. When I look at food I just want to get it out of the way so I can move on to the moments that really matter: great, intelligent, witty conversation; honest, simple humor; infectious laughter; and the unconditional cuddles shared between a parent and child and sister and brother. I streamline, scrap, and scarf so that I have the time to know my children, share their laughter, read their hearts, and greet their childhood delights with fully-present embraces.
Photo credit Close to Home/Flickr