X: “Thou shalt not
covet thy sibling’s outing, nor the restaurant meal she will eat.”
On Friday night, we had our Sabbath dinner. Oldest Daughter is home from college until
next week, which makes the table feel complete.
As part of the Sabbath celebration, we light the candles, say the
blessing over the bread and the juice.
The kids have juice and my husband and I have a glass of wine.
Near the end of our dinner, the conversation went something
like this:
Me, to Youngest
Daughter: There are some leftover
spinach enchiladas, so you can have one for breakfast tomorrow.
Youngest Daughter: Actually, tomorrow I’m just going to wake up
in time for lunch!
Me: Oh, yeah, that’s right. Tomorrow afternoon
Youngest Daughter and I are going out for lunch and a movie about a horse.
Oldest Daughter: Why are you going to that movie?
Me: It’s by Stephen Spielberg.
Youngest Daughter:
We’re related to him! (We are, distantly. At least 5 degrees of separation. Mr. Spielberg has never heard of us.)
Husband: Where are you going for lunch?
Me: Probably “Casual Italian Chain Restaurant.”
Son: Can I go?
Me: No, it’s a Mother-Daughter event.
Son: What?! How come whenever I go out to a restaurant with you, you force me to go to a Chinese restaurant, but when you’re going to an
Italian restaurant I can’t go?!
(We went to a Chinese
restaurant on Dec 21st. Yes,
during Hanukkah. Son ordered a mammoth
portion of Honey Chicken, which he devoured completely. He did not appear to be suffering as he
consumed his meal.)
Husband: Yes, Son, it’s a terrible injustice in your
life. You have no idea what kind of
injustice I experienced as a boy.
Son: Dad. We all
know that you had to walk 3 miles to school, with snow up to here, even though
you were only this tall...
Husband: First of
all, we hardly ever went out to a restaurant.
When we did go to a restaurant I had to go with my Dad and my grandmother. She always ate off of my plate, instead of
ordering her own meal. And if I ordered
something and didn’t finish it, I got yelled at.
(At our house this
line of discussion usually deteriorates into the Monty Python skit “You were
lucky!” but not this time. There was too
much coveting of YD’s outing going on.)
Oldest Daughter:
Can I go to lunch with you at the Casual
Italian Chain Restaurant?
Me: No.
It’s a Mother-Daughter event with some of YD’s friends.
Oldest Daughter: But I want to go to an Italian restaurant.
Son: So do I.
Me: You can arrange a Father-Son event, and a
Father-Oldest Daughter event, and get Dad
to take you to Casual Italian Chain Restaurant.
(It was about now that
Oldest Daughter, aged 18, grabbed the bottle of wine, poured it into her
plastic cup, and drank it down. I had
little time to realize what she was doing before she had swallowed.)
Me: What are you doing?!
Oldest Daughter: I was thirsty, and I didn’t feel like getting
up to get some water, and there wasn’t anything else to drink on the table.
So our attention
turned to other things, such as what the legal age for drinking is.
It turns out
that we didn’t see Spielberg’s movie about the horse. Instead we saw “We Bought A Zoo” in which,
for me, the major feature is that Scarlett Johansson gets to kiss Matt
Damon. But since this is a post about
not coveting, I will have to stop here.
2 comments:
I remember jockeying for position as one of four kids --our favorite thing to do was go grocery shopping with my dad, because he only took one of us, and it was the only alone-time we got with him.
This is one thing I don't have to face with an only :-)
Isn't it hilarious how quick kids are to perceive "unfair" but they never catch on to "hey, I got a lucky break!"
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