Sugar Rage

Dear Mom and Dad,

You’re great people, truly. But it has never been a child’s job to be kind to, nor appreciative of, their parents. So let me start this, instead, with the blame game.

See? See what you’ve done? See the monster you’ve created? All those years of restricting colored cereals, shapes, marshmallows, chocolate or fruit flavored loops have backfired. You used to let me get Kix on a good day, maybe Corn Pops if I had dusted the baseboards for once. But the rest of the time it was Raisin Bran, or plain Cheerios, or plain Shredded Wheat, or plain Corn Flakes, or a heaping spoonful of your own adult cereal, Just Right—and you could very much tell it was for lame old adults because it had not only raisins (gross!) but also dates (blech!), and nuts that weren’t encased in either sugar, nor honey (plain nuts? Puke!).

No, you didn’t let me have them. My only glimpses of freedom were at friend’s houses, the very likes of which drunk soda at dinner and had desert via pudding pops and cake (they had cake—and it wasn’t even anyone’s birthday! Dear God, this was a shock the first time I saw it.), and in the morning there would be a veritable grocery store aisle of eye-catching cartooned boxes to choose from, Count Chocula, Booberries, Fruity Pebbles, Reeces Peanut Butter Puffs, all of which strangely turned our milk the same hospital shade of gray. The only time I had a taste under our own roof was in those Variety Paks I could sometimes get Mom to purchase if I really turned on the charm and the guilt (Dad did all our grocery shopping—a Mr. Mom before the movie even came out, so when Mom was buying, it was time to cash in on everything Dad wouldn’t allow). Except there were two different kinds of Variety Paks, those marketing genuis bastards—one was bursting with the breakfast equivalent of Pixie Sticks, the other interspersed good and bad cereals, offsetting the Smacks with Fiber One…(not that Smacks even warranted Fiber One—that was most unfair—Smacks was, if anything, the bland equivalent of Crispix on the other side of the spectrum, not the eight-year-old-gag-reflex-inducing Fiber One!). And guess which one I got, even when I had dissuaded Mom?

Sure it kept me a tad less hyper (yeah right!). Keep thinking that. Just like when you thought I should have the regular vitamins instead of Flintstones and they tasted like what the owl pellet dissection in seventh grade smelled like inside, when you got a real good mouse in there, and I spit them all into your fancy brass umbrella stand when I was nine, every day for a month, and you didn’t find them until the next spring, at the bottom, mashed into a beige vitamin paste, crudding up all your umbrellas. That was the day you let me break my piggy bank shaped like one of those old-timey cash registers so I could buy the bottle of vitamins from you and toss it in the trash. That was one of the happiest days of my life. That was awesome.

Memories.

I know you intended well. You really did. You only wanted your only daughter and your eldest to be chock full o nutrients. You were in fact, really great parents…but…you know, you ruined me in that one respect. You know that right? All those years of repressed sugar rage. All those years of rationing Fruit Loops? What has it done?

I’ll tell you what it’s done.

Last night, for dinner, I ate six mini chocolate cookies, a donut, and two pieces of Bubble Yum.

After Pilates. And a salad at work. And plenty of water. Then I had to lie down because I had a tummy ache. Yeah, you were right. But it’s still no consolation.

And this morning, it’s back to oatmeal, before the next werewolf-like emergence of a fifth-grade eating pattern rears its ugly head.