The Groceryslinger

And the cereal killer

The vibe of my house is very important to me. Not furnishings or decorations so much as the feeling being in certain rooms imparts. I am a veritable preacher of vibe-appropriate lighting.

I could give a TED talk on the importance of lamps, candles, strings of lights and other crucial elements involved in lighting a room for maximum ambience, but it can all be summed up in one sentence: Turn off your overhead lighting you fucking killjoy, you.

I cannot understand you with your bug zapper electric blue LEDs or your megawatt 2,600 lumen lightbulbs can I get an amen, brothers and sisters!? I am an unapologetic candle-hoarding, year-round Christmas light-loving, lamp-obsessed freak.

I need clean + cozy for optimum mental well-being. People I love around me doing their thing but not all up in my business. Good lighting. Lots of windows. Good music.

Recently, I’ve been jamming grooving to Miles Davis. I dig it, bigly. Jazz is weird, man. You go through your whole life not caring about jazz at all, not really ‘getting’ jazz in the same way you never got algebra and suddenly you feel like “Kind Of Blue” tells you more about who you are than any song with lyrics ever could.

You fuse with the music; you fall asleep with the music; you write this newsletter with Blue in Green on repeat and you feel goooood. Jazz feels good. Smoooth. Sexxy. With two x’s, maybe three!

You want to shower to jazz, sleep to jazz, work to jazz, fuuuck to jazz. And because it’s jazzz you feel classsy. Low-key superiorrr. You move differently when jazzz is playing, you feeeel different; like a better version of yourself.

After an IEP (individualized education plan) meeting at one of the kid’s schools, Cory and I spent the afternoon of my birthday - wait for it - grocery shopping.

But it was a good time because we always have a good time together. As we’re walking into the store I tell Cory to snap a photo cuz that’s the shit I want in my phone, the stuff I want to look back on.

Not carefully posed selfies from vacations or gatherings, just us hangin around, parenting, doin our usual. A cat in a pile of clothes destined for Goodwill. A kid having a moment with one of the animals. And first photo taken is the only photo that exists from that moment, not 15 images from which you choose the best before editing all to hell.

The photo makes me feel happy. It gets us, the photo does, captures who we are together. Comfortable, happy. And it’s from my 47th birthday.

I rolled through that store like an arrogant top chef scoring high-end produce at a farmer’s market. I keep meticulous inventory lists on a whiteboard in my kitchen and know every item we need along with each kid’s favorites. Sharp white cheddar cheese for Blake to sprinkle on everything they eat, mozzarella sticks and Fruity Pebbles for Henry, orange chicken and vegetable fried rice for Charlie, Goldfish for Elliott, plus english muffins and eggs for the breakfast sandwiches he loves.

As we began loading the groceries into the back of the minivan I clocked Cory mindlessly throwing the bag holding all the bread in the back.

“Rookie mistake,” I told him in a passive-aggressive, sarcastic-yet-serious tone. “Bread goes in last. On top. You wanna put your pet foods, your milks, sodas and canned goods in first. Chips and bread last, FOOL. I thought you were a grocery bagger back in the day, did you learn nothing?”

It occurred to me that I’m good at grocery shopping in large quantities. And fuck you, don’t mock! Like being good at decorating or gardening, grocery shopping for a large family is a skill. If you were looking to hire someone to manage a house, it would fall among your top five interview questions. Maintaining short-term inventory, budgeting, making dinner plans, buying the right ingredients, keeping long-term pantry staples in stock, knowing which one of four kids loves/hates what items.

I am a goddamn groceryslinger and with four kids at home including two bottomless pit teens, I am at the height of my game, baby. A minivan driving, expert lighting, motherfuckin groceryslinger.

There will come a day when I’m no longer slingin’ groceries with the other parenting pros. I’ll just have my one recyclable bag of fruits, veggies and what? Multivitamins? Metamucil? I don’t know.

I’ll reminisce about my glory days of hardcore slinging. Back when it was pig food and dog food and cat food and chicken food and guinea pig food, gallon after gallon of milk, enough flaming hot chip products to burn through several stomach linings along with family size Fruity Pebbles because teenaged, nighttime Henry hits it hard after everyone’s in bed then leaves calcified Fruity Pebbles stronger than actual stone pebbles shellacked to the cereal bowls that litter his bedroom.

I buy sugary cereal. I buy flaming hot whatevers. Ice cream. TV dinners. I get it allll. That’s what happens when you’re raised on food stamps and squirrel away cans of Campbells soup and Spaghettios in your underwear drawer for when the family food supply runs out at the end of the month and you gotta ration your private stash.

As an adult you become obsessed with keeping all the food everyone likes on your pantry shelves at all times so your kids don’t experience the kind of want, the kind of hunger, fear and shame that permeated your childhood.

You’re aware you’re probably spoiling your kids but you don’t even care, you just want them to walk in the kitchen, look in the fridge, open cupboards and see options. You don’t want them to be accused of eating too much food at their friends’ houses, like you were when you were 11, because nearly 40 years later you still burn with the shame of sneaking so many strawberries - an item never found in your fridge - from your friend’s fridge (you just couldn’t stop yourself they were so fresh and delicious!) that their mom noticed and commented.

My brother-in-law stopped by with a sweet friend of his whom I adore, a 19-year-old aspiring musician who experienced a childhood as chaotic or worse than my own. When I asked her if she was hungry and wanted a snack she asked excitedly, “Ooooh, are you the kind of mom who always has Goldfish?”

“You bet yer ass I’m the kind of the mom who always has Goldfish,” I told Nicole.

“Original or Flavor Blasted?”