The list of things that make parenting a pain in the ass is literally endless. (For a real-time compendium, please scroll my Instagram.)
Having to be responsible for other people’s well-being, to provide food, shelter, clothing, and all the material bullshit they need to make life bearable - but not too much of it lest they become entitled and spoiled! - is exhausting and difficult and an endless treadmill of effort for, at best, small, incremental improvement that mostly won’t manifest for a long period of time.
Adulthood is hard enough to manage on your own, but when you have kids, it’s even harder. Many of the things that are inconvenient to a single person or a childfree couple are compounded by the need to duplicate those things for people who can’t do any of them themselves. We all need to earn an income, maintain a livable space, wear clean clothes, etc., but when you own a couple of kids, you have to do all of those things times 1000.
Little of it is easy, and none of it is fun.
Especially feeding them.
Now, I’m not going to complain about my kids’ eating habits.
I’m not going to bitch and moan about my 13yo’s habit of eating dinner as quickly as possible before going into hiding only to emerge two hours later and want an extra meal and a dozen snacks right when he should be brushing his teeth and going to bed.
I’m not even going to rant about my 8yo’s insane pickiness and our frequent capitulation to his limited palate by allowing him to eat whatever TF he wants just so long as he eats something.
(And I’m definitely not going to dwell on the fact that I was once just as picky as he is and how, like everything else modern parents spend too much time worrying about, it ultimately didn’t matter and I’ve emerged into a normal, well-rounded eater. #fedisbest)
No, instead I am going to bitch and moan and rant about the process of actually providing meals, no matter who is eating (or refusing to eat, as the case may be) it. Because it’s THE WORST. (Again, this applies to all adults, not just parents, but it’s definitely worse when you have more— and impossible to please —people to account for!)
When it comes to modern meals, there are two basic options: cooking and ordering out.
Cooking sucks because groceries are beyond expensive and prepping and making a meal is time-consuming and messy as all get out. In a NYC apartment with limited counter space, one meal can set your housecleaning back days! To make matters even worse, cooking involves grocery shopping, which is not only a miserable experience (even without the kids!), but— should you want to make an actual meal and not just rely on the same three easy dishes you already have ingredients for— involves a level of planning that is simply unreasonable most of the time.
(I’ll never not be in awe of my mother’s pantry, which is stocked like Halloran’s at the Overlook Hotel. Meanwhile I’ve got a crappy taco kit, a frozen bag of orange chicken from Trader Joe’s that everyone liked the first two times but would now rather die than ingest, and half a jar of pasta sauce. I guess it’s time for Shake Shack!)
Ordering out, on the other hand, is easy and convenient (once you get past the “what do yo feel like?” portion of the proceedings, which is hard enough as a couple and even more difficult with two kids who’ve never agreed on anything in their entire lives), but it’s even more expensive than grocery shopping. Ordering delivery more than 2-3 times a week pretty much rules out any hope for a summer vacation. Sorry kids, I guess you should have learned to appreciate Dad’s chili instead of demanding fucking Shake Shack again!
The third option? Meal kits. Meal kits are great when you don’t want to grocery shop and cook and you also don’t want to order out again, except for the fact that half of the meal kit services require the same amount of cooking you were trying to avoid and the other half are glorified TV dinners that cost almost as much but don’t taste nearly as good as Shake Shack. (This is not a sponsored post but I will gladly accept a free SmokeShack burger, thank you.)
We have tried a few: Blue Apron (you need to be Carmy from The Bear to prep these things), Every Plate (which also needs more prep than I’d prefer, and all the meals sort of taste the same), and one that provided meals to be reheated in the microwave. I’d have rather eaten a Hungry Man.
There are countless other options, but like everything else that was meant to solve a problem (Uber, Airbnb, streaming), meal kits have slowly become indistinguishable from the problem they were supposed to be solving. If I wanted to cook, I’d cook. If I wanted to spend a lot of money, I’d order out. This is probably our fault for expecting “convenient” and “inexpensive” to be a tenable combination, but still, for a brief moment, it seemed possible.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way to get cheap, convenient, good meals that don’t require so much prep and cooking as to defeat the purpose of using a meal kit service is to hire a personal chef. And once DAD TRUTHS becomes a major motion picture, that’s what I’ll do!
Until then, Mom and Buried and I will continue to spend our afternoons squabbling over options as we scramble to come up with something that is available, non-labor-intensive, and cheap.
And then I’ll end up eating two-and-a-half meals so everything my kids refused to put in their mouths doesn’t go to waste.
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Pop Culture Stuff
On Monday I saw an advance screening of CIVIL WAR, that movie with the trailer that confused everyone by indicating that California and Texas (and maybe Florida?) had somehow teamed up to secede from the U.S. In today’s political landscape, that doesn’t seem particularly likely, and if a movie is meant to be relevant to the times and/or make some sort of statement about the country— which a movie about a second American civil war seems poised to do —that’s a bad start.
The good news is that it doesn’t matter in the slightest. The California/Texas/Florida conundrum is not only left unresolved, it’s simply not explored, because CIVIL WAR isn’t about politics or the impending election or any of the specific things fueling our current anxieties about the country. The movie is not about what the initial trailers seemed to suggest it was about. It’s not even about what the titular civil war is about! It’s mostly about war in general, as seen from the perspectives of journalists covering it from the inside.
The plot follows a team of media members— Kirsten Dunst’s legendary photojournalist, her reporter partner, another older reporter who’s seen it all, and a young photographer with ambition —as they road trip from NYC to DC in an attempt to document the war and make their way to the White House to interview the sitting, besieged president (Ron Swanson).
All of the politics that incited the war are left largely ambiguous as the film sidesteps any partisanship or commentary on the current landscape as best it can. It can be interpreted in various ways— there are a few breadcrumbs that seem almost intended to confuse if not allow both liberals and conservatives to perform the multiple Spider-mans meme —but the director, Alex Garland (EX MACHINA, ANNIHILATION) doesn’t pick sides or draw overt parallels to current events (aside from the upsettingly plausible escalation of the national mood).
CIVIL WAR is intense and loud and often horrifying. The last act is a pummeling, bravura action sequence depicting a climactic assault on Washington D.C., and it’s surreal to watch our national landmarks get caught in the crossfire (almost as surreal as it was to watch that happen on the news a few years ago). It doesn’t point any fingers or clue us into what led to the war itself, understanding that the audience will bring its own preconceptions and opinions about who is to blame and why. Instead the movie focuses on the consequences of letting things get to this point, and in the picture it paints, sides hardly matter; it's a nightmare no matter if you’re in Texas, California, Florida, or New York.
Especially if you encounter a chilling Jesse Plemons, who proves yet again that his Landry was the glue that held Friday Night Lights together.