The Boy had decided earlier in the day that the two of us should make "cookie cutter cookies", as he called them, and so I made the dough (while he stood behind me, stealing bites of sugar and butter), I rolled out the dough and cut it out (while he took off with the cookie cutters to play farm), and I baked the cookies (I don’t know where he was at this point). Then when the cookies were cooled off, he proudly brought a big plate of them into the living room and announced that he’d made cookies. Fair enough.
The cookies sat around nudely until bedtime, when we frosted them, my children crying beside me. I think it was the cookies that made the kids cry, or maybe the fumes from the food colouring (we DID use a lot) or maybe it was that Mama had been a big crab all day and I kept snapping at the kids until finally both of them were sobbing. Yep. I stomped into the living room and sat sulking in a chair until my husband came up to me, furious, and told me to go look at The Boy’s face. So I did.
Oh.
Have you ever had one of those revelatory moments where you realize JUST LIKE THAT that you’ve been a jerk? It’s a nasty feeling, this sudden falling away of all of the self-righteous martyrdom, this revelation of a meanness of spirit, a cruel littleness.
I apologized to my kids and hugged them on my knee and admired their cookie decorating handiwork and they sniffled and permitted me to hug them, because after all, who better to comfort you when you are sad than your mother? By the time they went to bed – stuffed full of cookies and milk – they were cheerful again and all was restored.
Someone once told me that her children were only allowed to watch her bake – that she would put up the baby gate in the living room and her children would peer mournfully over it into the kitchen while she cheerfully made banana bread, which struck me at the time as quietly hilarious. Of course, now I feel like she was wise, that I should be perhaps furiously baking in a cage myself, cackling away and making apples as red as poison.
My children cheerfully filled up their lunch containers with cookie apples (and, mystifyingly enough, cookie DOLPHINS) this morning, chattering away to each other and hurrying off to school. The cookies will be untouched by me, though, one taste of sad self-knowledge being more than enough.