Spilled

© 2001 by Lynda J. Williams

 

            "One large drink, to share, if you can agree. Otherwise everyone gets water," I decree, turning right onto the by-pass.

            Eight year old Angela lobbied for iced tea in the back of the functional, untidy van. Six year old Tegan wanted root beer. Jennifer, who had recently turned thirteen, announced she didn't have to get involved. She had her own money.

            "Why can't I have iced tea," complained Angela, trumped by Tegan's shriller cry of "root beer!"

            "I am not prepared to pay for two," I told them.         

            Silence reigned as far as 15^th Avenue while the kids mulled these new rules over

            "How about pink pop?" Angela suggested.

            Before they had pulled into Muffin Break, it was settled.

            I bought two huge cinnamon buns and a single large cream soda served in a paper cup. The children went to pick a table while I paid and Jennifer waited to buy her own drink out of her $10 weekly allowance.

            My bill came to $9.70, which was now a quarter of my own allowance. I used it for little thing mostly, like time out in coffee shops or a book that I didn’t need, really. I did not know what to do with the helpless, petty feeling that rebounded on me for begrudging spending it on my children.

            My mother always handed out an extra ten or twenty when I called on her. I never realized it made such a difference. Now my brother was living at home with a craving for friendship that allied him with people he met in bars and all my mother’s income drained  into booze and cocaine deals and trips made to Vancouver that he didn’t have enough money left over from even to get himself home. He’d blown his visa, his job and my mother’s credibility with the bank.

            I had done what I could, struggling not to mix up my better motives with my own financial shock, and wondering with each $1,000 squandered whether it was simply stupid even trying to do that. The situation itself was not today’s problem.

            A lifetime’s assumptions haunted me now. Phrases like "the money doesn't matter" and memories of how you got it by declining to accept it twice, were hard to dismiss and impossible to live by any longer. The whole thing seemed bizarrely implausible. Like some ill conceived plot for a cheap movie.

            I was juggling my wallet and fanny pack when Angela appeared at my elbow, asking me for a cloth. Tegan remained seated, her shirt soaked in pink pop.

            "Did you spill all of it?" I demanded, very cross.

            I collected my change feeling it had been a mistake to come. No one was enjoying it much.

            The store manager took pity on Angela, and helped her mop the table and floor. I went to pitch in too. Six year old Tegan had not moved.

            “Can we get another one?” Angela asked.

            "You shouldn't buy it for them, Mommy," Jennifer said with moral force.

            "I'll give them a new pop," volunteered the store manager.

            Feeling sheepish, I muttered, "Thanks."

            I sat down with Jennifer to attack our shared cinnamon bun, while the new, large pink cream soda was placed between Tegan and Angela. Angela started giving orders concerning how it should be passed back and forth, proclaiming how the spill had been Tegan’s fault.

            Jennifer stabbed a piece of cinnamon bun. "You shouldn't have given them another one," she told me off. "You're too soft."

            "I didn't buy it," I pointed out, feeling cheap and small.

            My mother would have bought them one each to start.

            "They'll never learn to value things if you give them everything they want," Jennifer harped on the spilled pop.

            "It was an accident," I tried to brush it off, a bit bewildered by my eldest daughter’s vehemence. Jennifer was usually more warm and motherly towards her younger siblings than I was.

            "Accidents happen," chimed in the store manager. "I was impressed with the way the little one took it, in fact. If it had been my kids, there'd have been crying."

            I looked at Tegan. Her T-shirt was soaked, and probably getting cold. She wasn't eating and she wasn’t drinking her new pop.

            Jennifer griped, "They get away with everything because they're little."

            "You're becoming a hard woman in your old age," I told my 13 year old, getting up.

            It wasn't until I had seen Tegan cleaned up and back to the table in good enough spirits to enjoy the new pop that it hit me between the eyes.

            Jennifer was suffering from the same disillusionment I was. She was old enough to remember how it had always been like Christmas when grama took us out.

            Was she thinking, while she complained about spilled pop, about how much one  Frutopia subtracted from her weekly ten dollars? And resenting the free ride her siblings got.

            As I sat down again, I thought, 'It doesn't matter whether I am up to this or not.  I'm in it. That’s all.'

            I wondered if my mother had ever felt like that, or had her parenting always been boundless and unconscious. But that didn't matter either. It was time to be myself now, not my mother’s daughter. Make my own mistakes, and set my own examples.

            Time, perhaps, belatedly, to grow up.