Chronicles of a Late Bloomer

Dad is the one with diabetes. He was diagnosed about 10 years ago, and has since been promoted from mild sensitizing drugs to multiple insulin shots daily. He’s maybe 30-40 pounds overweight on his worst days.

BUT.

In his natural environment, my Dad does okay with eating well. He really likes vegetables (!!!) and so generally he’ll steam up asparagus or broccoli even when my mom makes a pasta/meat/bread/sweets spread for dinner. But, in my family of 9, he was generally the only one who would eat them.

He has a natural hunger switch, eats less than the rest of us, and quits when he’s done.

Dad also doesn’t mind walking across campus to mail a letter, or go to a meeting, or whatever else, even though campus is nearly a mile long. For a while, actually, he was doing a lot of walking and lost some weight on accident. He looked and felt great. He used to play basketball and, for a while in my childhood, would play raquetball on Saturdays.

But, Dad loves my mom. He loves her so much that he enables her in her inactivity. They both work at the same university, but he has a parking sticker which allows him access to all of the roads and lots on campus. He routinely picks her up and offers her door-to-door services for her campus errands. He has crafted a life for her which is virtually without effort. She buys the groceries, but he hefts them out of the car and carts them up and down the stairs to put them away. He does the laundry, which involves another round of up-and-down-stairs runs. He even protects her from her greatest enemy: cooking.

Who can blame her? She hates cooking. After feeding 7 hungry babies, who wouldn’t? Apparently, she has always hated cooking, but now she especially hates the exertion of it — the standing and bending and lifting and chopping — so they routinely eat out. She doesn’t like exotic foods or anything with too much spice (and won’t even add salt to the foods she makes because “it tastes so strong”) so she’s stuck with places like Tony Roma’s, Outback, Applebee’s, and her favorite — Sizzler.

Believe me, she’s not eating from the salad bar at those places.

I was telling RecordStoreRomeo about it this weekend. I had made a delicious panini from scratch, using whole wheat artisan bread, fresh mozzarella, heirloom tomato slices, and pine nuts. I coupled it with a butter lettuce salad tossed with a homemade garlic/lemon dressing. It was superbly delicious, fresh, and whole. He asked, “Where did you learn to cook like this?”

Unfortunately, my answer was, “Mostly from cookbooks and tv shows.” My mother was a child of the 50’s, and her cooking reflects that. Her primary method of cooking involves various combinations of pre-packaged foods, relying heavily on Kraft products and other processed stuff. There’s nothing she loves more than a summer bar-b-que of chicken breasts, ribs, steak, and shrimp. She’ll fill up on those meats and not even leave room for mayo-drenched potato salad, let alone a leafy green. Costco provides a never-ending parade of frozen appetizers which were once fried — taquitos, chicken strips, egg rolls, and the like — on which she binges. And, she taught the rest of us well.

It’s going to be really interesting to see if she can survive Weight Watchers. I know it’s been hard for me.