Special Song

I used to sing a special song for my children on their birthdays. It was a long, winding tale, chronicling their attempts to get food before their mother, the meanest, fattest woman in the land, ate it all. In this tale, goaded by desperate hunger, the lovelies would contrive to sneak the car from the carport while I slept off a pie-induced stupor, and drive to their favorite fast food restaurant, McDonald's. When they arrived home with their sack of cheeseburgers and fries, I would be awake again, and hungering. I would gluttonously inhale all their dinner (even the quarter-pounders, which were, in their minds, food so big only a grown man could order them), forcing them to ransack the shelves for old saltine crackers.

I did not spare the tragic details of their pitifully growling stomachs as I shoveled handfuls of fries into my gorging maw. Before song's end, however, they were able to restrain me, escape, and drive back to McDonald's to order their favorite meals, including large fries for each child. They almost hated me, but the triumphant ending, complete with the feast of McDonald's fare made it all worthwhile. Oh, how they laughed.

I remember them all sitting wide-eyed in a darkened room, waiting expectantly for the next ridiculous line.

Luke thinks I stopped this birthday tradition when he was around twelve, but I think it may have been a year or two earlier. He laughed again when I brought it up, as did Ben, but Allie remembers that she felt like crying when I sang it.

I'm rethinking certain aspects of my parenting methods these days.