Bean is a Four Letter Word

If anything, Kenny’s distaste for vegetables is pretty impressive.  Maybe impressive isn’t the right word, but his disgust for all things healthy is. 

His idea of a well-balanced meal is a greasy hamburger topped with the only kind of vegetable worth eating, the pickle.  Don’t even try throwing on any “salad” atop his burger.  Nothing ruins the taste of a good hamburger like the unsavoriness of a leaf of lettuce.

His pervasive disgust of all things vegetable has moved beyond annoying.  Aversion to pasta I can work with, but his entire omission of the vegetable cog in the nutritional wheel is getting ridiculous.

This past weekend, I snapped.  In Martin’s Deli, as I watched Kenny gag down two lousy beans, I lost all self-control and became what I have fought against my entire grown up life.  In a nanosecond, I transformed into one of those ranting WalMart white trash mothers.  As I dragged him to the van, I snarled,

“THAT IS IT, Kenneth Montgomery!  You will start eating your vegetables every single day or I am going to find you another family to live with!”

As he tearfully howled in the back of the van, I quietly banged my head against the sticky steering wheel of what is my family’s roving mess hall. 

That evening, as John sat not blinking across from him at the dining room table, Kenny executed his patented “green bean slip.”  Nonchalantly, he stretched and dropped beans that he handpicked from his plate and casually slipped them over his left shoulder.  His form was breathtaking, but it didn’t at all fly with his old Pop.  As John reached for the phone, Kenny began to wildly shovel in beans, terrified that he was just one phone call away from being placed with some unnatural, vegetarian-style family.

But the following evening was worse.  Even with dinner guests, Kenny couldn’t conceal his aversion to all that is healthy.  Our first mistake was allowing him to eat out of sight.  Insisting that he at least try the fish before rewarding him a piece of the cake that our guests had brought along, he did the unthinkable. 

He threw up.

And I wonder why we so rarely entertain.

You think I might have noticed the lack of broccoli in his undigested meal, but I didn’t. I hurriedly cut him a piece of chocolate cake and sent him along.  It was John who discovered shortly thereafter Kenny’s broccoli florets wedged into the cushion of his chair. 

Due to recent progress, however, I do finally think we are on the road away from perdition.  As I watched Kenny eat almost an entire serving of canned green beans with almost no struggle last night, I finally felt a faint glimmer of hope. 

Kenny can tolerate vegetables.  I just know it!

And while it may be true that my family has two of the worst vegetarians ever, I refuse to blame myself for my children’s junk food ways.  I can lead my kids to the produce aisle, but I can’t make them keep it down. 

So for today, I will continue to coax Kenny with the power of vegetables, just as I’ll continue to coax Stancey with the power of peperoni.  

And between the two extremes, my mediocrity as mother and line cook will prevail.