A childhood memory of mine is my mom cutting up bananas, putting them in a bowl with milk, and sprinkling brown sugar on it for breakfast. I loved this when I was a kid. I haven’t had it since then though because at some point I realized it’s a pretty wack snack. Despite being a hardcore cookie addict, I’ve never added sugar to anything I eat since I was little. It just seems like a bad idea to me — I eat way too much sugar as it is so I don’t want to add sugar to my (relatively) healthy meals throughout the day and make them sugar bombs as well.
But this is what my mom served me as a healthy meal. Sure, it was the 80’s and things were different then, but more than that, I think my mom’s age was a big factor in this nutritional decision. She was young when she had my brother and I, so she would have been in her early 20’s when she was feeding me this stuff. She was also a high school dropout, which tells me she didn’t always make the wisest decisions when she was young.
And yet I can’t help but judge her for it a little bit. I think my judgement has a lot to do with that effect where parents always see their kids as kids, even when they’re 50, 60 years old — even though I’m far older now than my mom was then, I still think of that 20-something version of her being older than me now. Because of that, I feel like she should have known better — never mind that I was still eating pure trash in my early 20’s, and almost completely irresponsible, to boot.
It’s funny how we see people, and what trouble we have shaking our perceptions of some of them. It must take a lot of awareness to keep your perceptions elastic, to not get stuck in this weird ‘my kids are always younger than I’ve ever been and my parents are always older than I’ll ever be’ point of view. I’d like to shake it but am not sure if I ever will.
I can’t even find a pic of cut up bananas in a bowl with milk and brown sugar. It must have been my mom’s own unique poor white trash breakfast creation.
crimson highway 