The Dog Who Wouldn't Eat the Broccoli

There must have been a school for messing up food so badly that even the dog wouldn't eat it and my mother one of it's honor students. My mealtime savior was my dog Tippy; who on most days would gobble up food slipped to her through intricate undetected delivery systems until I moved out at 18. Tippy held firm on refusing to ingest broccoli no matter how much butter i hid it in. She would spit it on the floor risking exposure of my waste removal system. As the time grew closer to being fed foods whose colors no longer could identify their place on the food pyramid my urge to put myself up for adoption heightened. Mother trained with he Romanian  grandmother and Russian mother believing eggplant, cabbage, cream, and onions somehow were staples of all children's diets. The aromas that waifed up to my room sounded the alarm giving me five minutes to develop some foreign incurable stomach condition that improves slightly with mashed potatoes or ice cream. Oh the finality of mother yelling for me to join her in the duties of feeding our small brood. Tippy follows closely as we head for the kitchen and our assignments. Her job was to leave the room and be scarce; while mine was typical of a girl of the fifties. Table setting and drink pouring topped my list while my brother was free to continue his studious trajectory to some career that exempted him for scullery work. Mother never dreamed of me doing more than being her homemaker clone and diligently tried to teach me how to cook eggplant with mayonnaise and scalloped potatoes as if my future depended on it seeing as I was  just a girl.  Imagining how diligently she had to struggle against her personal dreams in order to make her life of serving others satisfying and the blue print for my future. Was her spirit and zest cooked into her stews and digested by those she fed while she settled for small potatoes and the least desirable part of the steak? Even my dog set the role model of taking care of others and eating leftovers; left to beg for anything other than broccoli. Idols came from movie star magazines leaving me to dream of fame from beauty if only my freckled face would smooth out into porcelain and my red way too curly hair would magically straighten into long blonde locks then I would put down the dish towel and be swept off to Hollywood. But alas Betty Crocker and fifties songs of true love and chapels of love moved me closer to Donna Reed and my mother's small dreams for me. Ironically mother's favorite television show crowned women queen for a day and as she stood there watching these daily events she wept openly. I could never understand if this exaggerated outpouring of emotion was for the winner or another day of hope's dashed that she would remain the wanna be of dreamland. Looking back at her life I feel ashamed that I rarely if ever acknowledged what she did do for her family; both quietly and as expected since I was the caboose to her engine of clean and tidy and felt the prisoner in the dining car. 

In later years after mother heard about my being arrested for protesting the senseless and immoral war in Vietnam she phoned and asked me to listen carefully to her words of warning that sometimes being too pretty or too smart was the pathway to unhappiness and that I might consider stepping up to my place at home with my family. A certain vain part of me perked up around the word pretty as the left over movie star fantasy stilled lived despite years of therapy and as much as the scarecrow part of me felt her put  the diploma in my hand I knew I remained invisible to the one woman I wanted to rescue from the "good housekeeping" magazine that arrived weekly at her doorstep.