Peggy's Prompt--Drinking Milk

“You’ll be drinking milk,” my mother said in response to my request for iced tea. We two girls always had to drink milk with our evening mean, which we called supper. Mama and Daddy drank iced tea, Mama with a little sugar and lemon, Daddy unsweetened. They always got lots of ice in their large iced tea glasses, whereas Mary and I had plain old pasteurized milk that you had to shake up to stir up the cream which had risen to the top. And our old fridge didn’t seem to keep the milk icey cold, like we liked it. So Mama would drop a single ice cube into each of our glasses of milk to make it colder (and more watery, I might add). It was just not fair. Milk for kids, iced tea for adults.




But that’s the way it was, back in the day. Whatever Mama said went. You could protest, you could argue, but you couldn’t win. Daddy always and forever took her side. They were nothing if not consistent. “Go ask your Mama,” Daddy would say if we asked for some favor. “What did your Daddy say?” she’d ask us when we went to her next. He said go ask your Mama. Well, then, I say no. You know we can’t afford it/it isn’t good for you/you’re too young/I’m your mother. Except for the “we can’t afford it” the reasons always seemed like excuses to us. But we can’t afford it always stopped us in our tracks. We were acutely aware of the shortage of money in our family. Not that we didn’t have a house (small), car (old), clothes (made by Mama), toys (a few), food (provided by Daddy the fisherman and Granddaddy the produce farmer and chicken farmer). But we never seemed to have any money.



When I was in first and second grade, my mother sent me to school with a brown bag lunch and a nickel for a Fudgesicle. When I was in third grade and asked for an allowance, she gave me a quarter each week, but I had to buy my own Fudgesicle. Somehow this was fair in her mind. But hey, looking back, I’m glad we girls had to drink our milk, and I’m no longer aggravated about the so-called “allowance.” She did the best she could and it was pretty great after all.