The Green Vegetable Situation-

I am very stubborn and those of you who know me well would have to agree.  My husband complains about it regularly and when I get my mind set on something, it is hard to deter me.  This happens more in my everyday life than when I am at work.  I make a conscious effort to be flexible and easy to get along with at work.  When you are there for 40 hours a week or more it is important for me to have a harmonious workplace or I don’t want to be there.  This makes it even harder for me to get up in the morning and go.  Right now I have that and it makes spending so much time there easier.

When I was a child I often did not want to do what my parents wanted me to do.  A great example of this was dinnertime at home.  My mom would cook and she would always make a green vegetable for at least one of the sides.  Like most children I did not want to eat it, whether it was green beans, peas or the worst for me, broccoli.  I still hate broccoli and the smell of it cooking.

We lived in the small town Castroville south of San Antonio and we would all sit down at the dining room table for dinner as a family.  Our table was an antique wood table that was covered with a tablecloth.  This table had a drawer on the side that I sat on.  My mom would insist I eat the green veggies and at first I tried to feed them to our dog but he didn’t want them either.  Then I discovered the drawer and I began wrapping the green veggies in a napkin under the tablecloth and shoving it into the drawer while showing my mom that I had eaten all the veggies on my plate.

This went on for months but seeing as I was a child, the thought never crossed my mind to clean the drawer out when no one was around.  In 6^th grade we were moving to Fort Worth when my mom decided to move the table and get it to the door.  Of course she opened the drawer to see if anything was in there and there it was, months and months worth of napkins and desiccated green vegetables!  I am sure it was very disgusting and my mother was irate! I don’t remember the exact punishment but I am sure it involved being grounded from multiple things.

I remember my father, who is more stubborn than I am, telling me a story from his childhood.  He was the oldest of 10 children and one night his mother made spaghetti.  My father complained that one of his siblings had gotten more food than he had.  So his father decided he was being ungrateful and took all the spaghetti from his siblings and told him that in order to leave the table he had to eat everyone’s portion of spaghetti.  My dad said he sat at that table all night.   I can’t imagine how much food that was!  My father will not eat spaghetti to this day and it was something that we never had at home.

So maybe I was a touch stubborn and maybe I also learned it from watching my father. Either way my poor mother did not have it easy dealing with both of us!  And don’t think for a second that Brett must be having a hard time with my stubbornness, he is just as stubborn!  It is scary how like my father Brett is!  That old saying that you marry a man like your father is true!  That goes for you too men, you often marry women just like your mothers!  Ponder on that for a few minutes.  Pretty crazy!