Last week I found myself thinking about Mother's Days of the past, back when my husband and I faithfully took our mothers out to dinner every year on their special day. My mother always jumped at any opportunity to go out for a meal, but my mother-in-law often hesitated before accepting our invitation.
“Are you going to be trying another new restaurant this year?” she seemed almost afraid to ask.
I honestly couldn’t blame her for her reluctance. For some reason, instead of taking our mothers to their favorite restaurants on Mother’s Day, my husband and I thought it would be more exciting and adventurous for the four of us to try new places every year.
Alas, more often than not, the results were pretty disastrous.
There was one restaurant north of Concord, for example, we’d seen highly praised in a dining guide, so we thought it would be the perfect place for a Mother’s Day drive and dinner.
The food turned out to be so terrible, I’m surprised my dogs didn’t report me to the SPCA when I brought home the leftovers in a doggy bag for them.
I’d ordered barbecued lamb that, without exaggeration, looked exactly like a pile of black raisins on my plate. My mother-in-law’s barbecued chicken-tenders were soggy pieces of chicken drenched in cold barbecue sauce poured straight from the bottle. And my mother’s turkey dinner was a mouth-watering piece of old bread with some sliced cold-cuts stacked on top of it, all buried beneath a layer of bright-yellow canned gravy.
I left there seriously wondering if we’d live through the night.
The next Mother’s Day, we tried a different restaurant, one that several of our friends had recommended.
“I think I’ll have a big thick steak,” my husband said as we pulled into the parking lot. No big surprise from a man who’d spent his life eating so much beef, I expected him to lower his head like a bull one day and start charging at people. But in all fairness, he also said the same thing about me and chicken. I ate it so often, he teased me about growing feathers and laying an egg.
At the restaurant, we were seated in a spacious booth and handed a single sheet of paper with five meals listed on it: Chicken Cordon Bleu, seafood pie, filet mignon, prime rib, and stuffed haddock. The prices were high enough to make even the Rockefellers develop palpitations.
“Is this all you have?” I asked the waiter as I flipped over the paper, hoping to see more (a.k.a. cheaper) selections on the other side. When our friends had recommended the place, they'd mentioned how great the meals like the sirloin steak and roast turkey were.
“It’s our special Mother’s Day menu,” the waiter said, smiling brightly.
“Where’s the turkey? The baked ham? The sirloin steak?” I asked, tempted to add, “Where’s the stuff we can afford, seeing we're picking up the tab for everyone today?”
“Oh, those aren’t Mother’s Day items,” he said.
Even though the price was closer to what I’d expect to pay for a whole steer, I settled for the filet mignon. My husband also ordered it. Our mothers opted for the stuffed haddock.
We placed our orders at 2:15. By 3:45 we had yet to see anything edible other than a basket of breadsticks, which we’d turned into a pile of crumbs by 2:30. By then, we were ready to gnaw on the basket.
“I’m getting weak from hunger,” my mother-in-law said. “If I had known this, I would have eaten lunch.”
“My stomach’s holding a full conversation with me,” my mother muttered. "I'm pretty sure it's thinking my throat's been cut."
“Well, at least we’re spending quality time together,” I said, smiling weakly.
Finally, after we had been staring for so long at the food on everyone else's plates at the tables around us, we probably made the people think we were about to leap up and attack them, our meals arrived.
Even Barbie and Ken would have starved on the portions on our plates.
My husband stabbed his piece of filet mignon, which was so small it resembled a square meatball, then held it up and said, “Is this all of it?” Before I could answer, he added, “Gross! Look at all of the white fat around it!”
“Don’t be silly,” I said. “Filet mignon doesn’t have white fat on it!” I happened to look down at my piece and noticed it also had some kind of gelatinous-looking white stuff wrapped around it. When I touched it with my fork, it fell off and landed on my plate.
“It’s a thick slab of bacon!” my husband said, as if he’d just solved a murder mystery. “Raw bacon!”
Granted, I was hungry, but not nearly hungry enough to eat raw bacon.
Even worse, there also was a mushroom cap accessorizing the top of the meat. My husband wouldn't have eaten a mushroom ("dirt-flavored fungus") even if he previously had been without food for a week.
No, make that a month.
The meals that had taken nearly two hours to be served took us all of ten minutes to eat. I still was so hungry, I was tempted to lick everyone’s plates.
“I wonder what they have for dessert?” my husband said. “I’m ready for a big slab of chocolate cake!”
“Odds are it’s not part of their Mother’s Day menu,” I said, frowning. “But I’ll bet you can get a nice tablespoonful of pudding for about $15.”
The next year, we finally decided to let our mothers choose where they wanted to go on Mother’s Day. That way, if the meals turned out to be another disaster, my husband and I wouldn’t be to blame or feel burdened with guilt afterwards.
Both Moms decided they'd prefer a nice home-cooked meal...at my house.
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Sally Breslin is an award-winning syndicated humor columnist who has written regularly for newspapers and magazines all of her adult life. She is the author of several novels in a variety of genres, from humor and romance to science-fiction. Contact her at: sillysally@att.net.
