This Hurts Me More Than It Hurts You

Doesn’t it always feel like any time you have to punish your children that you’re being punished, too?

The twins and I stopped at the grocery store on the way home Friday night. We shopped for our weekly groceries and picked up a few things for Thanksgiving dinner. When we were finished we headed to the checkouts (obviously) where I told the twins to hop to the front of the cart so they could load our selections on the conveyor belt. I was then informed by a cantankerous Baby A that he and his brother did all the chores. Evidently I’m some evil taskmaster who sits on his ass while they…

“Excuse me?” I retorted. “Doing the dishes a couple of times a week and doing a handful of chores every other Saturday is hardly everything. What exactly do you contribute on the days you’re not there?”

“Well, um, when we are there we do all the chores,” he tried.

At this point I told him bodily harm would result if he continued to articulate this line of thought. I also informed him that I could, in fact, start making him do everything. Baby B laughed at this, but only after confirming he would not end up with more chores because his brother was suffering diarrhea of the mouth.

That was the end of the conversation until we arrived home. Once the groceries were unloaded and put away. I informed Baby A that he would be cooking dinner.

“Wait. What?” he gasped, flabbergasted.

“Well you do everything, right?” I deadpanned. Baby B snickered at his brother’s misfortune.

“That’s not what I said. I said we do all the chores.”

After explaining to this ingrate that cooking is a chore and promising him that he’d be forced to eat all of the food after he threatened to purposely burn it all, I walked out the front door to retrieve Baby C from my mother’s house. Baby A was left in the kitchen with the task of cooking metwurst and Italian sausage.

Easy enough, right? Evidently not.

When I returned roughly 20 minutes later, he had already cooked the Italian sausages. I thought that was rather quick seeing as how they were frozen when I left the house. A quick check of one of the sausages revealed it was incredibly squishy, meaning the meat inside was not thoroughly cooked. I told him to put them back on the stove and cook them a bit longer.

“But I’ll burn them!” he whined.

“It’s okay if they’re a little crispy on the outside,” I assured him.

I once again left him with the task of cooking the sausages. Once they were done he immediately dug in as he was evidently famished. He was about halfway through the sausage when he says, “Is it supposed to be pink like that?”

Make me cook, will ya? I’ll give us all food poisoning as punishment for this, um, punishment. (Photo credit: Cooking Up A Story)

“No, it’s not.”

He shrugged his shoulders and continued devouring the sausage. Sigh…. I handed him the plate of sausages, and instructed him to put them in the microwave for a couple of minutes so they could finish cooking.

My attempt to teach my son a lesson failed spectacularly. As a child I scoffed when my parents would say things like “This hurts me more than it hurts you.” Now I understand all too well what they meant.