Thursday, January 8, 2009

Not Just a Place For Food, But For Bonding



Source: New York Times

I’VE been pushing the cart for 28 years now. It started in 1981, when grocery shopping was a family affair: father, mother, two older sisters and me.


A very cute story about how grocery shopping brings a family closer together. When you're a kid, you like going shopping with your mom so you can get the good stuff. Cereal, chocolate bars, gummy bears, pudding etc.. Plus getting to push the cart around is the grown-up thing to do. If you're 5 you feel alot more important when you get to push the cart.

Then when you're a teenager, you don't want anything to do with the supermarket. It's suddenly uncool to be seen anywhere with your parents, let alone in a market! I never fully understood that because as a teenager I was still asked to buy groceries. but I would tell my mom to stay home and I'd go alone *wink wink*.

But as we all get older and move away from home, we realize that the only opportunity to spend time with our parents is at the supermarket. And as the writer states, if you've lost a parent, you always think back to those days of buying potato chips :)

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Aww. This makes me sad for some reason.

Anonymous said...

Oooh, pushing the cart hits a nerve with me. My older brother always, ALWAYS got to push the cart. I never did. I just had to mope behind. To this day I still bitch about it - as I'm doing now. And don't even get me started on sitting in the front seat! Even just once!
My parents really screwed me over. I despise my older brother (but he's a jerk anyway). I even have Dr. Laura's "Bad Childhood, Good Life" book, which I'll read someday.
For me, degenerasian, my title is - "Not Just A Place For Food, But For Screwing Up The Younger Child's Psyche".

;^)

Degenerasian said...

chiburu:

That's too bad, were there any times your spent with your parents without your brother that you remember fondly? Maybe it's time to revisit those days :)

Anonymous said...

Degenerasian:

My parents got divorced when I turned 18. But in my mind, they were divorced since I was 5 (when they talked about and I had to ask what the word meant). My brother and I were either with my mom or my dad. Never with both mom AND dad (although we lived in the same house). And my older brother was always there.

But after I got into my teens, I did my own thing with my friends. And as I became an adult, I told myself that I don't want my children to grow up the way I did. So it made me a stronger person.

Life threw me lemons and I made sweet lemonade! ;^)