That's not all it was, but it was a reminder, as if I needed one, of the downside of "I can do it all by myself."
The other day, the kid wanted a snack. Not just any snack, though, but a bologna sandwich. Since the only nasty sandwich meat I hate more than bologna is canned tuna, so I was happy to accede to her insistence on making her sandwich herself. Two pieces of bread and a piece of bologna, what could go wrong?
Then two days later, my wife summons me to the fridge and asks me to remove and throw away a mess she can't bring herself to touch. Turns out the kid had put the bologna back yellow lid-side down on top of a Ziploc container of pasta. For two days, bologna juice had drained down and out, and had congealed into the concave lid like bologna aspic.
"Sure, I'll just rinse it off and--"
"Actually, let's just throw it away. It's pork anyway, not beef."
Wait, you mean I'd bought the wrong bologna for the kid's lunches? I mean, didn't I do exactly what I had been taught all those years ago? Only to find out that it isn't enough to know that my bologna has a first name and a second name; now I have to know its mother's maiden name, too? Screw that. If giant packaged meat companies don't want to market to me, or at least stick big "this is the normal one" and "this is the weird, niche one" stickers on their products, I'll just shop at the Italian deli and let the kid have mortadella sandwiches instead. Mortadella which is made from pork.
I am 45, but I can still make my mother feel guilty by saying things like "I didn't get into Harvard because you fed me bologna as a child. All those nitrates and nitrites warped my fragile little mind."