In the town of Normal, Pennsylvania, there’s a little church at the corner of Wilson and Elm. Karen Winslow has taught Sunday school there for many years. And every year on Mother’s Day Karen’s daughter Carrie provides breakfast in bed for her mother before they go to church.
The tradition started when Carrie was three years old. The first breakfast was cold cereal and orange juice that little Carrie prepared with the help of her father, Del. As Carrie grew older she tried to make more complex breakfasts. However Carrie seemed to have inherited Del’s ineptitude in the kitchen instead of her mother’s expertise. After enduring rubbery, slightly greenish eggs when Carrie was eight, blackened French toast that tasted strangely of garlic when Carrie was ten, and pancakes that required a steak knife to cut when Carrie was thirteen, Karen remembered the days of cold cereal with longing.
All that changed when Carrie got her driver’s license. Unable to face her arch nemesis, the stove, one more time, Carrie instead woke up at five in the morning to drive to a bakery in the town of Tenor Falls thirty miles away. There she purchased a bag of hot, fresh cinnamon rolls.
These were no ordinary cinnamon rolls. They were buttery, flaky, melt-in-your-mouth cinnamon delights. They were the one commercially purchased baked good that Karen acknowledged as superior to what she produced in her own kitchen. Upon tasting them for the first time during a family road trip, Karen half seriously suggested they move to Tenor Falls just to be able to enjoy the treats on a more regular basis.
Needless to say the cinnamon rolls were the best Mother’s Day breakfast Karen had ever had. So the following year Carrie did it again. And thus a tradition was born. With her father’s help, Carrie managed to keep the tradition up even after moving to Cincinnati for college and after marrying a handsome young man named Carlos Lopez.
This year Carrie was back in Normal. Carrie and Carlos had moved in with Del and Karen after the company they worked for in Cincinnati went bankrupt. And this Mother’s Day would be different for the Winslow family due to an even more significant event:
Carrie had recently become a mom herself.
A few months earlier She had given birth to little Scott Lopez. Scott was too young yet to grasp the significance of the holiday, of course, but Carlos was not about to let Carrie’s first Mother’s Day as a mother go by without an extravagant celebration. When Carlos learned of Carrie’s plan to wake up before dawn and drive forty minutes each way to buy cinnamon rolls he had to intervene.
“You should sleep in,” Carlos insisted. “I’ll make breakfast for both you and your mother.”
Now Carlos was an excellent cook, but to Carrie the best part of his proposal was the sleeping in. At this stage in his brief life, Scott rarely slept more than four hours in a row. Carrie could no longer remember a time when she wasn’t exhausted.
So the next morning after feeding Scott at 5 am, Carrie went back to sleep while Carlos took Scott and went down to the kitchen to whip up a spinach quiche.
Carlos sat Scott in his infant chair on the counter while he worked. He made a crust, mixed the filling, scrubbed the floor after Scott knocked the mixing bowl off the counter, mixed more filling, poured the filling into the crust, slid it into the oven and set the timer for fifty minutes. Then he took Scott out to the living room and lay down on the couch. As a good modern husband Carlos shared equally in the childcare duties, which meant he was just as exhausted as Carrie. So whenever he had a few minutes he grabbed a quick nap.
He was awakened not by the oven timer but by Scott’s crying. Carlos leapt off the couch and scooped Scott out of his infant chair. “Shh,” he cooed to the baby. “Don’t wake Mommy up. We’re letting her sleep in for Mother’s Day.”
The cause of Scott’s unhappiness resided just where Carlos suspected it would – in his diaper. Carlos glanced at the oven timer. He still had ten minutes. He whisked Scott into Del’s den, which had been temporarily converted into a nursery.
Carlos unfastened the sticky tabs on the dirty diaper, disposed of it in a magical contraption whose inventor Carlos would have recommended for a Nobel Prize, and cleaned Scott off with a baby wipe. He was just placing a fresh diaper under Scott’s bottom when the boy decided he hadn’t quite finished what he’d started in the last diaper. Carlos sighed. This was not an unprecedented event.
And that’s when he heard the oven timer go off in the kitchen.
Carlos shifted into high gear. He quickly stripped off the newly soiled diaper. But in his haste one of the sticky tabs brush against Scott’s onesie where the adhesive grabbed onto the cotton and pulled it toward the danger zone. Carlos yanked the dirty diaper free but it was too late – the onesie was now soiled.
Carlos peeled the onesie off, disposed of the second diaper and reached for more baby wipes.
The container was empty.
Now Carlos was beginning to panic. He found a fresh container of wipes in the cupboard but when he returned to his son he discovered that for a person who hadn’t yet learned to roll over, Scott had somehow spread the mess across his entire lower body.
Carlos disposed of another half container of wipes frantically scrubbing his son clean. But Scott demonstrated his emotional bond with his father by feeding off Carlos’s frenzy. As Carlos tried to affix a new diaper, the baby pinwheeled his little legs like he was riding a bicycle. This made the task considerably more difficult. Carlos had to redo the diaper three times before it was secured properly.
By the time he ran back into the kitchen and deposited Scott in the bouncy chair there was a distinct acrid smell in the air. He opened the oven door and his shoulders slumped as he saw the blackened top of the quiche.
Del wandered into the kitchen and looked over Carlos’s shoulder. “That doesn’t look right,” Del said.
“I burnt it,” Carlos moaned.
“Maybe you can scrape the burned stuff off,” Del said. He was used to having to do such surgery on the rare occasions when he tried to make food himself.
“No, no,” Carlos replied, pulling himself together. “It’s no good. I’ll make French toast instead.”
Del shrugged and got himself a cup of coffee as Carlos started his new culinary project. Del retrieved the newspaper from the front step and retreated to the garage, which had replaced the den as his personal refuge since Scott’s arrival.
This time Carlos had finished the breakfast and had it all set out on two trays, one for Karen and one for Carrie, before Scott started crying. He checked Scott’s diaper but it was empty. This was just one of those mysterious bouts of unhappiness that babies seemed to have regularly.
Carlos covered the trays to keep them warm and took Scott back into the den. He sat in the rocking chair and rocked his son gently. Scott stopped crying after a few moments and drifted off to sleep. By that time Carlos had also fallen asleep.
That’s where Carrie found them when she came downstairs an hour later wondering what had become of her breakfast in bed. Carlos was snoring lightly with Scott on his chest. Carrie’s heart welled with love as she observed the tender tableau.
Karen came up behind her and smiled. “Happy Mother’s Day,” Karen said.
“You too, Mom,” Carrie replied and squeezed Karen’s hand.
The two women went into the kitchen and discovered the French toast, now cold and unappealing.
Happy Mother’s Day!
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