THE HEIST

I am a doormat of a mother.

One of those extra-sad ones, the kind that reaches the creepy level of sad, the kind that says WELCOME in a make-you-vomit script, surrounded by a nightmare of gladiolas (that is their plural noun).

I listen, with curiosity, while my children pillage the cupboards and refrigerator, cramming 40 lbs of mixed groceries that cost $380 at the local highway robbery stop (the hippie co-op’s gen(i)us) into the antique picnic basket they appropriated, and then proceed to drink a college education’s-worth of cashew milk from canning jars they found in my “organizational system” beneath the Band-Aids & Bug Spray & Hair Brush & Cough Drop & Sunscreen & Extra Toothpaste & That Set of Mini Christmas Lights Drawer.

Friends, I let them take my cabbages.

My children are cabbage whores. One of them goes into a near seizure of joy when he sees the cabbage section at the robbery stop.

His hands go up into a mirage of explosive joy, a jazz-hands-adjacent pose that actually flickers in and out of existence with disbelief, but he only holds this frame long enough to sigh, at the top of his lungs, “CABBAGES,” right before he physically dives in to the refrigerated shelf and touches, feels, rolls, hefts, every single cabbage.

All this he achieves before I can get to him, from the cheese cooler, and begin to apply the limp gauze of propriety against the gushing wound of his produce-induced ecstasy.

Once a cabbage makes it home, it is forgotten. UNTIL someone rediscovers it, catches a glimpse of a few square inches of its leafy come-hither inside the DMZ of our refrigerator, and then, once again, all bets are off.

But this time, for the relapse, whichever child initiates the cabbage-inspired pillage-and-consternation tour of the kitchen and pantry cupboard is SILENT. The second round with the cabbage is always deeply quiet—because it is half crime, half prayer.

For the last cabbage rave, I was in the shower.

Before I went up, I said, and I quote, “Mama needs a shower. She stinks. I will be upstairs with the door open, but I need to know that you can be HelpfulGentleKind down here the whole time. Can you work together, take care of each other, and do that while I am showering?” They nodded, beginning, already, to glint. “Is this a deal?” They nodded more vigorously, trying not to break into an open sparkle. One gave a tiny, gummy, thumbs-up. “And NO hitting or biting?” I finished. “DEAL,” said the one who still had access to language through her anticipation. The other one was already slipping towards the kitchen, glimmering as the veil between him and the Great Beyond thinned.

Reader, I went to the shower. AND, I took my sweet time. All this I did despite the dead-giveaway silence, which was punctuated only by muffled squeals and the diffuse thumps that only layers of cruciferous vegetal flesh can make against a floor, a wagon, a table, a staircase, a bookshelf, a piano, a bunk bed, a bowl, a porch, a small human’s eager, fumbling hands.

It wasn’t until I started hearing the clinking of the Ball Jars that I began to think maybe I should accelerate the pace of my languid toweling and combing and goop-applying, which I did, right as the negotiating wing of the partnership appeared in the bathroom door.

“Hello, Mama,” she said, sweet as pie. Then she kind of just stood there, continuing to look ethereal, enchanting. I am always unnerved when there is no arc to the story.

“What,” I said, and closed my eyes as I pulled the first of my tangled nuisance of underclothing on.

“Well…” she tipped her head and raised her gleaming seaglass-colored eyes to me. “Wouldn’t you like to… maybe… just… take a rest up here for a while?”

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING DOWN THERE.”

“Oh!” she said, perfectly composed, as if she thought I’d never ask. She clapped her hands together, first to show her enthusiasm and then to demonstrate her obvious efficacy, and reported, finally, “We are having a VERY TIDY feast.”

To be fair, when I got downstairs, still damp and only about one-quarter-clad, the mess itself was somewhat mild, for this particular pair of five-year-olds.

The sheaves of disassembled cabbage were mostly spread around and under the kitchen table, with only a few partial leaves dispersed throughout the blanket fort, and the $417 shopping spree basket actually still contained most of the items they’d gathered (some, I will note, from the TOP SHELF of the pantry cabinet, which would have required a tall stool and significant balancework).

They hadn’t even spilled very much of the nut-milk that is more expensive than drugs, and that was after pouring two entire cartons of it into the Ball Jar collective upon the balancing stool.

All in all, it was not even close to the worst mess I’ve seen. And you know what? I got my shower. I got my shower, and they got their feast. The cabbage was loved, very deeply— and some of it even ingested.*

*Note: this is how my children get most of their plant matter: thievery. They are only really interested in produce if they can “get away with it,” and then, once they do, they chipper-shredder it into their little conniving bellies like bunnies who have been accidentally starved. So I hide broccoli and carrot sticks around the house, and raisins and almonds around the playground, germs be damned, telling them loudly and smugly that they’ll NEVER find them, whereupon they begin racing and gobbling. I don’t know much about raising children, but I do know how to raise a parrot, and hiding food is golden.

So. If my kids need to feel that they are pulling one over on me, and the world, in order to commune with plant matter and put some of it into their growing bodies, far be it from me to assert that our lives should be anything other than a giant heist.

If my children find intense joy, if they get to know the ineffable pleasure of fraternizing with the plantlife of this brief, shining planet best by subverting the rules our janky-ass society has cobbed together in its shitty little window of a geological half-blink, well then, Amen.

Far be it from me to short-circuit this electrical love within them for stolen produce. It is not my place, it is no one’s place, to take away the capacity they are assembling for acquiring what they need, which—as inscribed within the curves of the noble, tantalizing cabbage— seems to be something like beauty, (a different kind of) truth, and (a deeper kind of) goodness.