Choosing a Pie (Banana Cream) Over A Pitbull (With Lipstick)

  Work Wednesday

I was convinced that I was going to blog this week about Sarah Palin and her strange step down from the governorship of Alaska. After all, I’d spent much of the fall's pre-election frenzy obsessed with Palin, venting about her candidacy with like-minded friends who were distressed over John McCain’s calculated and cynical pick of an unqualified ultra-conservative woman for the VP slot. After watching Palin in the debates, I joined the "Sarah Palin is NOT Hillary Clinton" Facebook group and clicked the online donation button for her opponents' campaign. I even stayed up until 2:00 a.m. with a (now former) work colleague and Palin supporter - an otherwise incredibly smart, thoughtful, and professional working mom - setting forth the case against Palin calmly and, I thought, convincingly. (I don't think I persuaded her, though.)

Then, last Friday, there was the reality of Sarah herself, breaking through my vacation-inspired Blackberry moratorium (O.K., I didn’t really stick to it), rambling incoherently about how "only dead fish go with the flow" as she resigned, nearly two years before the end of her term. Labeling others as "quitters" (yes, she had the chutzpah to use the word more than once) as she said "ta ta" and bailed on Alaska and her declining approval ratings.

There also was our pending name change from MomSpa.net (think: relaxing) to CurrentMom.com (think: electrifying - or at least energizing). (Look for the switchover soon!) What could be more current than a post on Palin’s resignation? Well, lots of things, I guess. Like Michael Jackson’s extravagant funeral or Mark Sanford’s unending narrative of infidelity. (It’s summer. No hard news, please.)

But when I arrived home, watched Palin on You Tube, and sat down to write, the words just didn't come.

Not for lack of material. (Not with lines like, "So I choose for my state and for my family more freedom to process all the way around so that Alaska may progress.")

Not for lack of outrage at Palin’s use of her family (she said she "polled" them and got four yeses and a "hell yeah") as a justification for her resignation. (A digression: It's hard for me to believe that Palin's kids - or any kids - would ever say that they wanted their mom to leave her job so she can - listen closely - "work very hard for others who still believe in free enterprise and smaller government and strong national security for our country and support for our troops and energy independence and for those who will protect freedom and equality and life." That sounds suspiciously like a stump speech to me.)

And not even because just about every journalist, pundit, comedian, and blogger had managed to fork up a rationale for the resignation over the July 4 weekend - somewhere between the franks and the fireworks.

I didn’t write about Palin because I made banana cream pie with my three-year-old son instead.

It wasn’t even good banana cream pie. We used a store-bought crust (loaded with transfats) that was in the freezer, artificially flavored instant vanilla pudding from a box, and synthetic whipped cream from a can. (Nothing like Laura’s wonderful organic and chic baking recipes in our Meals Monday feature.) The only things that were real were the bananas.

But it was banana cream pie. And that’s what my son had wanted for weeks. He loves Richard Scarry’s "Busytown" books - and especially the Bananas Gorilla character. (He can probably eat as many bananas too!) He’d been asking me for weeks if we could make banana cream pie just like in the books. And I kept putting him off.

First, I told him I was too busy to bake.

Then, I said that we didn’t have the ingredients. (This was when I planned on us making real banana cream pie with a pate brise, chocolate shavings, and quality ingredients. My Martha Stewart moment.)

Next, it was too hot to turn the oven on - we went to the pool after work instead!

Then, he was sick.

After that, I took my daughter and went on vacation for a week without him and his dad. (This was not mean-spirited. We’d planned a family trip to Oregon for my parents’ 50^th anniversary and my son had a fever of 103.5 the day of our planned departure. So, my valiant husband encouraged me to go ahead and stayed behind, planning to join us later in the week.  Sadly, that never happened.)

When we arrived home from the airport on Sunday night, my son’s first request was to make banana cream pie. But it was his bedtime. So, once again, I  told him we'd make the pie another time.

Later that night, I was reading the transcript of Palin’s press conference in an effort to get my blog going.  In it, she was meandering on and on about wasting precious time. I realized then that I just couldn't waste any more of my time on Palin.

So, on Monday, after dinner, I gave my son a stool and an apron. I let him measure out the milk, whisk it around with the powdered pudding mix, and toss cut up bananas into the mixture to make it taste banana-y. We baked the crust for 10 minutes, slopped in the refrigerated pudding mixture, and then sprayed the whipped stuff (I don’t really think I can call it cream) all over the top. And threw on some more bananas for decoration. It looked just like the pies in the Richard Scarry books.

My son was delighted!  He beamed. At his suggestion, we took pictures of the pie. (See above.) He touched it. He ate it. He served it to his sister.  And we talked about it for the rest of the evening.

When my son woke up yesterday morning, he asked if he could have more pie for breakfast and told me that he was going teach everyone at school how to make banana cream pie. And that’s when I decided to abandon Palin and focus on the pie. I knew there would be many other thought-provoking posts about the implications of Palin's resignation for working moms. (Read, for example, "Has Sarah Palin Thrown Working Moms Under the Bus" or "Sarah Palin: 'My Children Told Me To Do It!'".) But there wouldn't be many posts about the importance of a working mom making time for banana cream pie. So I wrote this instead. Plus, banana cream pie (even the artificial kind) goes down a lot easier than Palin’s incoherent prose.

Comments

[Katherine]

That pie looks yummy, trans fats and all! And the toothy grin behind it definitely speaks volumes. Now I wish I'd baked with my kids, instead of blogging about Sarah Palin on July 4. :) http://workingmoms.about.com/b/2009/07/04/why-did-sarah-palin-quit.htm

[kimmer]

What a wonderful post. I need to share this with all my young mother friends and family.