My family doesn’t dine together, or separately, for that matter. We forage; a throwback to earlier hunting and gathering tribes.

Each of us waits for the kitchen coast to clear. Then we quietly slip through the pantry shelves, the refrigerator, than poke through each others’ favorite hoarding places, each thinking we are the only one who knows all the others’ not-so-secret spaces for hiding red raspberries, sugar packets, peanut butter chocolate chip cookies that I baked myself, saltine crackers with extra salt, salt-licks, lemon used-to-be-meringue pie.

Then, having gathered our harvest, not even trying for a balanced meal, the object of the feeding game is to eat our fill, before the others, of whatever we are concerned they might get to before we do. It appears to be optional whether we scrounge for a clean fork or spoon or maybe just a straw, or just select whatever utensil is on the top of the dirty dishes.

Rather than mindfully gathering to dine we practice foraging, separately, sometimes competitively, looking over our shoulder for the always possible stalking predator. Each other. My 12-year-old fetal alcohol, square-brained daughter, Ivy, howls her alarm that I’m eating her last peanut butter chocolate chip cookie, which is true, except it was never hers until she takes a bite out of it.

She’s learned from this, though, so now as I forage through the pantry and in her chest of drawers and under her mattress, I often find a saltine here, a fruit and grain bar there, unwrapped with no more and no less than precisely one perfectly articulated Ivy bite missing, to mark her territory.

We take our food standing. It’s easier to slink out that way should one of my teenage sons decide to rise before noon to hunt and slurp his way toward an overdue shower. In fact, I’m not sure we even have a dining table. That could be what’s in the dining area hopelessly buried under last year’s laundry, but I’m not sure. I think the pile would be higher if that were a table. More likely a mattress or even an entire bed that never quite made it into any of our several bedrooms when we last moved away from our last laundry pile, which, by the look of things was perhaps a bit too long ago. Time to move again….

Ivy, with the Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, and a generous mix of cerebral palsy, and an under-bite so bad that for her the rules for chewing and swallowing successfully are like horseshoes. Close counts, including near misses onto the floor, her school dress, her shoes, if she wore them, so, OK, her feet, or spread across her beaming face giving full witness to each entry on her latest menu, causing the occasional unlucky guest to wonder if she was trying to eat with her nose, and eyes, and sometimes even her ears.

Ivy’s oldest brother calls her Poison Ivy and the middle brother calls her Demon Child, but only if she appears to be listening, which isn’t really all that often, and her youngest brother “D” calls her nothing at all, ever. D has never found a word he wanted to say so he just grunts and growls, shouts and mostly laughs at us, so we laugh back with him, often amusing him all the more. No further language needed or welcomed, in D’s way of seeing our world.

Ivy is just like the Mynah Birds in a Disney movie. Mine!!!!! Mine, mine, mine, mine, mine! Mine, mine, mine….  Mine!! Then D laughs at her. Then we laugh with D and Ivy asks “Wha’o unny?” hoping its her. I never know quite how to respond. I guess its us, together; we are funny together.

Ivy also has Oppositional Disorder, although why its called that I don’t know. She most vociferously does not have any disorder in her capacity for opposing everything, including my opposition that the bowl of granola with plain yogurt must be mine because I’m the one who is actually eating it. So then she responds, and not so clearly, because her teeth and tongue have trouble finding each other just right, that the bowl is hers, after all, I’m not eating the trough-sized red ceramic bowl itself, yet.

At the end of her last school year–which, if there were any justice in the world, would have been one day before the beginning of her next school year–Ivy came home with an awards certificate from her school. In recognition for outstanding Self-Advocacy. Interesting, I remember my 6th grade teacher called Self-Advocacy being a bratty know it all. Well, like father, like daughter. I just couldn’t be more proud.

Everything is MINE! for Ivy. My deodorant, my hats and shirts, my boxers, my car, bike, lawnmower, yard, house, job (OK, I don’t really have one of those), but most especially my laptop. I have been trying to teach her that at least some of those things are ours, not “mine” in the sense that I have any desire to exercise sole proprietorship over the use of the lawnmower, for example. A message that oldest and middle sons also have trouble understanding, but for very different reasons. Like, it’s too hot and there are too many gnats flying around my sweaty head because I slept all morning and was busy hunting and gathering and feeding til just now!

The other day I invited Ivy to go into our bathroom and sit on the toilet, although she had already peed in her pull-up, so, probably too late. As always, Ivy was opposed to this idea because she didn’t need to use the toilet. So I told her the toilet was mine and she should stay out of my bathroom. That got her up and waddling over toward our bathroom, with her soppy pull-up hanging halfway to her knees. Clearly, she was right, why use the toilet when you have this handy sponge right down there on your business?

Ivy is jealous of D because he gets all the hugs and attention that should rightly go to her as the chronological baby of the family. If I give D a hug or a peck on his forehead and she catches him showing his dimple in response, I too often hear, Mine!!!!! Mine, mine, mine, mine, mine! Mine, mine, mine….  Mine!! But, she is even more jealous of my laptop. It absorbs far too much of my attention, sucking me away from her, sucking on my forehead while drooling into my eyes, which is what she calls kissing. Well, actually she calls it mauling because I made the mistake of telling her that her kisses were more like being mauled. This, of course, she was not at all opposed to. Mauling seems like the way to go. Anyway, lately her strategy has been to ask me if I am done typing yet so she can use her kapu’er. 

“No, the laptop is mine and you are not to touch it.”

Oops. Wrong response. Next time I went past my laptop, Ivy was mauling it, and doing her oppositional and territorial best to take a bite out of it.