Spoiled Milk

Let’s travel back in time..say sixteen years ago to the Siwinski household. The kids were thirteen, eleven, eight, six, four and two. 

It was total chaos. 

Grant and I were both working full time. 

Our house was in shambles 95% of the time. 

Dogs, cats, birds, fish, guinea pigs, hamsters and an unlucky lizard or two foolish enough to be captured at the park down the hill made the house smell like a farm. 

The three little boys shared a room: bunk beds plus a toddler bed. I currently use this room as my home office and every so often I get a whiff of ghost pee lingering psychologically in my nose from festering pull-ups flung behind dressers and shoved under the beds to blend with stuffed animals and nerf guns, or an occasional peeing contest in a shoe box because the ten-step-away bathroom was too far and less fun than a shoebox. It’s shockingly funny now but back then it made my soul feel like it had died a little. Thank God souls don’t actually die. 

I also hear the faint echo of the giggling that happened in this room. The endless, silly, little boy giggling that sometimes had to be squelched with threats when the giggling cut into the rare sleep that Grant and I desperately craved for SO MANY YEARS. Sometimes we’d find Maria and the older boys all hunkered down in the stinky pee room, the giggles amplified x2, the joy x 6, the shenanigans x 12.  The giggles never actually stopped despite my banshee screeches, they just got quieter when the threats  sounded like they might be serious. Thank goodness we never completely stifled those giggles. They STILL all giggle and laugh when they are together. 

Our savings account was non-existent and our checking account was always on the verge of going into the negative. All the kids went to private Catholic school which was pretty much a second mortgage payment on a good year. Sometimes tuition payments were  surpassed by the amount of milk we purchased each week. We literally went through a MINIMUM of two gallons of milk a day for at least half or our child raising years.  Grant and I had a rule: you NEVER stopped at the store without grabbing at least ONE gallon of milk. When it went on sale and there was a limit of two per person, we would go through the line separately, sometimes twice. We were like secret spy milk buyers. The cashiers probably rolled their eyes at us: “Just buy eight  $1.99 damn milks Siwinskis.  We won’t tell the authorities.”  We had an extra fridge and two freezers in the garage specifically for when commodity products like milk went on sale. We talked of going to that fake dry powdered shit to be more economical but both Grant and I still have PTSD from our own childhoods with that kind of “cost saving” thing. We decided there would always be at LEAST 2% milk on the table. And while there was a lot of animated talking and arguing with hands and then spilling of milk at breakfast and dinner, where we would literally watch the dogs win with glee at a twisted slot machine game: quarters and dimes dripping off the table and onto the floor in the form of what was liquid gold back then, we never ONCE in all those years had a gallon of milk spoil. So, at $3.11 per gallon (average price of milk in 2009) x 2 x 365 x sixteen years of the twenty nine years of child rearing (when everyone was living with us) we accomplished giving our children  $36,324.80 worth of unspoiled, non-powered, delicious bone building milk. 

Hellz. 

We could have bought a small dairy farm. 

Thank goodness I never actually did that kind of math during the chaos years. I’d have stumbled and maybe lay down for a year or two. Instead we literally just existed one gallon of milk at a time. Because that’s how you get to any finish line: one step, one action, one glass of milk at a time without worrying about anything except that next “One Thing” that moves you forward with as much joy as possible. And GOD knows there was so much joy. And milk. 

Fast forward to now. Grant and I are PRACTICALLY empty nesters now with only the youngest two living at home while they finish school/build their own nest egg stash. I suspect we may have a year left with them and I’m not going to rush that shit. It puts me in jeopardy of adding another dog to the already large enough pack of three big dogs. Though I can guarantee that neither of them want to live with us for much longer. 

It’s kind of weird here now. It mostly just smells like dog.  

Plus the milk is almost always spoiled. 

When we even REMEMBER to buy a gallon of milk, it almost always goes bad in the fridge. David and Grant don’t drink it. Mitchel goes in phases of only wanting milk when there ISN’T milk in the fridge. So we buy it and it spoils just before Mitchel wants some.  I could drink the milk, I LOVE milk. But all those years I trained myself to NOT drink milk. It was too precious and not as soothing as wine. 

I’m not going to lie, I get a little choked up when I linger on the ghost pee, the giggle echoes and the spilled milk for too long. It hurts like hell behind my eyeballs. So I simply don’t do that too much. Instead I shake my head a little when the feels are super strong and whisper “We did okay getting these kids fed and grown with out fucking up too much. Good job.” And then I turn to new challenges I am responsible for. Thank goodness you never ACTUALLY finish raising a family or living your best life.

Also I buy oat milk now. It doesn’t spoil nearly as quickly.