By LINDA NUSBAUM
Contributing Writer
We had just finished dinner and Braden, my 16-year-old stepson, and I were driving back home from the restaurant. We were too full for dessert yet here on the drive I am thinking how good some cookies would taste right now, something little and sweet. I’m thinking we could pick up them up at a store or somewhere else and take them home and eat them.
So I ask with curiosity, “Want to get some dessert?” Braden shoots back with big excitement, “Do you want to go to Cold Stone?” (For people who don’t know, Cold Stone Creamery is an ice cream franchise where you can build your own flavors and they mix the ingredients for you).
I don’t mention the cookies now because the energy in the car has just gone from a dessert two to a dessert 10 and judging from past experiences there’s no pulling back now.
“I feel too full for Cold Stone.” I hedge.
“Well, when has that ever stopped us before?” Braden demands. “You know we always say we’re too full and promise ourselves we’ll put the ice cream in the freezer and always end up eating it on the way home. You know we do.”
I can’t argue. I know he’s right. We never wait. We can’t. We love our favorite sweets. I get cake batter ice cream mixed with cookie dough. Braden likes cake batter ice cream with peanut butter and brownie. It’s little girl and little boy food. It’s great.
I’ve tried his combination. It’s okay, but I love mine. He feels the same way about his. We’ve both tried other combinations, always coming back to our favorites.
We call his Dad; husband Bennett, to see if he wants to indulge with us. He says no. He holds strong, as usual.
And so it’s just us. And we are happy about it. We are doing something we have done together often. It is our thing and we talk about it.
“We haven’t been to Cold Stone for about three months,” figures Braden. “Yeah, about three or four months,” I concur.
“Remember when we used to go every other week,” Braden asks. “No, I think we went every week,” I insist.
“Did we ever go more than one time in one week?” I wonder aloud.
Braden replies, “No, but I think we ate cookie dough in the same week.”
Cookie dough- another one of our bad habits. We go to the store and buy raw cookie dough in a tube. We cook some of it, and we eat the rest, raw. We haven’t done this for many months, but we used to do it a lot.
So as soon as Braden mentions the cookie dough, we both start to laugh. We’re laughing at ourselves eating cookie dough because sometimes we would eat so much we would feel sick. Then we remind each other of the time we each got our own tube of cookie dough so we wouldn’t have to share. That night we clutched our tubes, made our own cookies and ate dough at our own pace. Two little kids hiding their treats from one another.
Now we’re really laughing, remembering the night. The laughter is louder and deeper. We’re laughing from our bellies; tears run down my face. The joy fills the car as if we’re stuck in one delicious moment.
And then Braden announces with certainty, “Oh, we were such kids!”
Now I’m over the top. I really can’t stop laughing. My body is in full laugh mode and yet my mind stops and I cling to what I’ve just heard because I don’t want to lose it. It’s like I know from somewhere deep inside that something bigger just happened here.
Braden and I have been eating cookie dough and ice cream since he was six years old. But when he said, “We were such kids,” I understood at that moment that he must see himself differently now. Braden must think of himself as a man, a man who has just witnessed himself as a little boy.
And he is a man, a man who can recognize that at times, he’s still going to act like a child. Like me, all grown up and yet sometimes a little girl.
I hope he never loses the ability to see his inner child at play.
We sure have a lot of fun together. I look forward to many more great times. They might change over the years; they probably will. But one thing is for sure. This child, now a man, has been a friend to me, and possibly the very best friend my little girl ever had.
